I’ll warn everybody right now, this is going to be an angry one. I’ve already gone into great detail about how much I love the show Avatar: The Last Airbender, so I won’t bore you with all that again. Instead, let’s talk about the man who’s responsible for the atrocity I’ll be looking at today: M. Night Shyamalan.

I actually kept my faith in Shyamalan longer than most. On paper, the guy’s got a great story: he was bitten by the filmmaking bug early in life, and as a kid he made several short films with his friends in lots of different genres. And after a few early professional works that didn’t get much attention, he hit the big time with The Sixth Sense, a film which still stands as an expertly crafted supernatural thriller, with some of the best use of foreshadowing I’ve ever seen.

Then came Unbreakable, which to me is his true masterpiece. It’s a fascinating real-world take on the superhero genre, and is also somehow the only one of his films whose big twist ending hasn’t reached Soylent Green levels of public awareness. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it; just try to forget the films that came after.

Because by that point, the ride was over, and every subsequent Shyamalan film received worse and worse reviews. I still held out hope, since those first two movies had impressed me so much. It wasn’t until The Happening that I went into one of Shyamalan’s films with real skepticism. The sheer egotism he demonstrated in Lady in the Water had finally broken me, and it’s probably not a coincidence that this was also when he stopped his endearing habit of including scenes from his childhood homemade movies as bonus features on his DVDs, along with introductions bemoaning how bad they were.

Which brings us to The Last Airbender. Early signs were promising: there were articles about how Shyamalan was introduced to the cartoon when his daughter wanted to dress up as Katara for Halloween, which led to it becoming appointment television for his whole family. We were assured that this film would be made by One Of Us, a person who understood what made the show work, and would do his best to translate it faithfully to the big screen.

That’s really what hurts the most about this movie: the sense of personal betrayal. Despite how low I’d seen Shyamalan sink, I still allowed myself to believe that we would get a respectful and worthy adaptation of a great show. That didn’t last long, as reports from the set only grew worse. Finally, I accepted the inevitable, and reserved the duty of writing this very recap several months before the film was released. This has been a long time coming, and I can already feel a huge weight lifting off me.

I should also mention that the film was hastily converted to 3D, because nothing makes a movie better than occasionally feeling like you’re getting poked in the eye. I refuse to see any 3D movies on principle, but I’ve heard that the conversion job done on Last Airbender was a particularly rushed and sloppy one. I wish I could say I’m surprised.

One more thing before I get started: I’m going to try my absolute best not to sound like a whiny fanboy, only complaining because something isn’t exactly the same as the source material. If I do complain about any changes, it’ll be because they’re significantly worse than what the show did perfectly well. And with all that out of the way, let’s dive into the worst M. Night Shyamalan movie yet. And damn, is that saying something.

Fittingly enough, the film starts with what is easily its best touch, just so the movie can be entirely downhill. Directors love to mess around with studio logos these days, and this is one of the cleverest I’ve seen, incorporating all four elements across the three logos. Yeah, raise my hopes a little bit more, why don’t you?

After a live-action recreation of the show’s opening credits, which nicely shows off the overly complicated bending maneuvers we’ll soon be getting to know better, there’s a scrolling text prologue about bending and the Avatar. Now that’s original. And it’s read aloud to us by Katara (Nicola Peltz), but to be honest, I can’t blame Shyamalan too much for assuming this film’s target audience can’t read.

I won’t go into detail here about the whole setup for the story—just check out my recaps of the show for all the backstory you need.

But in this narration, Katara pronounces the word “avatar” as “ah-vatar”. And while this film will feature quite a few other weird mispronunciations, this is one I can’t pin on Shyamalan. Instead, it can be chalked up to James Cameron being a gigantic asshole.

This film was in production at the same time that Cameron was finishing up Avatar, and he accused Paramount of trying to steal his business and threatened to sue. Never mind that the cartoon had beaten him to the punch by a good five years, and the word isn’t exactly new. Paramount would have undoubtedly won the lawsuit, but I’m sure they figured it wasn’t worth it just to prove a point (and I’d like to think they were already eager to wash their hands of this movie, anyway).

Hence, the word “avatar” is pronounced in a weird way (though much like the Saruman/Aruman thing in Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings, half the time it’s pronounced correctly anyway), and the word also doesn’t appear in the film’s title. And I couldn’t be happier that the movie is distanced that much more from the show.

And we’re still not done, as next is a title reading “Book One: Water”. And it’ll be the only book, if there’s any justice in the world.

Fade to the South Pole. Or at least, the South Pole as portrayed by perhaps the most obvious soundstage of the last 20 years. The background is clearly a matte painting, the characters are walking across a completely even surface, and they don’t even have visible breath.

And the effects failure doesn’t end there, because Katara pulls a ball of water from the ocean, which constantly drips from the bottom without getting any smaller, and then she supposedly dumps it on her brother Sokka, but he’s completely dry once he stands up in surprise.

And Sokka is played by Jackson Rathbone, best known as Jasper (or “Harpo” if you’re a RiffTrax fan) from the Twilight series. Oh sorry, he’s not Sokka in this film, but “Soak-a”.

See, Shyamalan decided to change the pronunciations of several characters’ names, which from what I’ve gathered has something to do with his frustration as a kid that none of his classmates were able to correctly pronounce his first name (Manoj). So... he’s taking out his revenge on a few fictional characters? You know, I’m starting to get the feeling that M’s not very smart.

Plus, “Soak-a”? I don’t need your charity, sir. I’m perfectly capable of coming up with lame puns on my own.

But wait, it gets worse! The film garnered quite a bit of heat for its racist casting (something I’ll get into soon enough), but what kind of got lost in the shuffle is that the movie is incredibly sexist as well. And you can’t blame that on casting directors, studio execs, or anyone but Shyamalan himself; it’s all right there in his screenplay.

In the show, Katara is a strong female character and role model, while still being flawed enough that it doesn’t become annoying. She’s seen early on refusing to put up with the sexist crap of her culture that Sokka spews at her, and she carries on in that vein for the rest of the series. But here, after splashing Sokka, she actually cowers before him and repeatedly apologizes as Sokka steps towards her, with blocking that strongly suggests he’s about to choke a bitch.

This gets even weirder when you consider that it was his own daughter’s admiration of Katara that piqued Shyamalan’s interest in the show in the first place; I imagine there were some awkward dinners in that house after she saw what her father had done to the character.