Shyamalan’s ‘Last Airbender’ is scarred on arrival

Reviewing "The Last Airbender" is a bit like notifying next of kin of some terrible loss.

M. Night Shyamalan, after all, isn't just any writer-director, a guy who made this week's disposable blockbuster.

He's one of the region's major employers. He takes old airplane hangers and abandoned factories and fills them with craftspeople and technicians, channeling millions in Paramount money into the local economy.

There's a lot riding on "Airbender," inaugural installment of a proposed trilogy that could keep things at Shyamalan Industries humming for years.

Part one, though, is a movie with a biblical plague of problems. Combine that with gimmicky 3-D conversion and ongoing controversy of racial insensitivity, and you've got a franchise in danger of being DOA.

Paramount must hope for major turnout from Shyamalan loyalists and a built-in "Airbender" fan base - the movie is drawn from a Nickelodeon cartoon series ("Avatar") with an international following.

The first hurdle will be to withstand what are sure to be some tough reviews. Shyamalan envisioned this as a mytho-FX epic on a "Star Wars" or "Lord of the Rings" scale, but comparisons to "Battlefield: Earth" are likely.

Basic storytelling is botched almost from the get-go, despite nonstop flow of expository dialogue and desperate voice-overs.

The series' hero, Aang (Noah Ringer), shows up in scene one in a block of polar ice, freed by a young man (Jackson Rathbone) and woman (Nicola Peltz) who'll become his friends and allies as he accepts his role as a savior destined to prevent warring nations from destroying each other.

A "Star Wars" type crawl might have answered important questions in a few minutes (Is this a long time ago? Is it far away? Is it earth?), but "Airbender" doles out essential info in confusing narrative drips, with an inexplicable lack of competence - Aang's new friends refer to him by name, for instance, then a minute later ask him what his name is. This is almost astounding, given Shyamalan's deserved reputation for layered narrative and elaborate story construction.

It's not hard to guess what happened - a coherent origins story for the "Airbender" mythology should probably take about 150 minutes. But Paramount, at some point, didn't like what it saw, and probably started hacking.

What soured the studio on a longer version? Well, what's left is pretty inert - stiff writing, wooden performances. Shyamalan has talked at length about the imperative of casting actors who radiate emotional truth, but of late this has come off in his movies as earnestness, even among good actors (i.e., Mark Wahlberg in "The Happening.")

Young Ringer, first-time performer in a big lead role, is no natural, and does not yield the Haley Joel Osment magic. He's not as charming or readable, for instance, as Will Smith's son in "Karate Kid," and the emotional demands of registering the cultural holocaust in Aang's backstory are beyond him.

And he's apparently not Asian, which has infuriated many Asian fans of the Nickelodeon series, who see Aang (modeled around Tibetan cultural signifiers) as one of their own.

Other actors are strangely cast. "Daily Show" comedian Aasif Mandvi is a sneering villain, and genial slumdog millionaire Dev Patel a scar-faced rage-aholic.

The movie's redeeming feature might be its beauty, but you have to take off your 3-D glasses to fully appreciate it. The lenses blunt and mute the unique tones and colors that Shyamalan uses to create his lavish fantasy kingdoms.