From “Slumdog” to “Airbender” is a huge leap for young Indian actor Dev Patel but it’s also a risky move for director M. Night Shyamalan who takes on his first CGI blockbuster “The Last Airbender”. His previous fairly small-scale supernatural dramas started with “The Sixth Sense” which was great success, but his subsequent films have not matched that striking debut. Can this shift into the fantasy-epic genre revive his career?
It’s interesting that there is a strong Asian trend in this year’s blockbuster offerings. Jerry Bruckheimer’s “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” is grand adventure in the style of the Arabian Nights legends, and hard on its heels come “The Last Airbender” which, like the TV series on which it is based, drew on popular Asian genres, using the style of the traditional Japanese “anime”, but also drawing upon the myths and motifs of Japanese animated films and Chinese martial arts. Brett Ratner, a major Hollywood director re-edited the Bollywood movie “Kites” for the American audience, all films add an Asian flavour to the year’s releases.
“The Last Airbender” originated in 2005 with a TV series that had a great run on America’s Nickelodeon TV. The show became a major hit that was extended for three successful seasons. The original series was called “Avatar: The Legend of Aang” but as the series became more successful, it was re-named “Avatar: The Last Airbender”. Now the feature film arrives with yet another name-change. It is now just “The Last Airbender”, to avoid any confusion with James Cameron’s sci-fi blockbuster. The Asian feel and the eclectic mix of action genres featured in the series kept the TV audience happy throughout three successful series. The cycle ended in 2008, on a high note, with a two-hour TV movie finale that became a multiple award-winning hit, taking both an Emmy award and a Peabody Award.
That kind of public success always gets a second look from the Hollywood mainstream and veteran producers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy took an interest in the project. The first decision was to ditch the animation format, and to convert the stories into a CGI action epic with live actors. Frank Marshall has a special skill with that kind of fantasy epic. He co-founded Amblin Entertainment with Steven Spielberg, and Marshall produced on a string of block-busters including “ET”, the “Indiana Jones” film-cycle and the Jason Bourne trilogy. Marshall and Kennedy also produced M. Night Shyamalan’s breakthrough hit “The Sixth Sense”. That’s an impressive track-record for those two seasoned producers and with a proven director, Shyamalan, there is a formidable team backing “The Last Airbender”. The big plus is that the TV show created a huge, pre-sold audience and “The Last Airbender” is expected to make an impact in the US summer season.
It is set in a mythical place, a bit like Tolkien’s Middle-Earth or Ursula Leguin’s “Earthsea”. In this world, there are gifted individuals known as "benders", shamans who are able to use the elements – Earth, Air, Fire and Water – as destructive weapons or as defensive shields. The “benders” are uniquely gifted beings and, as the four Elements often will, they all strive for dominance. The Fire Nation seems to hold the power and their attacks on the other three nations have brought their world to the brink of chaos. From the most peaceful of those four tribes - the Air Nomads - emerges a unique prodigy, a young boy called Aaang. He is the last of the Airbenders and he is called “the Last Avatar” because he is the physical embodiment of the entire elemental world, with the ability to control all four elements, and to draw upon the combined power, knowledge, and experience of the Avatar’s previous incarnations.
The Avatar’s duty is to maintain peace between the four nations and to prevent any damage to the spirit realm, thus ensuring that the world remains in balance. The supporting characters include a teenage Waterbender, named Katara (Nicola Peltz) and her warrior brother Sokka (Jackson Rathbone), who has a animal guide Appa, a Flying Bison. As Aang begins his journey to restore balance to their war-torn world he must confront the ambitious Fire Nation Admiral Zhao (Aasif Mandvi) and Prince Zuko (Dev Patel), the banished prince of the Fire Nation who must capture Aang to regain his honor.
Dev Patel as Zuko
Production started in 2009 in locations in Greenland and then moved back to America, to a mountainous region in Pennsylvania, where the huge outdoor sets were built. The visual enchantment is supplied by Industrial Light and Magic who had to create all the spectacular fire, water, ground and air-effects. Two thirds of the way through the shoot, however, the producers decided that the film should be converted to 3D, a process that added between $5 million and $10 million to the film’s production budget which now is in the vicinity of $120-million. The musical score for “The Last Airbender” will be written by James Newton Howard who has written the music for seven of Shyamalan’s movies.
“The Last Airbender” faces strong competition in the fantasy genre during the rest of the year. There’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” starring Nicolas Cage; Adrien Brodie in “Predators”, Angelina Jolie in “Salt” and looming in November is “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1” followed by the third film in the “Narnia” series, “Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”. As I write this in mid-May, the US summer season has not yet yielded up a bona-fide blockbuster hit to match last year’s “Avatar” and Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland”. Can “The Last Airbender” blow the competition away and seize the fantasy crown? We’ll find out when it is will be released in the USA on July 2, 2010 and in South Africa on Sept. 10.
Director M. Night Shyamalan