The movie is choppy. It doesn't follow the cartoon/animation accurately but not really many adaptations do. I'd say for a better kick you might want to see it in 3-D and you might also want to be prepared for a lot more critics as the months go by. Hope for the best but be prepared for the...well not "worse", but "not too bad". Shall I hope for the next three movies?

M. Night may be in trouble with this one, effects were about the only good part to this movie. If you have seen the animation on Nickelodeon just walk away from this movie or pay the consequences. I myself was a fan of the animation and could hardly watch this. Too much movement was used to create bending attacks and when Aang goes into his avatar state it is nothing like the original. So very, very disappointing because the story has the potential to be an epic movie trilogy.

there are a lot of very unhappy “Airbender” fans right now. People who have seen the TV show, real fans if you will, who are not very happy with M. Night Shyamalan’s take on the popular Nickelodeon cartoon. Besides the movie’s general lack of awesome, there was also something very noticeably wrong with the film: the movie has, for some reason, changed the pronunciation of the lead character’s name. “Aang” (pronounced pretty much the way it looks, with strong accents on the “a” and “n”, and rhymes with “bang”) had somehow become … “Ahng”, with emphasis on the “Ah”, and rhymes with “hung”.
According to Shyamalan, he did this on purpose. The director tells IndiesMoviesOnline:
And I fought like crazy to have the pronunciation of the names to go back to the Asian pronunciation. So you say “Ahng” instead of “Aaang” because it’s correct. It’s not “I-rack,” it’s “ee-Rock.” I’m literally fighting for all this.
So yes, the actors didn’t start pronouncing Aang’s name “Ahng” because they wanted to, they were directed to do so by M. Night. It seems odd that Shyamalan would go to such great efforts to, from what he’s saying above, change up the pronunciation because he thinks this is how it should be pronounced rather than how the show did it. Ego much?

the film is notable because it is the first attempt by the once mighty M. Night Shyamalan to make a big-budget, effects-heavy fantasy film -- and one based on preexisting material at that. The Sixth Sense writer-director had once been known for crafting his own smallish but memorable thrillers, but as his work's quality has grown increasingly dismal in recent years (see Lady in the Water or The Happening… or rather, don't see them), Shyamalan finally decided it was time for a change of pace. Alas, this new direction does not seem to have revived his former great potential.

The only thing I can really say about The Last Airbender is this: Epic Fail. Just how epic? Paramount Pictures gave M. Night Shyamalan $150 million dollars to adapt the popular Nickolodeon cartoon for the big screen. What they got is an absolute mess of a movie, complete with poor acting, the most hackneyed script ever, and a last-minute conversion to 3-D that only serves to destroys what was possibly some lush cinematography. The Last Airbender is perhaps the worst film of the summer, a feat I thought Jonah Hex had locked down. However, Airbender makes a determined effort. Let me put it this way, as good as Toy Story 3 was, Airbender is just as bad. It was hard to find anything wrong with Toy Story 3. It is nigh impossible to find anything right with Airbender. The story is ridiculously complex. In a world where people can manipulate (bend) the four elements of air, earth, fire and water, depending on their tribal affiliation, there exists a being (the Avatar) who can manipulate all four. This person is also the sole being capable of communing the the "spirit world" which serves to keep things in balance. This being went missing 100 years ago, only to be found in a giant ice sphere by two children of the water tribe. In the 100 years the Avatar has been gone, the Fire tribe has begun conquering the others, though we're never really told why. The disgraced Prince Zuko(Dev Patel, the Slumdog Millionaire himself) of the Fire tribe wants to the Avatar so he can return to his family. The Water children need to save the Avatar to ensure the Fire people don't win. For this point on it becomes to silly to try and summarize. Shyamalan succumbs to his own hubris, loading the film with long, boring exposition communicated through long, boring speeches that I'm sure were meant to be inspirational. Instead they are clichéd, burdensome mounds of words that only slow down an already languidly paced film. He heaps some unnecessary narration on top of the exposition, condescending to the audience as he does it. Perhaps the narration was put in to help the film's target audience, the prepubescent b0ys and girls who watch the cartoon, understand where this convoluted story is going. Sadly, it doesn't. The dialogue is so corny, it left me squirming a little. Also bothersome is the ham-fisted way Shyamalan expounded his themes, which seem to be responsibility, responsibility, and the horror of industry destroying nature (lifted with little change from the Lord of the Rings). Seriously, the Fire people sail their world's oceans in giant steel yachts that feature gigantic smokestacks over visible flame. These stacks spew out a never ending cloud of dark, ashy smoke. The metaphor could not be more clear had it just been printed as a subtitle across the screen. The acting is bad across the board. The child cast as Aan, the Avatar, Noah Ringer, a wooden child actor if there ever was one. He speaks his lines as if reciting them of a cue card just off screen. The two Water tribe children, Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) are no better. A colleague of mine I saw the film with noted that Rathbone seemed downright anxious every time he was on screen, delivering his lines tersely, with little emotion. The older actors just phone it in. The usually reliable Cliff Curtis looks bored stiff as the leader of the Fire people, while the main antagonist, a Fire general played by Aasif Mandvi, is neither menacing nor scary. He comes off as a schoolyard bully, all bluster and no balls. The only actor I found brought any sort of depth to his role was Shaun Toub (Yinsen from Iron Man). Playing Prince Zuko's Uncle Iroh, he's conflicted between his duty to the prince and his beliefs in the spirit world, something the Fire people have come to consider children's superstition. Perhaps the most egregious error of the movie is the 3-D conversion. 3-D tends to suck all the light out of the images it portends to display, leaving viewers with a murky picture where shadow and light blend together. There are no crisp lines in the film, no real detail. Which is a shame, as the film's setting should've been its biggest strength. The movie travels from an arctic campsite, where the whites should have popped against the bluish hues of the ice and water around it. When it travels to warmer climates, the greens and browns should have been awe-inspiring. It's not. It all looks faded. Much as with Clash of the Titans, the 3-D is barely noticeable throughout the film, and contributes nothing. I fear that Hollywood has cynically latched onto this fad for the high ticket price it commands rather than for any real artistic merit. My only relief was the movie was short, so I didn't get the usual headache 3-D movies tend to give me. I didn't expect much going into The Last Airbender. However, I didn't expect it to be quite so bad. It's like watching a train wreck unfold over 94 minutes. The problem is, that 94 minutes feels like an eternity. The end of the film hints at a sequel. I hope some divine being takes mercy on us all and never lets that happen.

