The Last Airbender (2010) and Visual Cues for Heroes and Villains

In sports, the easiest way to distinguish between the teams and competitors would be through visuals. The numbers, names, and jerseys that the athletes wear make it easier to tell who each player is than trying to find their faces in the fray. A jersey Is extra important when it comes to team sports. As the action gets more hectic, a player must know who is on their team so they can avoid the people on the other team. For the audience, it helps to tell which direction the play of action is going, who is scoring, and where everyone is.

That idea of a jersey could be translated to movies. Whether a sports movie, an action movie, or a western, a uniform look can easily help distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. For an audience that may not be paying attention thanks to the ever increasing number of distractions, a visual cue for a hero and visual cue for a villain can make it easier to jump back into the story after a momentary loss of attention.

The most famous use of this idea in movies is the trope of white hats and black hats. The early days of silent films, specifically westerns, needed something to distinguish between good guys and bad guys. The Great Train Robbery was the first to come up with a colour code for the heroes and villains. There were three colours that came through in the black and white film stock. There were black, white, and grey. The black and white were the furthest from one another, so they became the two colours. The heroes would wear white, a typically clean colour. Their hands were clean of the atrocities that the villains would commit. The villains, on the other hand, wore black. The black was the dark colour, like the dark acts the villains committed. Since cowboys wore hats, the white and black of their hats became the symbol.

The idea of the white hat and the black hat is a nice simplification of how to tell the hero apart from the villain. However, there are many movies that feature multiple heroes and multiple villains. Sports movies, war movies, and action movies in general frequently feature groups of people butting heads with other groups of people. Having good character depth can allow the audience to understand motivations. The audience should be smart enough to understand motivations and goals and know who falls on what side of a conflict. Just in case, though, the white hat and black hat visual cues frequently come into use.

Sports movies were the easiest transition to the white hat and black hat concept. Sports teams already had jerseys to identify themselves to the audiences that watched them. It was only a natural progression to add the white hat imagery into the fray. Take the Mighty Ducks movies, for example. In each of the three films, the villainous hockey team wore black. The Hawks in The Mighty Ducks wore black against the Ducks’ green. D2: The Mighty Ducks featured an Icelandic team wearing black jerseys going up against a Ducks team that wore blue, and later white. Then there were the varsity players in D3: The Mighty Ducks who wore black against the Ducks’ two different white-based jerseys. It was white hat and black hat by way of hockey jerseys.

White hat and black hat concepts don’t always mean the literal black and white colour iconography. There might be different colours or symbols used to portray the heroes and villains. It might simply be that their morals are black and white. The good guys are good. The bad guys are bad. That is the black and white. Yet, there needed to be a visual cue to identify who was who. War movies frequently use that loose idea of white hat and black hat. Soldiers from different places wear different uniforms, which, admittedly, is true to life. The American soldiers, the British soldiers, the Soviet soldiers, the Japanese soldiers, and the German soldiers all wore different uniforms throughout World War II. In movies, the use of the uniforms can help identify who is fighting for who, and who is fighting against who.

Action movies in general, though, have taken to using visual identification to separate the heroes and villains of their stories. They will have the heroes look one way, while the villains look another way entirely. They might even look the same, except they’ll have a visual clue to put them on one side of the conflict. Some movies and television shows do it well. Others, like The Last Airbender, can be very problematic with how they use the visuals to separate good from bad.

The Last Airbender was one of the M. Night Shyamalan movies from that stretch of his career where people didn’t like his output. It was an adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender. In the world of the film, there were people who could bend the elements: air, water, earth, and fire. Aang (Noah Ringer) was an airbender who went missing 100 years earlier. He was found by Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone), who discovered he was the Avatar, a bender who would be able to bend every element. They had to help him become the Avatar while preventing the firebenders from conquering the world.

Each of the four different nations (Fire Nation, Water Nation, Air Nation, and Earth Nation) had distinct visuals for their characters. The Water Nation, particularly with Katara and Sokka, took their visual style from the Inuit people. The problematic element of using the Inuit imagery was that the actors portraying the characters were white. It made everything feel like cultural appropriation. The problem only got worse with the villains, the Fire Nation, who were all South Asian. Though, that’s not even entirely true. Their leader, Ozai, was played by Cliff Curtis, a Maori actor. Simplifying everything down, The Last Airbender turned the conflict into white people versus South Asian people, which wasn’t a fair representation of the animated series it was based on. It was all the more strange considering the director was a South Asian man.

Not all action movies based their visual differences on race. Most of them focused on costuming. Twister was a good example of this. The protagonists were frequently wearing clothes that were a little more colorful, both in terms of actual colour and in terms of personality. They weren’t worried about being a little rough around the edges. Everyone was unique, wearing whatever they wanted to wear. They were comfortable in their own clothing. This bled into their vehicles, as well. It was whatever would get the job done, and most of them looked like they were well worn. Then there were the villains, the rival storm chasers. Their clothing was clean cut, lacked personality, and felt more like a uniform than anything. Their vehicles were all sleek black and looked like they had just been washed and polished. It was a stark contrast between the two teams of storm chasers that let the audience know exactly who was on what team and how they went about their business.

