For the better part of the last decade, many of us have wondered aloud what would happen if one-time sooper-jeenius M. Night Shyamalan dropped his Twilight Zone zing-you-in-the-end shtick and just made a good old fashioned movie. How great would that movie be? Well, after a slow, depressing slide from greatness (The Sixth Sense) to pretty greatness (Unbreakable) to pretty good until you thought very hard about it-ness (Signs) on down to you’ve gotta be ****ing me, we guessed that from the trailer-ness (The Village), it seemed like an inevitability. He had to do something. Unfortunately, that something led to him ignoring the buzz and making Lady in the Water and The Happening, the later being held by many as one of the worst films of the last decade. So, with nowhere lower to sink, he finally found a project that he didn’t create himself: The Last Airbender.

The trouble is, he selected a property so beloved by its fanbase, that he was going to have to work extremely hard to keep everything they loved in while having to tell a coherent story to audiences that were unfamiliar with Avatar: The Last Airbender. For those of you unfamiliar with the show, it was a three season series that ran on Nickelodeon about a 12 year old boy named Ang who was the reincarnation of the Avatar, a special prophet like wise man who could master the magical powers of all four elements (while the most powerful humans could only master one.) Along with the faithful companions who dug him out of the ice that kept him away for a century, he travels the Earth, training in the four elements so he can become powerful enough to defeat the evil Fire Lord, who is leading an army to conquer the known world. The show is brilliant – a perfectly conceived piece of children’s entertainment that is equally captivating to adults.

It was the perfect choice for Shyamalan. A built in fanbase to keep the buzz going, but not so big that everyone on the planet already knew about it and thus were chasing it down. A comeback was in the making and the questions began – could we see a return of the guy the critics all believed he was back when they compared him to Hitchcock and Spielberg?

Sadly, the answer is a resounding no. In fact, it looks like M. Night has made the film that will put the final nail in the coffin of his career. Some are calling it the worst of the year, message boards and aggregator sites like reddit and Digg are swelling with homebrew reviews warning fans away from the film. Complaints range from bizarre adaptation choices, poor casting, the lack of a coherent narrative, strange casting decisions, all the way up to a complete lack of personality in the characters. There is even a small but vocal group of fans angry about the changes in the races of characters, with complaints about a white Ang (who is supposed to be of Asian decent, but looks identical to the little boy cast in the film) and making the fire nation people Indian instead of Chinese. The arguments now are no longer whether or not M. Night can make a comeback, but whether or not he’s made the worst film of the year and can even get a large studio contract again. Questions have even arose whether or not Shyamalan has killed any hopes of a second and third Avatar film (only the Box Office will decide that.)

Tags: m. night shyamalan, the last airbender, the sixth sense