That I might not have a reason to see this particular film is right, considering it bombed among critics and is in free fall at the box office. But I can’t help being intrigued by such a request from a student. So I wrote him back and said, Sure. I hadn’t yet put together what I later realized while watching the closing credits – the source of his interest in the film was from being part of the special effects team on it.

I don’t know much about what it’s like to work on the special effects of a movie. But I would guess that CGI technicians are just as capable of pouring their heart and soul into their work as the creative principles on a project. Everyone wants to feel proud of what they’ve done. So when the resulting film bombs, as this one seems to be doing, it is just as disappointing for them and prompts a need to find out how and where things could have gone so terribly wrong.

So I’ll start my comments by saying – Thank you! – to the special effects team since the film’s rich visual spectacle was definitely its redeeming feature. And I’m not just saying that. I was struck from the outset at the seamless integration of the live-action “realism” and the animated fantasy. In fact, I breathed a sigh of relief in the first scene that this film wasn’t going to strain my ability to enter its world in the same way that a film like, say, Where the Wild Things Are did.

Sadly, though, that wonderful work was not enough to save the film from being impaled on a post by critics and quickly abandoned by audiences.

Let me first address my student’s question about the definition of story. Certainly, story can be considered separately from the writing of a film. This is why “Story” and “Screenplay” are often credited separately. Someone came up with a great idea but their execution didn’t fully do it justice, so another writer was brought in to finesse the screenplay. In fact, this is what keeps me in business as a story consultant. I see countless drafts from clients that are very good or great story ideas but the characters aren’t quite there, the dialogue is over burdened and the dramatic momentum is only lurching along. So my job is to help them bring the writing of the screenplay up to the quality of that great idea they walked in with.

And, boy, do I wish I could have gotten my hands on this draft of The Last Airbender. I, too, liked the story, to the degree that I could discern it through all the distracting mess it was surrounded with. But I’m going to skip over talking about bad dialogue and chaotic plot threads and instead focus on the larger picture.

My initial comment to this writer/director would have been that his screenplay suffers from a confusion of main characters. Is it Katara’s story or Aang’s story? Not to mention what about ole Prince Zuko, who’s supposed to be the bad guy. For all three, we are given plenty of reason to become sympathetically attached. Katara has an unusual gift that she doesn’t know how to use effectively while her tribe has a desperate need for her to have mastery of it due to their dire circumstance. Aang pops out of an iceberg after 100 years and so is considerably behind the times, struggling to catch up, and, we eventually learn, has some unresolved conflicts to work out that got him stuck there in the first place. And poor old Zuko is utterly unloved and unappreciated by his father, having been given the near impossible task of hunting down, capturing and bringing home “the Avatar” in order to regain his father’s esteem. But more on Zuko later.

First the confusion between Aang, who is, actually, the last airbender of the title, and Katara, who is, actually, put front and center at the beginning. Katara has the misunderstood gifts, she is the motherless child with the absent father, she, along with her brother, has been left with the responsibility of protecting her tribe, which has been reduced by war to a few children and old people. While her character is a stark embodiment of vulnerability, uncertainty and undue burden, Aang, on the other hand, is a manchild stuck in an iceberg who appears to emerge with confidence, sureness and a certain amount of power.

Yet, it turns out that, of the two, Aang has the far more serious underlying problem. The way he got stuck in that iceberg in the first place is that when, some hundred years ago, he learned he was the Avatar, he rebelled and ran away. In effect, he rejected his destiny. And, as we all know, your destiny is your destiny, especially in drama. He’s gonna have to pony up to it at some point. And, indeed, he does, somehow, I’m not sure how, come around in the end, at least as it is reported to us, to have resolved his inner conflict and accepted his role. But we see very little of that happening actively in front of us as the story transpires.

Do you see how we have started with one story here and ended with another? Here’s my glib summary of what I saw: This is the story of a young water tribe girl, left alone by her parents but having the gift of a water-bender, who must master her water bending abilities to adequately protect and defend her tiny water tribe against the evil fire nation. She finds a mystical seeming boy in an iceberg and they launch a journey together to find a teacher of water bending. Meanwhile, the fire nation is after him because they know he is The Avatar, which means he has the capability to master bending in all four elements. He has many near scrapes with the fire nation until he reaches the large powerful water tribe. There, he starts to learn water bending until the fire nation arrives and attacks the water fortress. Somehow, in the course of the battle, the boy gets over his problems with being the Avatar just in the knick of time to make his show of force that has the power to scare away the fire nation.

Katara’s problem is presented at the beginning as the need to master her water bending skills to protect her village. But by the end, this goal has been almost completely sidelined. At first, it was simply matched by Aang’s need to learn water bending along with her so that he can become the Avatar, and help her defend her village. But, ultimately, it is completely overshadowed by waiting for Aang to get his act together, which means deciding that he’s willing to be the Avatar, which then means accepting his grief and anger and then learning how to show force without hurting others. Only problem is that most of this is simply reported to us through dialogue. I don’t recall ever seeing any signs of undue grief or anger in him and, come to think of it, not even a whole lot of ambivalence about his lot in life.

