M. Night Shyamalan’s latest release, The Last Airbender, received an abysmal seven-percent “fresh” rating on critic aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. How bad can it really be? Pretty terrible.
The movie, which is based on a Nickelodeon cartoon series called Avatar: The Last Airbender, was controversial before it was even released. Fans were up in arms when the film featured a mostly white cast, while the cartoon series featured mostly Asian characters. But that was just the beginning of the harsh critiques the film is receiving. Critics ripped the movie apart for its hasty post-production conversion to 3D, the shoddy script and wooden acting. Here are a few choice zingers:
Ty Burr from the Boston Globe: “It’s a tossup as to which is worse: the script, which regularly grinds to a halt to Explain Everything until the movie curls up and dies; the shockingly dingy camerawork; or the execrable 3-D.”
Owen Gleiberman from Entertainment Weekly: “As for the 3-D, I’m tempted to leave responsible critical language behind and say, quite simply, that it sucks — except that the 3-D visuals in this movie would have to exist before they could be called terrible.”
Roger Moore from the Orlando Sentinel: “This colossal folly, the fiasco of the summer of 2010 — gives us all a ringside seat at the sight of Mr. “I See Dead People’s” career gurgling down the drain.”
(Maybe you should watch an underrated sci-fi masterpiece instead.)