Shyamalan Goes On Last Airbender

The kid who gets cast in the lead of The Last Airbender better like being bald.

Variety brings word that Paramount has teamed up with Nickelodeon to release the live action version of the kids’ network’s hit show, Avatar: The Last Airbender. M. Night Shyamalan is directing from his own script.

The film is set to be released on July 2, 2010. It will drop the Avatar from its title, in deference to James Cameron’s 3D epic Avatar, which he has been filming for approximately 108 years, but is supposed to open on December 18, 2009.

The series takes place in a world that is divided into four nations: the Water Tribes, the Earth Kingdom, the Air Nomads, and the Fire Nation. Each nation has an order of people who can manipulate, or “bend,” that nation’s element. One special person each generation, the Avatar, has the ability to master all the elements. There’s only one Avatar at a time and when he dies his soul is reborn into the next tribe in the sequence (the Avatar cycle mirrors the seasons: winter is water, spring is earth, summer is fire, and autumn is air). The Avatar that the show is about is an Air Bender, who had been trapped in ice for 100 years. While people were searching for him, they destroyed all the other Airbenders. Hence the “Last” in the title. The Avatar’s job is to try to maintain peace between all the nations.

The creators of the series were influenced by Japanese anime filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki. Shyamalan says he is as well, calling Miyazaki “one of the greatest storytellers in the world. He says, “In The Last Airbender, I see an opportunity to make a live-action version of a Miyazaki film.”

I asked a friend who’s a big fan of the show what she thought about this, and she said, “M. Night Shyamalan? Shouldn’t they have gotten…someone else? Maybe a martial arts person? Is there going to be some stupid ‘twist’?”

I had also wondered whether we will get one of those signature not as clever as he thinks Shyamalan twists at the end. Possibilities include:

a) It’s all taking place in the head of a kid who’s in a mental hospital.

b) The whole thing  is live action, but has an anime ending where we see it’s a story being told to some kids.

c) Everyone is really dead.

d) The bad guys are really you and I.

e) Wait, we can ALL manipulate all the elements. I guess you’re not so special after all, bald Avatar kid.

f) Some elements are compounds! (thanks to a tipster for that suggestion)