Moving forward on the idea of cars separating the good guys from the bad guys, the early seasons of Hawaii Five-0 (the reboot) featured a lot of car iconography to make sure the audience knew who the good guys were. That may have continued into later seasons, but I fell off the show three or four years in. The good guys would always drive Chevrolet vehicles. The bad guys would not. This may have simply been a case of product placement, where Chevrolet made a deal with the show to feature their cars prominently. And to showcase them in a good light meant to have the good guys driving around in them. It would be bad marketing for the villains to ride around in the cars that are being sold. Audiences wouldn’t want to drive in the cars of the people they weren’t supposed to like.

The same could be said about the Transformers movies. The Michael Bay ones. Not necessarily the movie Bumblebee. When the Autobots landed on Earth, they took the form of Chevrolet vehicles, or vehicle lines associated with Chevrolet. Notably, the Autobot known as Bumblebee took on the form of a Chevrolet Camaro, leading to Chevrolet releasing a Bumblebee edition of the car. The Autobots made the Chevrolet vehicles look cool as the good guys tried to win the war against the Decepticons. The Decepticons, however, didn’t use Chevrolet cars. It was an easy way to separate the good guys from the bad guys, when they were in vehicle form, at least. It may have been meant to market the cars as Chevrolet good and everything else bad, but the unintended effect was to make the good/bad distinction of characters easier for the audience.

The white hat and black hat concept can come in many forms. It doesn’t always mean that the hero will be wearing a white hat and the villain will be wearing a black hat. When it comes to groups of heroes and villains, it simply means that there will be some sort of defining visual trait that will make it easy to figure out which characters fall on which side of the conflict. It could be colours. It could be logos. It could be the way they dress or what they drive. As long as the heroes are defined as one visual thing while the villains are defined as another. That’s how the white hat and black hat concept has evolved. And that’s not even bringing the whole hacking angle into things.

The use of visuals to separate the heroes from the villains has been an idea that has permeated through many films and many genres. Westerns featured the literal white hat and black hat cowboys during the silent, black-and-white era of film to differentiate the good and bad. Sports movies featured teams wearing different jerseys to allow audiences to understand who was on what team. War movies featured the real-life way that different countries had different military uniforms so that they wouldn’t shoot their own soldiers on the battlefield. Action movies picked up on this, as well, integrating the uniforms or clothing to signal where the characters stood in the conflict. They even used product placement to aid this visual direction. Chevy or not. Fire or water. Black or white. It’s all about showing the two sides visually and making it easier for the viewer.

And with that, I bring you to the notes:

• The Last Airbender was directed by M. Night Shyamalan, who also directed The Happening (week 185).
• Aasif Mandvi played a member of the Fire Nation in The Last Airbender. He was previously featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies in Mother’s Day (week 233) and Movie 43 (week 243).
• This was also the third appearance of Robert Lenzi, who was in The Happening (week 185) and Sex and the City 2 (week 370).
• Dee Bradley Baker returned to the Sunday “Bad” Movies this week after being in Furry Vengeance (week 162) and Star Wars: The Clone Wars (week 377).
• Six actors from The Happening (week 185) were also in The Last Airbender. They were Michael J. Kraycik, Roberto Lombardi, Jeffrey Mowery, Ken Myers, Jordan Romero, and M. Night Shyamalan.
• Three actors from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (week 310) showed up in The Last Airbender. They were Chris Brewster, Sam Ibram, and Patrick Phan.
• Ali Khan and Jerry Lobrow were both in The Last Airbender and Sex and the City 2 (week 370).
• Brian Johnson returned from The Devil Inside (week 13) to be in The Last Airbender.
• Doua Moua was in Tracers (week 133) as well as The Last Airbender.
• Finally, The Last Airbender featured Tamiko Brownlee from Officer Downe (week 242).
• Have you seen The Last Airbender? What did you think of it? Did it live up to the series it was based on? What do you think about the white hat, black hat concept? Let me know your thoughts in the comments. Or you can find me on Twitter.
• You can also head on over to Twitter or down to the comments if you have a movie you want to suggest for me to watch as part of this blog. I’m always looking out for movies I may not have heard of to include as part of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.
• Make sure to check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram, where I frequently post fun pictures videos and things that have to do with the movies that have been covered.
• This was week 399, which means that next week is the big 400. With that coming up, I decided to check out the first four films in one of the most definitive franchises of the 1980s. Why only the first four? The main star of the franchise up to that point left after the fourth film, so it seemed like as good a place as any to break things off… for now. I’ll be watching and writing about the first four Police Academy films. Why don’t you join me next week for that journey? See you then.