Use Your Delusion
In the late summer of 1999, some friends and I got free passes to see a new Bruce Willis movie. A week before the screening, we’d all laughed at the trailer. It was just accepted among my peers that Willis had squandered all the good will and fortune he’d earned with Pulp Fiction—for every Twelve Monkeys, it seemed, there were a half-dozen Color of Nights; and now he was in some silly ghost movie called The Sixth Sense.
Two hours later, we left the theatre buzzing about this creepy little movie with the greatest twist ending since The Usual Suspects. Those of you who claim to have seen it coming, I’d wager, probably saw the movie after it had become popular; The Sixth Sense is a film that demands to be seen without the slightest knowledge of what the twist might be—or that there even is one. It’s a deftly told, tight supernatural thriller with a big, beating heart and an even bigger brain behind it. The visionary writer/director M. Night Shyamalan had delivered a modern masterpiece.
The next year, Shyamalan teamed with Willis again for Unbreakable, a film that was 15/16ths perfect. A brilliant, grounded play on superhero mythos, the movie soared towards a climax that was so dreadful, so unforgivably ham-handed that I’ve not been able to watch it since. The big showdown between hero and villain turns out to be a really long dialogue scene in an office—followed by a fade to black and paragraphs of white text explaining all the cool battles the two rivals had after the first part of the story (i.e. the two-hour movie that was ending) wrapped up. I’d never felt so cheated and duped.
Until I saw Signs. You know the drill: Aliens travel millions of light years to conquer Earth without taking the time to figure out that it’s comprised of seventy percent water—which the aliens are deathly allergic to. Oh, and Mel Gibson’s character’s wife’s dying words are somehow a psychic blast into a future where her brother-in-law uses them as a prompt to beat an alien to death with a baseball bat.
Fucking please.
On and on, Shyamalan went, churning out failure after failure in a Human-Centipede-like journey to crawl as far up his own ass as possible. After the near-hate-crime level beating he received in the press following The Lady in the Water and The Happening, I was stunned to hear that Paramount handed him the keys to the kingdom: a $280 million live-action adaptation of a Nickelodeon kids’ show.
Which brings me (exhaustedly, finally) to The Last Airbender. I’d never seen the series (which is called Avatar: The Last Airbender), but it came highly recommend by friends whose opinion I trust. So, in the name of empowered criticism, I called up the first two episodes of Season One on Netflix Instant Play.
The best word to describe the show is enchanting. A sublime blend of humor, adventure and big ideas, it dresses up all the clichés of The Hero’s Journey in a painstakingly rendered mythology that presents the illusion of originality. It’s a complex, multi-cultural show that drops the viewer right into the middle of a sprawling plot and allows them to discover the mysteries of its world organically.
Even if you don’t care about the warring elemental nations or the elusive master spirit Aang—re-incarnated as a spunky boy fugitive—you could spend an entire episode admiring the wardrobes, landscapes and weaponry of the characters. Avatar is the kind of smart children’s entertainment that I didn’t know still existed.
The Last Airbender movie, however, is a heavy, dull mess; the only film I can recall whose every single line of dialogue is a piece of exposition. Sure, the first two episodes of the TV show are re-played here, as clipped story points that ignore the sharp writing that breathed life into the beats. Even the introduction of the two main characters, Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) gets botched with a sterling example of piss-poor directing.
This is not a matter of perception, mind you. It’s a fact that we meet Katara as she practices “waterbending”—basically levitating water. She brings a wobbly orb out of the tundra and loses control of it, drenching her brother in the process. Having watched this an hour earlier on television, I knew what was going to happen; what I didn’t know was that Sokka would be completely missing from the scene until he popped up out of nowhere, complaining about getting wet. It’s an amateur mistake, unless you take it as an omen of where Shyamalan intended to take the rest of the story.
I won’t go much further into the plot because I really want everyone reading this to check out the cartoon show. Essentially, Katara and Sokka discover Aang (Noah Ringer) frozen inside a glacier. They believe him to be the one person who can defeat the evil Fire Nation in their attempt to take over the world; the trio embarks on a treacherous journey through exotic lands, as Aang learns to bend elements other than air. I’m glad I didn’t watch any more of the series, because I’m looking forward to seeing what co-creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko have up their sleeves.
For his part, Shyamalan has only tired special effects and ponderousness to offer. I don’t understand why he didn’t just make a two-hour cartoon for a quarter of the budget; or why he insisted on casting the worst child actor I’ve seen in some time as his protagonist; or why he didn’t hire actual martial artists to choreograph his fight scenes, instead of that lightsaber kid from YouTube.
Much has been made of the fact that the “good guys” in The Last Airbender are mostly Caucasian, while the villains are all of Asian descent. Is there a subversive racist message? I doubt it, unless M. Night Shyamalan is actually Steven Spielberg in brown-face. The real controversy here is how this guy keeps getting jobs. It’s true that, as of this writing, the film has taken in over $40 million (!), but after the stink sets in, Shyamalan will be lucky to get a PA job on a Kellogg’s commercial.
I want to believe that there’s a great filmmaker somewhere deep, deep down inside this once-great auteur. I remember being engrossed in every moment of The Sixth Sense; in The Last Airbender, I was constantly distracted by questions like:
Why didn’t the Production Designer use the specs for Sokka’s weapon from the cartoon show, instead of that dorky ivory question mark he kept swinging around?
Did Shyamalan intentionally frame the introduction of the Water Princess (Seychelle Gabriel) so that her head looked like a magnificent blonde penis?
Are there really so few Indian actors in America that Daily Show correspondent Aasif Mandvi had to be recruited as the heavy?
The only answer that will allow me to sleep tonight is that Shyamalan is an artist in the sense that Andy Kaufman and Andy Warhol were artists. They made every facet of their existence into a must-watch performance. Part of me believes that good ol’ Night is pulling a fast one on us: launching a spectacular career as a potentially very important director and then gradually sabotaging his subsequent efforts until they culminate in an avalanche of despair-evoking shittiness.
He may be working on the greatest twist ending Hollywood’s ever seen.
Note: While it’s true that M. Night Shyamalan hasn’t directed a quality film in eleven years, I must give props to The Happening—a movie so awful and so hilarious that I own it on blu-ray. If you’re wondering how anything could be worse than The Happening—and The Last Airbender certainly is—keep in mind that even constant, derisive laughter during a movie is better than an hour and forty-eight minutes of yawning.
Additional Note: I just remembered that DiMartino and Konietzko were executive producers on this movie--which leads me to believe that there's a (ahem) fifth element in The Last Airbender: the too-easily-bent Artistic Principle.