The Real "Avatar" (The Last Airbender)

I saw The Last Airbender this weekend with my 13 year old and his friends. If you don't know, the movie is based on the cartoon called Avatar : The Last Airbender. I call it the "real" Avatar because Avatar the blockbuster movie hardly reflects the meaning of the word. The word "Avatar" comes from the Sanskrit word for "descent," meaning a spirit (or "God"), descending to the material world as a human. You may think such a notion is preposterous, or you may have deep faith that some Avatar is your personal savior (like Jesus Christ or Krishna), but in either case, an Avatar, fictional or factual, is more closely related to the Last Airbender than the Marine in the virtual blue suit.

As you might expect, I enjoyed The Last Airbender more than Avatar. Avatar was three hours of over-the-top drama. The Last Airbender was far more subtle. Instead of yelling and screaming and in-your-face interaction, Aang, the main character's strongest imperative was telling an animal "Be nice."

Noah Ringer, who played Aang, was phenomenal. I was expecting to be disappointed, as most were by Hayden Christenson playing the adult Anakin Skywalker. Monks with power are very difficult to play, but Ringer did what great actors Ewan MacGregor and Liam Neeson could not pull off - maintain a constant state of grace and even temper while exercising power in difficult circumstances (Alec Guinness, the original Obi-Wan Kenobi, maintained grace, but his style was better suited for stage than film).

The theatergoers, including my triad of 13 year olds, did not like the movie. They picked on the things missing from the cartoon, like the villian's missing ponytail or the fact that Aang was pronounced more properly like a mantra than like it was in the cartoon (rhymed with "hang"). After comparing Aang to the Jedi, I was met with disbelief by the 13 year olds. "Aang is not a monk - he's a warrior!" That led to a 15 minute diatribe about the Bhagavad Gita's ("What? What do you mean we've never heard of the most widely read book ever?!") Arjuna the Archer, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Star Wars. I think I got enough into their minds that it will spark their interest when they come across it again sometime.