Experience the thrilling live-action adventure based on the hit Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last Airbender. Join Aang, an extraordinary boy with incredible ?bending? powers, as he journeys through an exotic land filled with magical creatures and powerful friends. As the Avatar, he is the only one who can end the age-old conflict between the four nations: Air, Water, Earth and Fire. An inspirational journey, The Last Airbenderis exciting entertainment for the entire family!

"The Last Airbender" is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here. It puts a nail in the coffin of low-rent 3D, but it will need a lot more coffins than that.

Let's start with the 3D, which was added as an afterthought to a 2D movie. Not only is it unexploited, unnecessary and hardly noticeable, but it's a disaster even if you like 3D. M. Night Shyamalan's retrofit produces the drabbest, darkest, dingiest movie of any sort I've seen in years. You know something is wrong when the screen is filled with flames that have the vibrancy of faded Polaroids. It's a known fact that 3D causes a measurable decrease in perceived brightness, but "Airbender" looks like it was filmed with a dirty sheet over the lens.

Now for the movie itself. The first fatal decision was to make a live-action film out of material that was born to be anime. The animation of the Nickelodeon TV series drew on the bright colors and "clear line" style of such masters as Miyazaki, and was a pleasure to observe. It's in the very nature of animation to make absurd visual sights more plausible.

Since "Airbender" involves the human manipulation of the forces of air, earth, water and fire, there is hardly an event that can be rendered plausibly in live action. That said, its special effects are atrocious. The first time the waterbender Katara summons a globe of water, which then splashes (offscreen) on her brother Sokka, he doesn't even get wet. Firebenders' flames don't seem to really burn, and so on.

The story takes place in the future, after Man has devastated the planet and survives in the form of beings with magical powers allowing them to influence earth, water and fire. These warring factions are held in uneasy harmony by the Avatar, but the Avatar has disappeared, and Earth lives in a state of constant turmoil caused by the warlike Firebenders.

Our teenage heroes Katara and Sokka discover a child frozen in the ice. This is Aang (Noah Ringer), and they come to suspect he may be the Avatar, or Last Airbender. Perhaps he can bring harmony and quell the violent Firebenders. This plot is incomprehensible, apart from the helpful orientation that we like Katara, Sokka and Aang and are therefore against their enemies.

The dialogue is couched in unspeakable quasi-medieval formalities; the characters are so portentous they seem to have been trained for grade school historical pageants. Their dialogue is functional and action-driven. There is little conviction that any of this might be real even in their minds. All of the benders in the movie appear only in terms of their attributes and functions, and contain no personality.

