NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!

You can fuck up your career with your own stupid ideas all you like, Mr. M Night Shyamalan, but for the love of God please don't ever destroy somebody else’s story.

The Last Airbender had so much potential to be a great trilogy of family films but Shyamalan has royally fucked this up on a quite grand scale (although this should come as little surprise to anyone who has been following his career of late). There was not a single competent element here and I fear a lot of people unfamiliar with the original series will probably blame the source material as much as the woefully poor execution.

Firstly, it looks unbelievably cheap almost bordering…

a transcript of me and my friends’ thoughts. read at your own risk. 

• “oh boyy you know it’s good if nickelodeon made a live action movie with its logo”
• “i can i hear we don’t those words in that lame ass font”
• “sokka gives me greasy white boi vibes and its not good”
• “aapa looks like if you pasted a tele tubbie onto a soggy piece of white bread”
• “why are there so many white people”
• “if you’re gonna whitewash the entire cast at least have the decency to cast danny devito as uncle iroh. bish instead we get some customer at a department store who only uses debit cards”
• “momo? more like…

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Listen, I get it. This is probably (most definitely) atrocious as adaptation. Even as someone who hasn't seen the original show, its plotting is frequently rushed and the representation issues of the main players is tough to stomach. There's no getting around its stilted mannerisms or over-reliance of digitality, but it's also a Shyamalan movie, so exactly none of that matters to me. What is so satisfying is, instead, The Last Airbender's preoccupation with nature, in addition to the graceful form of its inspirations, including Tsui Hark and Zhang Yimou, that rise above its clunky details. Shyamalan's surroundings in literal elements provides a basis in carefully-designed frames, action/dance sequences, and delicate blocking. Many of the sets are rooted in…

About halfway through the movie, my friend commented “I feel like things are just happening on a screen in front of me” and that was probably the best diagnosis of the disaster.

People often mock the acting and voiceover and cringeworthy action in this movie - and yes, it’s horrific. Not only that, but it’s straight-up uncomfortable. I feel so bad for Noah Ringer, but man...watching this dude on a big screen is like watching the awkward kid in your middle school class give a presentation on his favorite Pokémon. It makes you want to bite your lip and curl into a ball. Also: why are all the action scenes so entirely devoid of tension? In the show, bending is like…