The Last Airbender – Breathing Some Fresh Air Onto the Airbender

You didn’t start reading this article just to hear the same thing written in all the other articles about Shyamalan’s latest movie, The Last Airbender.  So, I’m going to take a risk and say something that (a) might slightly piss you off and (b) at least hopefully be a bit of a new take on Airbender. 

The press on Airbender seems to be of two kinds, the critical movie press, dissing the movie for its content and the martial arts press that is fawning all over it, because, well, we all just love martial arts movies and there are so few big ones, and well, as long as the kicks are fast as lightning, the martial arts press doesn’t seem to have much of a problem.  So lets just assume that some of the negative criticism of the film, that seems to be ubiquitous, is justified, and some of the action critics fawning is a bit simplistic and move on to an original thought, because I think that I might just have one.

It is not an easy thing to do something original in martial arts movies.  If you think about it, almost every martial arts movie is one of just a few basic plots.  These include:

- Some kind of excuse to have a competition:  Karate Kid (all of them),  Unleashed, Bloodsport, even the         venerable Enter the Dragon, Fighting;

- A revenge plot: Master Killer, 5 Deadly Venoms, Kill Bill (ok, to be fair, this  was an homage);

- Westerner learning the ways of the east: American Ninja, Bloodsport, Last  Samurai;

- The soldier or cop story: Universal Soldier, Rush Hour

- and maybe a couple others [if you know some more, write in!]

Now, what is interesting about this list?  Actually, a lot of these movies are classics. So what does that mean?  It doesn’t mean that a movie sucks because it is in one of these few categories; what it means is that it is downright hard to make a martial arts flick that does not fit into one of these groups.  But…to be fair to M. Knight…that is exactly what he did.   Try it yourself, try to think of a plot for a martial arts movie that is not a typical one, its not so easy.

To be fair, The Last Airbender, for all its possible faults, did something very rare.  It has a storyline that is tremendously full of martial arts and basically martial arts philosophy, but it is not a typical storyline.  I give Shyamalan a lot of credit for not just having a bunch of people throwing some great moves and then tacking a tokenistic story around it for window dressing.  Instead, the martial arts are integrated within, and serve, the story.  In my opinion, when this is done, it has the potential of actually making the fighting much more relevant, because (in theory) then we have something to care about when we are watching the fight scenes, which actually makes the fighting more meaningful, more dramatic and more cool.

Remember Big Night in Little China?  Now that was a movie ahead of its time, and man did I love it.  Remember those days? – that was before martial arts movies were ‘in’ and us martial artists just totally loved it.  But we didn’t love it just for its fighting, we loved it because the story was good, the characters were good, everything was original – so when it came time for a fight scene we could really get into it.  Or what about Borune?  Now everyone loved the fighting there, it was excellently choreographed, and yet the fighting and the plot mutually impacted each other, each in harmony with and feeding the excitement, mood and style of the other.

I think that it might be helpful to get past the critique of Airbender, and see something else.  What we can see is that martial arts movies can be more than what we are letting them be.  They can be adventures, original and exciting new worlds and great blockbusters right up there with the rest of the genres.  And in doing so, that can just make the martial arts all the better.   So, in conclusion, when it comes to The Last Airbender, I’m a cup is half full kind of guy.  Here’s looking on the bright side and I’m bracing for all the hate mail this is going to get me!!!!

Lorne Gross

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