The dubious race casting in “The Last Airbender” is the least of director M. Night Shyamalan’s problems.
The reviews are starting to pour in regarding “Airbender,” the first film Shyamalan directed from existing material.
Movie critics are pretty grouchy this summer, but they still saved up plenty of bile for the man who gave us “The Sixth Sense.”
Consider:
A soul-crushing disaster – Cinematical
‘The Last Airbender’ is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented – Roger Ebert
The Last Airbender could be The Last M. Night Shyamalan Movie. Yep, it’s that bad. – Willie Waffle
A new low point in Shyamalan’s crumbling career. – Mark Dujsik
It all adds up to a 6 percent “Fresh” rating at RottenTomatoes.com, about as bad as a movie can get. (The percentage may change as more reviews file in …)
The “next Spielberg” suddenly looks like the next Uwe Boll.
The WWTW review will be posted July 2.
(Photo: Writer/Producer/Director M. Night Shyamalan on the set of Paramount Pictures/Nickelodeon Movies adventure, “The Last Airbender.” Photo credit: Zade Rosenthal)
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
“…but they still saved up plenty of bile for the man who gave us ‘The Sixth Sense.’ ”
But who also gave us (in chronological and level of suckness order):
Unbreakable (2000)
Signs (2002)
The Village (2004)
Lady in the Water (2006)
The Happening (2008)
Notice how each successive movie became more sucksessive? So are we suprised that this latest offering is getting some major critical suckitude? Why does this man (and Uwe Boll, for that matter) keep getting jobs doing more movies?
Our bookstore’s program with Amazon used to give us a quotation a day, and a couple of them warned us against genius without culture, against genius without professional artistic chops. That’s Shyamalan. Even his best work is based on childish ideas and urban legends. I didn’t guess the surprise ending of “The Sixth Sense” mostly because all the science fiction magazines I submitted to told us absolutely do not send us any stories in which the hero turns out to be (spoiler.) “Unbreakable” is a great movie that was created to tell us why we cannot have superheroes in real life. “Signs” is “Independence Day” retold on a microscopic scale with bits of “Alien Nation” and a ripe urban legend tossed in (man called to accident scene by cops because his wife is squooshed and will die when they back off the car that squooshed her but is keeping her together.) I actually enjoyed “The Village,” his two-hour Twilight Zone episode, but I was under the spell of B. D. Howard. Hated hated hated “Lady in the Pool” (to put it as delicately as possible, it probably isn’t a good idea to photograph a pale redhead in harsh light without much makeup.) These were the films with which he destroyed Howard’s career, or rather reduced it to its current level of replacing the redhead in a series who couldn’t adjust her schedule to appear in the sequel. “The Happening” (Sixties survivors, how much would you have bet you would never see that title reused?) is at the loathsome human-hating level of Michael Shaara’s “The Herald,” my least-favorite novel ever. I think I’ll skip the rest of his career.
Wish I Wrote That:
These were the films with which he destroyed Howard’s career, or rather reduced it to its current level of replacing the redhead in a series who couldn’t adjust her schedule to appear in the sequel.
Bravo!
“The ‘next Spielberg’ suddenly looks like the next Uwe Boll.”
That’s cold, man. Really cold.
I know I’m in the minority with this opinion, but I think “The Sixth Sense” is a bit overrated. Mind you, I don’t think it’s a bad movie (although Bruce Willis’s constant whispering got on my nerves). I just thought it was incredibly derivative of “Jacob’s Ladder” and Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”. The rest of Shyamalan’s work has been consistently disappointing which is a shame because I really want to like his movies.
*I* still love “Unbreakable” for what it is and what it suggested, particularly in light of the many, many mediocre-or-worse superhero films.
After that film, however, I concur: Manoj’s successive films became worse arithmetically.
D.
IMHO, “The Sixth Sense” and “Signs” are both masterpieces, and “The Village” was much better than it got credit for. But the rest of Shyamalan’s films have been god-awful. I don’t know how a filmmaker who started out getting so many things right in his films can now get so many things wrong.
Honestly, having seen the film, a lot of the reviews about “Airbender” seem to be more about showing how much that reviewer hates Shyamalan than about reviewing the film. (and the reviews above are tame compared to many that I’ve seen.) It’s a film with faults (I’d give it a “C” personally. It wasn’t great but it was more watchable than Cop Out or The Wolfman were) but the reviews seem to be far, far over the top with regards to the actual faults of the film.
Matt,
I do think critics can be guilty of what you’re describing. But in this case I thought the movie deserved all the brickbats – sorry, just dig that word. I also think critics feel let down by Shyamalan. I think they would have eagerly praised the film if it had been a return to form of any kind.
I long ago learned not to waste any money on Shyamalan films. The 6th Sense was brilliant and Unbreakable was pretty good, but after that, M.Night had his frontal lobe removed. And for those who are praising “Signs,” I’m sorry, it started with Signs. The only reason that movie was successful was that it had a couple of decent actors in Gibson and Juaquin Phoenix. Nevertheless, the first thing I said after watching it on DVD was “That was really stupid.” Come on, everything about it was stupid, admit it. Aliens for whom H2O is poison invading a planet that is covered with water and has water vapor in the very air you breathe. God squishing a woman so she can utter random comments that turn out to be meaningful years later, thus restoring her husband’s faith!
Stupid.
Could this be the case of the director, spending years dreaming of his favorite handful of films he would make, suddenly running out of films? This strikes me with Shyamalan, it also hit me watching the dreadful previews for the Wahlberg/Ferrell buddy-cop abortion Judd Apatow is letting loose.
Sorry to disagree with some, but his most entertaining films were “Sixth Sense” and “Signs”. I thought the “Signs” moral of “everything happens for a purpose” was inspired. “Unbreakable” was entertaining, but ultimately unsatisfying. “The Village” WAS a mediocre Twilight Zone episode, as someone mentioned above. However, M’s production of “Devil” was outstanding. I loved the premise of a group of people stuck in an elevator with the devil.