Review: The Last Airbender

IMDb

Title: The Last Airbender
Distributor: Nickelodeon Movies (Paramount Pictures)
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Writer(s): M. Night Shyamalan (written by)
Staring: Noah Ringer, Dev Patel, Nicola Peltz,Jackson Rathbone, Shaun Toub, Aasif Mandvi, Cliff Curtis, Seychelle Gabriel
MPAA Rating: Rated PG for fantasy action violence.
Running Time: 103 min
Synopsis: The story follows the adventures of Aang, a young successor to a long line of Avatars, who must put his childhood ways aside and stop the Fire Nation from enslaving the Water, Earth and Air nations.

What Others Are Saying?

Rotten Tomatoes: T-Meter: 09% (Rotten), Top Critics: 07% (Rotten), RT Community: 65% (Fresh)
Metacritic: Critics: 20 out of 100, Users: 2.8 out of 10
MRQE Metric: 37: (23.0% A, 15.3% B, 15.3% C, 15.3% D, and 30.7% F)
Yahoo Movies: Critics: D+ Users: C+

My Review

Source Material: Based on Nickelodeon's Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Entertaining Value:

• Action Elements: The showcasing of the different martial arts forms was great, there could have been more, but as an action film it not too bad.
  

• Comedy Elements: Sokka character bring a lot of slap stick and physical comedy in the television version while the film had some, it was missing quite a bit.
  

• Dramatic Elements: Can you say epic fail, most of the failure comes from bad acting.

• Sci-Fi / Fantasy Elements: Elemental Bending, and other Asian culture/ folklore, descend visual effects.

Cinematic Value:

• Acting and Dialogue: C-: The acting well, wasn't that great. I think most of the bad acting comes from the fact the cast was young in there careers. Out of the "child" actors the only ones I recognized was Jackson Rathbone, known for portraying Jasper Hale in The Twilight Saga, and Dev Patel from Slumdog Millionaire. The adult actors also only did okay, the best acting came from Shaun Toub who play Iroh. To top it all off the best acting in the entire movie came from the girl who played Princess Yue, Seychelle Gabriel. So we have established the acting wasn't the greatest well neither was the dialog, exhibit A, “We need to show them that we believe in our beliefs as much as they believe in their beliefs” There were many lines like this one, were one word would get repeated.

• Art Direction: B-: Awesome location, with beautiful sites for the different nations.

• Cinematography: B-: There were some really cool scenes that capture the different martial arts showcased in this film. Some of the scene brought me back to The Matirx days.
  

• Direction: C: M. Night Shyamalan is one of the director in my top five favorites directors. I know people will raze me for liking him and his films, cause the general public started to jump ship after The Village and even more so with the Happening. Now with The Last Airbender, it seems the only people on the ship are M. Night Shyamalan and minute amount of fans. I think he did a good job directing the movie but the film didn't turn out that good.

• Editing: D+: Very slow pacing, the 103 min movie felt a lot longer. the cut between scenes seemed a bit random, and out of place. I thought there were to many montage type of scenes.
  

• Screenplay: C-: The mythology and story from the television show is great, some where along the line it was ruined. Personally I thought the story had too much childish behavior written into. Aang is spouse to be a bit childish but full grown adults, WTF. Seriously, this is one of the lines from an adult, "Those kids where earthbending and hitting us with small rocks in the head, that hurts. These words were uttered in a winy manner, just like a child. I do understand that the film was mad for kids but it doesn't have to be that extreme

• Sound and Music: C: Midorcer like everything else.
  

• VFX: B-: Probably, the best thing about this movie.

Overall: C-:Fan will be disappointed to some level cause it doesn't live to to the television show.