2. The Last Airbender (2010) Does Everything Wrong; Fans Wonder If Director Saw Original Show
M. Night Shyamalan's name is so synonymous with "terrible acts of filmmaking" these days, that I'm genuinely surprised that the poor guy can look his family members in the eye with feeling ashamed. Not that he doesn't deserve it, of course: the last decade has brought nothing but critical disaster for the once promising filmmaker. Bad as Shyamalan is, though (or maybe misguided is a better word?), there's no real excuse for the travesty that was 2010's The Last Airbender, a movie so ill-judged and so unfaithful to its source material (Avatar: The Last Airbender) that it makes a genuine case for the construction of a time machine. Unfortunately such a thing doesn't exist, and this thing does. Based on a genuinely remarkable animated series, The Last Airbender was supposed to tell the story of a young boy named Aang, who is the latest reincarnation of something called the "Avatar." There are four kingdoms in the world of the show, each represented by a different elements, though only the Avatar can "bend" all four. The mistakes that Shyamalan makes bringing all this to the screen are mind-blowing. To start, he doesn't even get the pronunciations of the character's names right - didn't he have the freakin' show to tell him how they were supposed to be said? Surely he could have checked? Next, he swaps around everyone's ethnicities for no clear reason than he "felt like it" (the bad guys are now Indian?). Worst of all, he messes with the one thing that made the show truly great: that it followed a young boy as he grew into an mature adult with real responsibilities. Instead, the movie is so grim and depressing, with characters who are nothing like their original counterparts, that The Last Airbender and Avatar seem like totally unconnected works.