Avatar: The Last Airbender was a monumental show. Shown on Nickelodeon from 2005 – 2008 and made by Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, this show was considered, and is even still to this day, one of the greatest animated family shows ever created with incredibly fleshed out story, world and mythos, amazingly likeable and complex characters, great voice acting, gorgeously colorful animation, amazing fight scenes, and a strong leaning to Eastern Asian philosophies, the show stood tall as Nickelodeon’s best running show and even survived long after its release with connected books, video games, and even a follow up show, Legend of Korra, which also aired on Nick. Like most highly beloved shows, a movie was inevitably going to be made. Even though fans were not expecting much when a 20 episode long season would be spliced into a roughly hour and a half long movie, and with the man who tried to make plant life a film’s antagonist, M Night Shyamalan, as the director, opinions were already pretty set on what the film would be like, but upon its arrival in 2010, even they were astonished by how truly terrible this film turned out. In a film with very little set up, two young ‘’Eskimo’’ children named Katara and Sokka (played by Nicola Peltz and Jackson Rathbone) discover a mysterious boy encapsulated within a frozen ball under the ice. Upon awakening, the young airbending boy named Aang (played by Noah Ringer) finds he is being hunted down by a fire prince named Zuko (played by Dev Patel) for being the Avatar, the reincarnated spirit of the world that is meant to protect the world from balance. With the fire nation throwing the world off balance, Aang, Katara and Sokka set off to find the places where Aang can learn the other elements to take down the fire lord (played by Cliff Curtis). Often deemed one of the worst movies ever made along with one of the worst adaptations ever made, this movie captures nothing that the original stood for and only backtracks on all its goodwill, with an abundance of information with no soul or humanity, stilted acting, characters with no drive, underwhelming action and mashed together narrative that’s impossible to care about.

Making a film about a tv show is already a dumb idea as replacing hours of split apart content in a small compact timeframe means that several cuts have to be made in order to fit it all in, leading to story that is uncomfortably bloated with exposition. Instead of the dialogue offering character moments and flowing conversations, every single line that is spoken is only used to give more detail to a very underdeveloped world, making it all incredibly boring and pointless as it never focused on what’s most important to a story, its characters and their experiences. There is no sense of fun, lightness and cheer in anything that’s being said; it has no humanity in any of its words that it only feels robotic, it misses all the marks in what makes a good fantasy film; create a likeable hero, place them in a dangerous situation, and learn about them through said journey. Instead it’s only point and click storytelling without any care or passion. Even ignoring everything that is removed from the show to the film, what’s left behind doesn’t equal out a complete narrative, rather a slideshow of famous scenes from a much better source material. Instead of the ending feeling like an epic conclusion that’s only the beginning of a trilogy, because it gave the audience no reason to care about its character, its left with this empty feeling that makes it clear there will be no follow up.

Going from a show with such amazing characters that people wished to be real to character that people would confuse for even being alive, these are not good live-action versions of the heroes everybody knows and loves. All of them are incredibly boring as well as featuring next to no definability as the movie’s whole focus is on its story and not on its characters. None show any strong characteristics from their animated counterparts (even some going completely against type, with Sokka going from the inventive wise cracking planning to a constant stick in the mud) and they all mix together in a haze of non- memorability, a horrible change from such memorable beloved characters. The casting for most of these characters is strangely both incredibly right and wrong at the same time. In some moments some of the characters look spot on like Noah Ringer as Aang, and other times they couldn’t look any more different from their original choices, like Katara and Sokka looking a lot whiter than usual. Even taking out the idea of white washing and change the character’s races, their acting talents don’t make up for this change. This feels like it’s solely on Shyamalan’s directing, as most of the actors have gone on to do better things and even apparently exhibit attributes to their characters in real life, yet it never comes across in the film. Despite all the poor acting jobs in the film, the only three that manage their positions okay enough are Dev Patel as Zuko,  Shaun Toub as Iroh and Aasif Mandvi as Commander Zhao, one of the leading bad guys. Though they don’t look the part, they act their parts well enough and are the only ones that come close to having any sense of personality.

With one of the biggest complaints against the movie being its effects, it’s a surprise to find out they aren’t as drastically awful as people would have everyone believe. While they aren’t the best and clearly could have been better with this material, for a Nickelodeon made movie with Shyamalan behind the belt, they could have been a lot worse and every once and awhile, there is a nice-looking location or visual. What does suffer greatly from being live action is the action itself. While the action in the show was quick, fast-paced, well-choreographed and filled with amazing visuals, the film has incredibly slow, clunkily shot, bland looking action that is rather held back by its effect than improved by them. The bending is way too long to do anything meaningful even if the techniques are correct, the cinematography is trying too hard to be innovative and special rather than whatever would make it look cool, and it takes an amazingly colorful vibrant lively world and makes it the most grey lifeless and forgettable environment in most films, aside from an occasional real life palace or temple.

With Shyamalan’s fingerprints all over this film as well as the hassle of turning an incredibly loved show into a film franchise that wouldn’t be able to give it the same treatment, it’s really no surprise how terribly this film turned out. With absolutely nothing connecting it back to its original source outside of name alone as well as being hounded with a lifeless directing and storytelling, a failure in both character building and acting, a confused idea of how to choreograph action and failing to even get the basic idea of fantasy elements correct, it is one of the worst adaptations of a TV show ever. The film is surprisingly more pathetic and empty than aggravating as it can never tarnish the way people view the real Avatar and it had an understanding of what the show looked like, just missed the mark in every possible way to please newcomers, fans or just general moviegoers. Definitely not worth a viewing for fans and not even a so bad it’s good viewing is really warrant unless you’re really curious to see a great icon with no soul left in it. It was predictable that everything would change when Shyamalan got the rights, but even still this movie is definitely something that brought everybody out of balance.