Two parts “Captain Planet,” one part “Star Wars.” Mix together in a large bowl of rock-paper-scissors. Replace ethnic characters with white Americans.  Cast “The Daily Show” comedian as evil fire lord.  Bake for 103 minutes.

If you’re interested in seeing M. Night Shyamalan’s cartoonish adaptation of  Nickelodeon’s hugely popular animated television series, save yourself ten bucks and ask a friend who has seen it to tell you the whole story from beginning to end.  Thanks to the relentless, cumbersome exposition in “The Last Airbender” the effect will be about the same.

The most basic, elementary rule in all of filmmaking is that old cliché, “show, don’t tell.”  Shyamalan’s film happily ignores this and features mostly criminally underdeveloped characters telling — telling us what they’ve done, what they plan to do, what they’re doing right now, why things are the way they are, why they’re sad about the way things are, what they think other people will do, why they think they’ll do those things and how they feel about that.  The film’s script is easily the worst Shyamalan has ever written; strange, considering it is his only adaptation, and one with more than 24 hours of widely acclaimed source material from which to draw.

The film’s cardboard performances handicap an already sorry narrative construct.  Granted, our primary protagonists are children, an acting demographic notorious for bad performances, but Shyamalan has established himself as particularly adept at coaxing believability from child performers (see “The Sixth Sense” and “Signs”).  A number of atrociously miscast roles may factor prominently into the uniformly unwatchable dialogue scenes.

Sloppy editing and an utter disregard for continuity further plague this shambled mess of fantastical nonsense and incoherent drivel.  Unrelated scenes are stitched together and the pacing is choppy and inconsistent to the point where there’s hardly a real cohesive sequence in the entire movie.

Still, “The Last Airbender” doesn’t deserve all the hate it has received.  It is a bad movie.  But the growing consensus is that it is the worst movie of the year.  Not even close.  The huge amounts of infectious, irrational hostility directed at this movie is thanks to a venomous cocktail of reactionary hyperbole from loyalists of the TV show, a growing Shyamalan backlash and carryover from the racebending controversy, which may be a valid social criticism but doesn’t directly factor into the film’s artistic merits as a piece of storytelling.

Despite its significant flaws, “Airbender” has a few things going for it.  ILM (Industrial Light & Magic), the famed visual effects company owned by Lucasfilm, has done a terrific job rendering the film’s frequent visual effects.  The various instances of element “bending” look fantastic and the creature design and implementation are excellent.  And the message, if there is one to be found amidst the rubble, is life affirming, hopeful and unifying.  Unfortunately, the filmmaking isn’t strong enough to support the few positives this embattled project has to offer.