Now, about Zuko. The film’s mistake here, and an easily fixable one, was in revealing to the audience too early his problems with his father. Remember, in How to Train Your Dragon, how the dragons were very scary, formidable adversaries until almost at the end when we learned they were functioning under the extreme duress of having to feed a much, much bigger, scarier monster? A nice clean dramatic tension was maintained throughout that then had a satisfying pay off when we were shown their underlying predicament. In contrast, The Last Airbender’s dramatic tension was seriously undermined by revealing Zuko’s burdens while we were still supposed to be fearing him.

In fact, I found myself at moments caught between, on the one hand, wanting Aang and Katara to escape Zuko’s pursuits and, on the other, wanting Zuko to succeed at capturing Aang so that he could be loved again by his father. The dissonance of that latter impulse with the overall narrative drive kept causing me to pop out of my immersion in the story, having to stop and think, “Wait! I don’t want that to happen! I’m rooting for Aang. I’m supposed to be fearing Zuko.” In a different sort of drama, this popping-out-of-the-story-to-think could be considered a Brechtian alienation effect. But I don’t think this film’s intention was to make a radical socialist statement. On the contrary, my popping-out-to-think in this film was actually undermining the writer/director’s intentions to build a tension-filled, action/adventure story.

Here’s my idea for how to fix this story: Since Aang’s problem seems to be one of identity – Do I have to be an Avatar? Or can I just be a regular boy like all the other boys? – I would give him a “Bourne Identity” opening. He pops out of the iceberg with no idea who he is. Kind of a cosmic comeuppance. You want to be a nobody rather than fulfilling your Avatar destiny? Well, we’ll make you a real nobody, no identity at all, and you can see how that feels. This puts him in an even more disempowered position than the gifted, motherless, fatherless Katari left with only her brother to defend her beleaguered village. The disempowerment of having no identity will definitely take the trump card in the game of creating sympathetic character, getting us firmly on board with him from the beginning.

Whereas Bourne has a chip buried under his skin to give him his first clue, Aang has a barely decipherable tattoo on his forehead. Perfect. The grandmother can make out just enough to get him started on his quest. But nobody has any clue that he might be the Avatar. Then, like Bourne, he gradually discovers skills and knowledge in himself that he has no idea how he got. He sees that his powers have the potential to help Katari reach the larger water tribe to learn water bending. So they set out for that purpose.

Meanwhile, one of his newly discovered skills involves sending a light beam into the sky, which gets the attention of the Fire Nation and starts their hunting and harassing of him. Now, not only does he not know who he is, but he sees that someone else does know and it is threatening enough to them to want to do him harm.

So we meet Zuko appearing to be working in collaboration with his father to capture Aang (the Avatar), willingly doing his father’s bidding, being the good warrior. The two together creates much greater dramatic tension (because its scarier) than having them working at odds with one another.

At a certain point, probably around the middle, Aang has some kind of revelation (a memory, an oracle, a message on a scroll) about having been a novice monk and being given the test in which he picked out the four objects, proving he is the reincarnation of the Avatar. So, whereas he spent the first half of the story trying to find out who he is, he spends the second half not wanting to believe its true, or somehow resisting. Yet the Fire Nation is bearing down on him (and everyone else).

This is when we begin to see what has been at stake for Zuko all along – it’s not that Zuko shares his father’s values of waging war and killing spirits. It’s that Zuko knows that his father has little faith in his warrior abilities and desperately needs to prove him wrong in order to gain his love. This could pay off either with a high-tension moment when it appears Zuko has succeeded but then must be confronted with the fact that he still doesn’t have his father’s love (because his father is incapable of love), or with Zuko failing and having to punish himself in anticipation of his father’s punishment, which would speak volumes about Zuko’s internal state in relation to his father.

Then the whole thing culminates with Aang being backed up against a wall (metaphorically speaking) to the point that he has no choice. That’s when he has to accept his destiny in order to call upon the forces necessary to propel back the assaulting fire people and begin to restore balance in the world.

The point here being that even a main character who is a half-god needs to have some human challenge, problem, quirk, quandary or other such underlying issue in order to be interesting and have somewhere to go in the course of the story. Aang is introduced to us as being very assured and god-like, as if he has no real problems to overcome. Then we are told that he had a very un-god-like reaction when he learned he was destined for great things. So there is an interesting human problem (that’s what I like about the story), but it’s not presented to us through human behavior and, therefore, gets kind of lost in all the dazzling spectacle.

If I were to sum up in a few words what I think is wrong with the film overall, I would say: Way too much information, way too early in the story, and all coming out at us through reportage in dialogue rather than being communicated through the action.

But I will say this for The Last Airbender: It was better than The Happening.