There are so many aspects of The Last Airbender one could choose to focus on in expounding upon its weakness as an adaptation, but let’s instead key in on three in particular: Shyamalan’s misunderstanding of the characters, the poorly constructed action, and the film’s persistently troubling racial presentation/whitewashing. The visual fidelity of the movie seemed to suffer as a result, with many scenes that look murky, dark and underlit. The post-filming conversion of The Last Airbender to 3D was one of these, and was heavily criticized at the time, being one of the most high-profile cases (along with Clash of the Titans) of more or less complete films being converted to 3D to cash in on the massive success of James Cameron’s Avatar-ironically, the reason why the word “avatar” is no longer present in the title of Shyamalan’s adaptation. There are myriad aspects of Shyamalan’s interpretation that flat out don’t work, including some aspects of the film over which he had no real control. Suffice to say, the work of art does not translate well.

To watch the entirety of Avatar, and then move directly on to Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender is like touring the Louvre and then going to a souvenir shop outside where street urchins are painting their best attempts at replicating the works of Monet and Vermeer. What I found was a film that was every bit as bad on a technical level as I remembered, but also so much worse as an adaptation than I ever realized. Night Shyamalan film, ahead of only (of course) The Happening. It sits second to last in our ranking of every M. And the timing proved to be fortuitous, as we just marked the 10th anniversary of that legendarily bad film’s release. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender adaptation from 2010. Which of course, to someone who is fascinated by bad movies, can mean only one thing: It was clearly time for me to revisit M. As has been experienced by so many other shows that are beneficiaries of the so-called “Netflix bump,” though, appreciation for Avatar has subsequently exploded, and the show has consistently been in Netflix’s top 10, with an entire new audience falling in love with it along the way.

It’s a cult series that had been on my “I really should watch this” list for years, but its limited availability always kept me from actively seeking the series out. In the last few months, like so many other Netflix viewers, I dove head first into Avatar: The Last Airbender.

James cameron avatar the last airbender 2