Adapting a series or book into a feature-length film is no easy feat. Movies like The Godfather, The Shawshank Redemption, and the Harry Potter films are some of the best big screen adaptations, but there are plenty of others that have completely missed the mark. Paramount+ just added a notoriously bad adaptation of a beloved animated series that critics described as a “crime against film.”
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Planned as the first movie in a trilogy that never panned out due to the film’s poor critical and commercial reception, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender is a notoriously bad adaptation. The film, based on the first season of the Nickelodeon animated television series Avatar: The Last Airbender, started streaming on Paramount+ on December 1st. It tells the story of Aang, the last successor in a line of Airbenders who must learn to master all four elements to restore peace to the world.
The Last Airbender Movie Is a Major Disservice to the Nickelodeon Series
Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender is legendary for all of the wrong reasons. Rather than being remembered as a faithful and well-constructed adaptation of a beloved animated series, the movie is notoriously a shameful adaptation and insult to fans of the original show and truly one of the worst films ever made.
The Last Airbender failed to capture the spirit of the show with a script that adopted an overly serious, somber tone, altered the show’s lore, and was far too rushed. Beloved characters like Aang and Sokka felt like shadows of their animated counterparts, the element-bending was downright bad, the acting never quite hit the mark, and even the CGI was bad. Most notably, the movie was blatantly offensive with a whitewashed cast and frequent mispronunciations of the main characters’ names.
More than a decade later, The Last Airbender remains a massive disappointment that holds just a 5% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 30% audience rating. Roger Ebert candidly described the film as “an agonizing experience in every category,” while David Nusair of Reel Film Reviews dubbed it “a tremendously disappointing effort from a once rock-solid filmmaker.” R.L. Shaffer wrote for IGN, “The film is an unmitigated disaster, a putrid patchwork of the original series stitched together by wretched performances, bad creative decisions and a story that’s all exposition, no depth.”
What’s New on Paramount+?
The Last Airbender may be a film that’s better off being skipped, but there are plenty of other great streaming options now on Paramount+. December 1st brought the arrivals of films like Annihilation, Braveheart, Django Unchained, Fargo, Forrest Gump, Inglourious Basterds, and all four of the Tim Burton-era Batman movies. There are also several holiday movies now streaming, including Adam Sandler’s Eight Crazy Nights, Ernest Saves Christmas, and both the 1947 and 1994 versions of Miracle on 34th Street.
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Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.
