It’s fair to say that live-action adaptations of beloved animated films and shows haven’t had the best success rate. For every one successful adaptation like Alita: Battle Angel there are multiple extremely disappointing examples like 2017’s Ghost in the Shell, Netflix’s Death Note movie, and more recently, that same streamer’s live-action Cowboy Bebop series. Still, when Netflix debuted its excellent live-action adaptation of One Piece, there was a glimmer of hope that there would be a brighter future ahead for American remakes of cartoons. Then, everything changed when Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender attacked.
Simply put, Netflix’s take on Avatar: The Last Airbender is bad. At best, the show serves as a constant reminder of how amazing the original Nickelodeon cartoon was. At worst, it makes M. Night Shyamalan‘s 2010 The Last Airbender film feel like a mercy because at least that poor effort was only 2 hours long. Granted, there are some saving graces. Most of the cast is good, with relative newcomer Dallas Liu (PEN15) as Fire Prince Zuko, veteran character actor Ken Leung (Industry) as Commander Zhao, and the great Daniel Dae Kim (Lost) as Fire Lord Ozai being the prime standouts (yes, the show is very pro-Fire Nation, at least in making that the best part of this first season). Additionally, the bending visual effects look fantastic. But none of these pros are enough to bring balance to this world.
Avatar: The Last Airbender is set in a fantasy world where people can bend the four elements, but only the Avatar can master all four together. The Netflix original series opens with a sight that was only alluded to in the original — the moment the Fire Nation decided to start a war on the fellow lands. From the opening minutes, it becomes clear that this live-action remake aims to be both a dark and violent fantasy epic for the post-Game of Thrones crowd, while also trying to capture the silly and cartoony fun of the source material. However, this balancing act of sorts never fully clicks in the 8-episode season.
Our protagonist is not just any hero’s journey archetype, but Aang (Gordon Cormier), the current incarnation of the Avatar, a mighty warrior and spiritual leader who happens to be a 12-year-old kid whose mission is to stop a 100-year-old war and bring balance to a world on the brink of destruction. He is far more than an orphan, he is the last member of his entire culture. The titular last airbender. Netflix’s The Last Airbender tries to age up the story by bringing a sense of urgency and maturity to the stakes, constantly reminding us of Aang’s failure to stop the conflict before it began (he’s been trapped in ice for the past century), making implicit deaths graphically explicit, and showing us the psychological toll war has taken on this universe as a whole.
Granted, there are some interesting results from Netflix’s approach, with the season able to make explicit what the children’s cartoon couldn’t. The fear of war and genocide and years of occupation weigh heavily on the characters we meet along the way, particularly Aang’s companions — the waterbender Katara (Kiawentiio) and her brother Sokka (Ian Ousley) who was left to protect his village when all the men left for battle. The problem is that the show can’t fully commit to a singular tone. Just when it’s about to make a poignant observation about the cost of war, it reminds the audience that it is still based on a cartoon and introduces an insane wacko character that feels out of place in this otherwise more adult adaptation — I’m looking at you, Bumi (Utkarsh Ambudkar).
Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender tries to have it both ways, yet it never finds a way to compromise its opposing views of what this show should be or who its target audience even is. Of course, every adaptation has to make some changes, that is not inherently a bad thing. In fact, some of the changes in this Netflix series work wonderfully, like how the show expands the roles of Aang’s past lives, as well as Zuko’s quest to hunt the next Avatar and his exile from his homeland. Dallas Liu gives the standout performance of season one by far. He not only captures the essence of the source material (at times he even sounds exactly like voice actor Dante Basco) but also takes advantage of the live-action format to give Zuko nuanced expressions that communicate more than just a voice ever could and make the character his own.
Prince Zuko gains the most from the show’s writing, with an expanded look at his rivalry with the human weasel Commander Zhao (Ken Leung), as well as his relationships with his uncle Iroh (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee) and his father Ozai (Daniel Dae Kim). And yet, when it comes to condensing the 20-episode “Book One” of the original series into only 8 episodes, so much is lost. Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender suffers from the same issue as Disney+’s recent Percy Jackson adaptation in that the characters are too far ahead of the story, with so much of the meat of the source material getting cut that the plot developments come across as way too convenient.
In attempting to skip all the side missions and get straight to the point, but also wanting to include every single character and moment fans of the original like, Avatar: The Last Airbender‘s pacing varies wildly between nothing happening or too much happening in the span of an entire episode. Every character that matters to the story repeatedly converges in the same place at the same time by pure coincidence. As a result, this hurts the characters’ arcs and individual growth. Gordon Cormier’s Aang suffers the most from this, with the young air nomad spending less time being a kid struggling with his huge responsibility and more time simply listening to others as they monologue advice and lessons at him.
Likewise, the arcs for Sokka and Katara are heavily simplified, like you’re listening to someone describe what Avatar: The Last Airbender is about rather than watching the show itself. Even Zuko, despite some neat additions, gets his rougher edges sanded off — as if the writers were afraid to make him a proper antagonist. When the show’s original creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Koniertzko exited the project in 2020 due to creative differences and left Albert Kim (Fox’s Sleepy Hollow) as the sole showrunner, many fans were worried… with good reason. They are still credited as writing the teleplay for the pilot episode (the worst episode in the season), and the story for episode 6 (the best episode), though. Make what you will of that.
One of the biggest concerns after the Shyamalan movie was the action. Thankfully, the bending looks great in Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender, with the combination of real martial arts and VFX delivering a fluid and believable translation of the fantasy powers of the original. Sadly, that isn’t enough to make up for visually bland action scenes and overly dark cinematography — the bane of every Netflix genre show. While the costume design can often be quite meticulous, most of the wigs are as bad as those in Japanese live-action remakes of anime and manga, especially that of King Bumi (Utkarsh Ambudkar) and Northern Water Tribe Princess Yue (Amber Midthunder of Prey fame who does her best to make her character charismatic and memorable).
The big locations, like the Earth Kingdom city of Omashu, the capital of the Fire Nation, and the Northern Water Tribe, look steller through VFX. The same goes for creatures like Aang’s loyal flying sky bison Appa, his winged lemur Momo, and June (Arden Cho) the bounty hunter’s shirshu beast. However, most of the virtual Volume-like sets are painfully bland. This constant inconsistent quality sets Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender back at every turn, failing to both stand on its own and properly honor the original animated series. This feels like a show made by an algorithm catered to the kind of fans that hate filler and side stories in animation and hates when characters make jokes. It tries so hard to be more adult than the source material that it ends up playing much safer and less complex than the cartoon made for kids!
Ultimately, Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender is like a worse version of the in-universe “The Boy in the Iceberg” play from the ‘Ember Island Players’ episode of the original show.
Developed by Albert Kim.
Based on Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko.
Main Cast: Gordon Cormier, Dallas Liu, Kiawentiio, Ian Ousley, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, Elizabeth Yu, Daniel Dae Kim, Ken Leung, Maria Zhang, Lim Kay Siu, A Martinez, Amber Midthunder, Yvonne Chapman, Tamlyn Tomita, Casey Camp-Horinek, C.S. Lee, Danny Pudi, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Arden Cho, Momona Tamada, & Thalia Tran.
Music by Takeshi Furukawa.
Episode Count: 8.
Streaming Service: Netflix.