![]() Rathbone, and the wish-granting fairy said that I was going to be in two films that would both open huge on the same weekend, but the one that sucked less of the two was The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, I would crawl into a bottle and never ever crawl back out). That taken care of, we jump to the Southern Water Tribe, an icy region of subsistence hunters, of whom the only two we care about are Katara (Nicola Peltz) and her brother Sokka (Jackson Rathbone. ![]() That "just" absolutely cracks me up: it has such a slangy, earnestly childish quality to it, a squirrelly informality that doesn't fit it in with the sobriety of the rest of the exposition, or of the rest of the mercilessly serious epic. Once a generation, the Avatar is born, who can bend all four elements but about 100 years ago, the Avatar just disappeared. The film opens with a crawl (and attendant narration) explaining how the world is divided into four nations, each of which holds sacred one of the four elements - water, fire, earth, air - and that there are certain people born within each of those nations who can "bend" the element to their will. And if the Q Document, instead of being a hypothetical, now-extinct text, was available on Netflix View Instantly. It's a bit like trying to re-construct the Q Document, if the Q Document was not the source for the foundational texts of the world's largest religion, but for a phenomenally shitty popcorn movie. I've not seen an episode of the show, but from the evidence of Shyamalan's condensation, I'd guess it tells a real corker of a story: once you scrape away everything about the movie that is dysfunctional, misjudged, badly executed, sloppy, and asinine, what you have left is a structurally intriguing bildungsroman set in a very specific, well-articulated fantasy world. The Last Airbender doesn't put that theory to the test, but it comes closer than anything else has: while Shyamalan still wrote the screenplay, he adapted it from the first of three seasons of the American anime series Avatar: The Last Airbender, which aired on Nickelodeon beginning in 2005 ("Avatar" was snipped from the title on account of that other movie). ![]() Night Shyamalan has been the subject of much "if only he'd direct someone else's screenplay!" conjecture since his career started tanking in earnest with 2004's The Village (which at the time seemed like a shockingly bad work from a pretty good artist, and how silly we all were to think that it couldn't get so, so much worse). Like a lot of other filmmakers with a good visual sense and apparent no idea how to structure a story or write dialogue, M.
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