The Details

The Last Airbender

Noah Ringer, Nicola Peltz, Jackson Rathbone

Directed by M. Night Shyamalan

Rated PG

Beyond the Weekly

The Last Airbender

IMDb: The Last Airbender

Rotten Tomatoes: The Last Airbender

The Last Airbender, adapted by M. Night Shyamalan from a popular animated series, opens with an expository text crawl explaining the history of the movie’s world. The exposition continues for the entire running time, via narration and terrible dialogue in which characters woodenly lay out the histories of various places, people and groups. All that exposition concerns yet another sci-fi/fantasy Chosen One—Aang (Ringer), the title character and the only person in this world who can “bend” the four elements of air, water, earth and fire. The battles are only slightly more exciting than the exposition, the acting is laughable, and the characters are flat. The ending sets up a proposed trilogy, but if we’re lucky, the series will stop here.