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Contrast this with the more timid closed-off world of Shyamalan's Airbender. We know there's more to the world, because the characters keep telling us so, not because we feel it in any way. Everything looks artificial, composed, even the lived in quality seems calculated, not really lived in. It's beautiful set and costume design, but doesn't seem to be much more than just that. The world never feels like it extends beyond the boundaries of the story, never seems more complex than the broad strokes the constant expositional dialogue tells us.

There's a very unfortunate line one character lobs at Dev Patel's Prince Zuko, claiming that he's like a boy playing dress up in his uniform, paraphrased of course. Problem is, all of the characters feel like this, none of them seem a part of anything greater than the events we see on the screen. The entire problem with the film is summed up in this one line.

Of course, if Patel and his fellow actors had seemed at all like they were actually living in this world, and not just pretending to, it would have gone a long way towards selling the concept to the audience. Again, Lucas shows Shyamalan how it's done. Not one known for being an actor's director, Lucas nevertheless gets it right in Star Wars with both Alec Guinness and Harrison Ford. Shyamalan's actors either take themselves too seriously, or the mythology not seriously enough. Patel and the other younger actors invest each line with deadly gravity, while the older actors seem bemused with the foolishness that they're portraying.

One could see such a fantasy as foolish. It's not real, after all. The trick is to make it real, without losing one's sense of humor. Guinness and Ford strike the balance of taking the mythology seriously, just not themselves too seriously. This, I believe, is the key to this kind of acting. Look at all of the most successful performers in modern mythologies - Ian McKellan, Terry O'Quinn, Laurence Fishburne, Edward James Olmos, pretty much the entire Harry Potter cast - these actors believe in the rules of the universe, but know that all universes are filled with irony. Rather than making the mythology bear the brunt of this irony, they invest their characters with it.

Before I saw the movie, I figured folks were just giving Shyamalan a hard time again. I assumed that, though not a huge money maker, its $130 million domestic plus tons more overseas grosses would make it successful enough to keep Shyamalan on board for any possible sequels. Now that I've seen what can only be considered a travesty to the Airbender show's fans, I have to say, if this franchise should continue on the big screen, they'll have to hand the directorial reigns off to someone else. Making a fantastical mythology palatable to real world audiences is a specialized skill, a skill I don't think Shyamalan posseses. I'm not a fan of mixing up directors for sequels. In general, I find a consistent voice is necessary to make a continued franchise work. In this case, we need a voice who can speak the language, because M Night sure can't. There's nowhere to go but up.

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