The Last Airbender

What do you do if you’re adapting a Nickelodeon cartoon series named Avatar onto the big screen, then James Cameron goes and names his technological blockbuster with giant blue things “Avatar?”

You name it the mysteriously compelling “Airbender” and hope that fans of the show make the connection. If you’re no fan,, here’s the set-up. In a mystical world, four tribes represent the four ancient elements: Earth, Water, Fire, and Air. "Benders" are born into each tribe, half-warrior, half-priest beings who (through elaborate tai chi movements) can manipulate the elements in CGI fantastic ways. For instance, the water benders suck up water from the ocean and form it into ice to seal off their castle entrance.  There are advantages to being a bender.

As long as these elements are in balance, there is peace. But the fire nation, darn them, has gone and started a war against the other nations. They take villages hostage and kill any non-fire benders they find.

And so, in the midst of the chaos, the weary people look for the lost Avatar -- the mysterious reincarnated being who can learn to bend all four elements.  He also is reported tall and blue and can ride flying dragons.  Nope, sorry – wrong movie.  But he can communicate with the spirit world, such as the moon spirit, from whence all benders derive power.

Or something like that.

This particular avatar is a scrawny, bald boy named Aang (Noah Ringer), who’s overwhelmed by the responsibility.  He ran away from his monastery and ended up frozen in ice for a hundred years. In his pajamas, no less.

Oops.

Now that he's thawed, he finds all his friends long dead and the balance of the world all out of whack. That'll teach him to run away. He teams with Katara, a water bender, and Sokka, a teen warrior, to inspire villages to rise up against the fire nation. Riding a giant flying beaver creature with a round face, they travel north so that Aang can learn to bend water from the masters.  (When this avatar is riding his flying beaver, that’s probably when he most wishes he’d been in James Cameron’s “Avatar.”)

There's also a story-line about the prince of the fire nation, Prince Zuko (Dev Patel) and his obsessive desire to regain his evil father's respect.

And so we come to the basic flaw of this film. Scene after scene is bloated with exposition about this fantasmical world and the people who live therein. Everyone has a relationship or history or problem and feels the need to tell the story in verbal form to someone else. All that talking sure adds up. The concepts are pretty neat (and all the more interesting as they come from a Buddhist perspective) but what we really want to see is fire battle water and earth battle air. We keep waiting to see all those tai chi movements put into action and instead we're treated to soliloquies from Prince Zuko about how daddy doesn't love him.

It shares a commonality with the week's other new release, Twilight: Eclipse, in that there's a lot of intense and emotive waiting, but not nearly enough pay off.

We never really bond with Aang or his sidekicks Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone, who is up against himself this week. He also is in Twilight as Jasper Hale). They are more like symbols of hero and sidekicks than real people.

Not to say it's a bad movie, just not as good as hoped. The visuals, in the hands of inconsistent director M Night Shyamalan, are lush and rich. Some of the fighting is pretty cool, although in the post-Avatar (James Cameron's Avatar, that is) era, one hopes for more from 3D battles. One hopes to almost feel the water hit your face.

There's a word for what this film is. Ah yes, I have it. Mediocre. Middle of the road. Forgettable. It's not a bad way to pass a few hours, but about half-way through you realize that air doesn’t really need to bend… and you didn’t really needed to plop down $10 for a ticket to this movie.