Potentially interesting details are botched. Consider the great iron ships of the Firebenders. These show potential as Steampunk, but are never caressed for their intricacies. Consider the detail Miyazaki lavished on Howl's Moving Castle. Trying sampling a Nickelodeon clip from the original show to glimpse the look that might have been.

After the miscalculation of making the movie as live action, there remained the challenge of casting it. Shyamalan has failed. His first inexplicable mistake was to change the races of the leading characters; on television Aang was clearly Asian, and so were Katara and Sokka, with perhaps Mongolian and Inuit genes. Here they're all whites. This casting makes no sense because (1) It's a distraction for fans of the hugely popular TV series, and (2) all three actors are pretty bad. I don't say they're untalented, I say they've been poorly served by Shyamalan and the script. They are bland, stiff, awkward and unconvincing. Little Aang reminds me of Wallace Shawn as a child. This is not a bad thing (he should only grow into Shawn's shoes), but doesn't the role require little Andre, not little Wally?

As the villain, Shyamalan has cast Cliff Curtis as Fire Lord Ozai and Dev Patel (the hero of "Slumdog Millionaire") as his son Prince Zuko. This is all wrong. In material at this melodramatic level, you need teeth-gnashers, not leading men. Indeed, all of the acting seems inexplicably muted. I've been an admirer of many of Shyamalan's films, but action and liveliness are not his strong points. I fear he takes the theology of the Bending universe seriously.

As "The Last Airbender" bores and alienates its audiences, consider the opportunities missed here. (1) This material should have become an A-list animated film. (2) It was a blunder jumping aboard the 3D bandwagon with phony 3D retro-fitted to a 2D film. (3) If it had to be live action, better special effects artists should have been found. It's not as if films like "2012" and "Knowing" didn't contain "real life" illusions as spectacular as anything called for in "The Last Airbender."

I close with the hope that the title proves prophetic.

I have only seen a few of the cartoon episodes but the few I did see matched up pretty perfectly with what was in the movie. The opening scene looks just like the first cartoon I did see and the actors portrayed the cartoon counterparts a little to well (there own adaptation would have been a little more refreshing). I would have never watched the movie if it wasn’t for M. Night Shyamalan which gave the movie a fighting chance. If I was 8-12 years old this would have been the best movie I have ever seen. It had the potential to be as cool if not cooler then lord of the rings but nickelodeon really dorked it out hardcore unfortunately.

This movie achieves to maeke a very good story to a complete failure.
How it is expected in a movie were the main actors are kids, the characters ae very bad achieved.
Completely diferent from the original story.
The efects save it a little because the scenes were completely beatulifull.
In general the movie was awfull...

Air, Water, Earth, Fire. Four nations tied by destiny when the Fire Nation launches a brutal war against the others. A century has passed with no hope in sight to change the path of this destruction. Caught between combat and courage, Aang discovers he is the lone Avatar with the power to manipulate all four elements. Aang teams with Katara, a Waterbender, and her brother, Sokka, to restore balance to their war-torn world.

What a let down to the fans like myself, this movie was such a fail, it didn't even came close to the cartoon, it was boring, rushed the acting was the worse ive ever seen and WTF they didnt even pronounce Aang's name right did any of them even watched the cartoon my god that was so annoying but the only good thing that came out of this movie was that it was so bad we're not gonna get another thank god for that. 4/10

Hell i'm not going to Hide it, I love the original animated series and may regard it so highly it shadows almost everything else, so i'll try to keep myself at least civil when reviewing this film...
Alright for the most part I'll place the blame of failure squarely on M.Night and the writers/script. Some of the actors themselves are not terrible ex.Jackson Rathbone but the script given to them was shocking in parts, the effects are terrible in regards to bending, pronunciation of Names/Terms is equally shocking. I found the portrayal/casting of the Fire Nation characters completely off key which was a little more troubling for me than normal.
If your a fan of the Series or just interested in the setting stick with the animated show or wait for the upcoming new seriers "The Legend of Korra"

great movie ! could watch several times over and always see something that i missed the first time, an the time before that . and so on-an so on :-)! great for young and old alike. i recommend that all should see this movie, if you don't you will be missing out on what i think will be one of the best movies in 2010.

this was good sci-fi movie makes you wonder if this is really possible can wait till the next part comes out the special effects are great and the action was exciting it will keep you the edge of your seats good show for the family and the kids i give the thumbs up