So we were reading Ebert's review of The Last Airbender, about how it's unrelenting bad, like, all aspects of it are bad, cinematographically speaking, and there's a line in the review about "The laws of chance suggest something should have gone right. Not here." It made me start wondering if someone had sabotaged the thing. And I was thinking, maybe the editor. Because you can sabotage a fucking lot in post. You can make the plot meanderingly arcless and awful with editing. You can make the actors look shitty by choosing mediocre to awful takes. You can fuck the effects. You can fuck the 3D. You can fuck a lot as the editor.

So we imdb'd and the editor of The Last Airbender is... the editor who did Spaceballs, Species, The Abyss, Titanic ETA: WHICH WON THE ACADEMY AWARD FOR EDITING /ETA, Terminator 2, King Arthur, and before he was master editor he got started through visual effects work, on Empire Strikes Back, on Raiders of the Lost Ark, and ET (which I don't know if you remember this, but those effects were awesome shit at the time).

This guy knows how to edit and knows how to work with special effect heavy stuff. So yeah. This is my theory. The Last Airbender was deliberately sabotaged by its editor, Conrad Buff. Possibly by just by letting M. Night Shyamalan have whatever he asked for.