THE LAST AIRBENDER
Locations: Pennsylvania, USA; Greenland
Talent: M. Night Shyamalan (director), Dev Patel, Noah Ringer, Nicola Peltz, Jackson Rathbone, Cliff Curtis, Shaun Toub
Released: August 13
There are two things M. Night Shyamalan is clearly very fond of: a pretty abstract answer to a question, and a sporting metaphor. To wit: "If you're getting guarded in basketball and keep going to your right, going to your right, eventually they're going to start guarding to your right, so then you go left. Then you go back to your right and they're like, 'Oh, man!'
This is the response he gives to the question, "Having always directed films based on your own ideas, what made you decide to adapt a Saturday morning cartoon?" He's not a man who likes to talk in straight lines, preferring to leave things open to interpretation. But then, he doesn't direct in straight lines either.
Given every project Shyamalan's worked on had in a contrary direction to its predecessor - think of the difference between the Sixth Sense and the gloomy noodling of Unbreakable; or Lady in the Water, a bedtime story for grownups, and The Happening, a thriller so awkward and wooden it seems almost impossible to believe it wasn't deliberate - the short answer to Empire's question could have been: "What would be the last thing you'd expect me to do? A family friendly, effects-heavy fantasy trilogy..."
Still it would be rather unfair to think of Shyamalan's latest project as a retreat to the mainstream after the pasting he received for The Happening. Adapting The Last Airbender is not like making a movie of Thundercats or He-man. A rare example of its kind, this is a film that's going to have to be extremely good to live up to the cartoon on which it's based.
Created in 2005 by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, Avatar: The Legend of Aang - or Avatar: The Last Airbender, in the US - is aimed at kids, but equally popular with adults due to the quality of its writing, intricate story telling and high production values. Not unlike Star Wars or Lord Of The Rings in its themes, the series, set in a world made up of four kingdoms named after the four classical elements, and inspired by a hotchpotch of Asian cultures, charts the adventures of two siblings who chance upon a small child, Aang, and flying bison (yes, flying bison) who have been frozen in an iceberg and hold the key to uniting the nations and ending the tyranny of the firebenders. Oh, and particular people in each nation can manipulate their respective element and are known, in a term coined by someone with no knowledge of British homophobic slurs, as 'benders'. Aang, the last of the air tribe, has the potential to control all the elements. It sounds a bit confusing, but it's a story well told across the show's three seasons. Neatly, the film series will also be a trilogy (Shyamalan is attached to all three instalments but will not make the films back-to-back).
“It was Night’s daughters who made him aware of the show,” says producer Frank Marshall on the film’s Philadelphia set. “He started watching it with them and thought, ‘Wow, I could make a movie out of this…’ We’re scaling it up. We’ve made the characters a little older and we’ve made some changes to the story. We’re looking for an audience beyond that of the cartoon.” A larger audience will be needed given the budget is in excess of $100 million and scripting had already begun on part two. If things go will, Marshall says there will be "hopefully more" than three.
“I’d always been toying with large-form storytelling, so you tell it over many films, like a mythology,” explains Shyamalan, “Short of me stopping everything and getting into four or five years of writing, I was hoping to find something like that where I could tell a long-form story. There are a lot of franchises that I’ve looked at doing, trying to find one where I could invoke a lot of my personal feelings, where I could intuit that they naturally would fit. You don’t want it to be the wrong fit. Transformers wouldn’t be the right for my philosophies… This had all the Buddhist and Hindu philosophies – Avatar is a Sanskrit name – and all the things about family and the elements and martial arts. All of it just felt right for me.”
Looking around the enormous set, The Last Airbender is markedly different from every other Shyamalan film. For a start, it’s clearly costing a lot. We’re standing at the grand entrance to a to-be-digitised-later bridge leading to a sky city, just to the left of a full-sized ship that looks like the fanciest craft in the River Styx Cruise Lines fleet, but is in fact the runabout of the film’s bad guys. Elsewhere there is an ice kingdom roughly the size of Stoke. All the fake snow probably cost more that the entire budget for the Sixth Sense. It’s so big, its production has essentially created a film industry in Philadelphia, Shyamalan’s home town, where he insists on making all of his pictures. But there are some Shyamalan’s hallmarks – not least the fact that he’s found a new adolescent to take from unknown to overnight star, namely Noah Ringer.
The film has come under some criticism online for not reflecting the overt Asian appearance of the cartoon’s drawn cast. Each of the elemental tribes appears inspired by a specific culture, e.g. Tibetan for the airbenders, Chinese for the firebenders and so on. Here, however, the only leading cast-member with any direct Asian connection is Slumdog Millionaire star Dev Patel, a second-generation Indian from Harrow, north-west London. The rest – Nicola Peltz (Katara, a headstrong waterbender), Jackson Rathbone (her clumsy, conceited brother, Sokka) and Ringer – are Americans.
“It’s a fantasy world,” shrugs Marshall. “The cast and the characters in the movie are much more diverse that in the series. So I think you have to see the whole movie and see the whole story and then see how all the worlds are laid out. It’s much more detailed and diverse. We’ve combined them all.”
Putting the others aside, it’s hard to see how the producers could have found a better fit for Aang than Ringer, a pocket-sized 12-year-old who is so well-matched in appearance and ability that he could well have been bred specifically for the part.
“He sent us a tape,” says Marshall. “His friends in Texas had often said to him that he looked like Aang from that cartoon show. He was a martial arts expert – he’d been doing probably since he was two. His head was already shaved. We just couldn’t believe it.” Empire catches some footage of Noah Ringer in airbending action – admittedly, we weren’t supposed to, but somebody left a tape running while we were nearby – and it’s pretty clear that the kid’s got the chopsocky chops. As does, surprisingly, Shyamalan.
“I have a statue of Bruce Lee in my office,” he says. “I’m that guy. Enter The Dragon’s like a religion for me. I’ve always wanted to do [a martial arts movie]. When I saw The Matrix I thought it was awesome. It was like someone else felt the same way as me.” However, as much as The Last Airbender takes inspiration from multiple forms of martial arts, it’s not really a martial arts movie in the traditional sense – nobody ever actually hits anybody. “It’s interesting because the main characters don’t do combat. They do forms. They’re manipulating elements, which is a whole other thing.” It will probably still be compared to martial arts movies, though, so Shyamalan wants it to stand out in a crowded genre. “I do really long takes. We could do this with many cameras and may cuts, but anybody can do that.”
Things might not have worked out every time, but one thing you can’t accuse Shyamalan of doing is things that just anybody can…
