Avatar: The Last Airbender (2024)— A Live Action With the Weight of the World on Its Shoulders
Netflix’s courageous attempt at bringing the beloved 2000s cartoon to life
The world of live-action Avatar was off to a rocky start. 2010’s The Last Airbender is one that most purists prefer to forget about. Despite the critical lambasting M. Night Shyamalan’s attempt at the story has received, though, it still deserves some credit. It can’t be said that the task before him was easy. The cartoon isn’t one that lends itself to real-world depiction.
Faithfully reimagining the work of Nickelodeon’s animators with a team of in-person actors is bound to look a little silly. In stories that depend so heavily on CGI, actors face a significant uphill battle in believably representing their characters. The Avatar universe is most conducive to animation. Not every story translates into a physical retelling without grappling with certain growing pains. Perhaps the visionary director just bit off more than he could chew.
One of the Shyamalan movie’s great shortcomings is in striving to condense hours’ worth of plot into a single film, all the while trying to recreate the specific scenes that made the precursor show great. The result is something nearly all critics can agree feels confused, stilted, and overly ambitious. To properly realize a land like Aang’s would demand a full season’s duration.
The new Netflix series attempt at the Avatar saga has been off to a promising start. Loyalists are likely to take issue with some of the modifications made in transitioning between the Nickelodeon show and this latest live-action rendition. But some of the changes made are wise ones. While for many fans, to alter the story of the original is tantamount to heresy, I think it finds some useful ways of distinguishing itself from both the progenitor cartoon and Shyamalan’s stab at revivifying it.
Change isn’t inherently bad. For all of its greatness, the Nickelodeon cartoon still leaves room for improvement. Early on, the show appears to suffer from a mild identity crisis. While on one hand, it wants to explore weighty subject matter, it’s ultimately restrained by the bounds of its TV-Y7 rating. Genocide is implicit and its aftermath is palpable, yet never depicted on screen. It has a hard time finding a proper balance between the cartoonish quirks of its Nickelodeon adjacents and the deeper storytelling of Lord of the Rings-like worlds. By its later seasons, though, it finds more effective ways of toeing that delicate line.
While the Netflix adaptation doesn’t rise to the heights of blood-squelching brutality innate to many of its modern cinematic peers, it does warrant a certain parental advisory that most wouldn’t afford to its source material. But for the post-GTA generation, it’s unlikely to be anything too egregious for most younger viewers to stomach.
The decision to show death and violence on-screen within this Netflix adaptation drives home a sense of stakes absent from the original. Beginning the story with the atrocities of 100 years prior rather than Aang’s present-day world establishes a gravity to the plot unfolding from the very onset. But in the process, it sacrifices the sense of ambiguity that colored the precursor’s canon.
While some have been critical of the casting, it’s difficult to deny that each member has strenuous shoes to fill. Like the characters they depict, they’ve got a world of responsibility on their shoulders. It’s an enormous challenge that falls on them in humanizing the hallowed cartoon.
Though the cast members don’t have an entire realm to save from calamity, they bear the weight of years and years of on-and-off speculation about whether this live-action would rise to the heights of its foundations or stumble like Shyamalan’s remake. With Avatar creators Michael Dante Dimartino and Bryan Konietzko parting ways from the Netflix creative team early on in development, many viewers lost hope before a single scene had even been shot.
With the renaissance of Avatar hysteria that has swept the globe since its streaming premiere in 2020, portraying these characters in a way that pleases fans of the first incarnation and critics of the Shyamalan catastrophe is no simple feat.
There’s a level of hyperbole that it takes to revive the personalities embedded in the American anime that is Avatar: The Last Airbender. To approach the acting assignments like the cast would any other would likely be a mistake. It would defy the tone of its cartoon roots for it to be too self-serious. Comic exaggeration is part of the source material’s blood. So a little theatricality in this live-action followup feels largely appropriate.
The liberties taken have a way of keeping faithful fans on their toes rather than repackaging the old story in a shiny new box. There’s not always a clear sense of what’s coming next even for those who know the story like the tattoos on Aang’s hand. Because it subverts expectations, it keeps the story feeling like its own creation rather than a mere rehash.
But not every change made is one that’s likely to please. So many of the characters and storylines are beloved enough that every alteration will be greeted as blasphemy for those nitpicky enough. However, the decision of the creators for the characters to linger longer in specific settings has a way of taming the narrative.
Staying in Omashu for enough time to explore its culture instead of allowing the protagonists to fly episodically around the planet is a mature approach that suits this live-action take well. It allows the city to feel like a lived-in place with styles and customs rather than a pitstop on a whimsical tour of the world.
There’s no denying that the show deserves credit for the ways in which it’s diverged from its foundational lore. Many scenes remain faithful enough to make any Avatar enthusiast smile. But some of the more flagrant liberties taken with the plot were enough to make even this fan wonder.
In almost every case, I can forgive the changes made in bringing this story to life. From the costume, sound, and set design, to the casting and special effects, Netflix did a commendable job. What I have the most difficult time forgiving, though, are the faults in the writing. In its best moments, this adaptation manages to recapture much of what makes the ancestral show great, but in its worst, it’s nearly enough to wince.
The Sokka character is particularly well embodied by Ian Ousley, while Gordon Cormier, Kiawentiio Tarbell, and Dallas James Liu each struggle to fully embody what made their respective Aang, Katara, and Zuko great. Cormier does capture much of the child-like verve of the original Aang, yet comes across feeling just a little too childish to fully sell his character. But he’s still future-proof enough to finish his plot arc before he’s finished puberty.
Likely no performance is a greater disappointment than Tarbell’s Katara. Any Devotee to the Nickelodeon classic is unlikely to find much satisfaction in her effort to personify the maternal warmth of her cartoon predecessor.
Paul Sun-Hyung Lee and Ken Leung do effective jobs portraying Uncle Iroh and Commander Zhou, but where every performance fails to reach full potential is in the show’s lackluster writing. In the most objectionable scenes, almost every line comes across as cheesy, sentimental, and devoid of depth. Sometimes the actors appear to earnestly struggle buying the lines they’re given.
While there’s no denying that recapturing everything that made the 2000s show great was an ambitious goal, this attempt labors to fully reach fans’ most lofty visions. It soars above its cinematic predecessor in nearly every regard, but still neglects to do complete justice to a story that so many consider an all-time great.
Avatar: The Last Airbender is memorable not because it’s perfect; the 2000s TV show isn’t without its flaws. The writing has its weaknesses. So much of its appeal is in the beauty and originality of its world. There’s a magnetic quality to the environments it creates and a powerful symmetry and circularity to all of its symbolism. It’s no easy story to do justice to, and Netflix’s attempt deserves its share of commendations for creating what it did.
I hope the story is given a full three seasons to properly unfurl. With any luck, the show will find the success it’s earned and the remaining seasons will find a better board of writers to carry it to the vistas of its source material. It’s clear that this adaptation shows the promise of being much more, but it’s going to need to rise to the occasion and meet that potential if it wants to hold the enduring spots in hearts it’s aiming for.