I friggin’ love Avatar: The Last Airbender, the classic three-season Nickelodeon cartoon. I watched it only by chance. I had found out one of my uncle’s was called on to create some of the prop stone weaponry for the M. Night live-action movie version. When I found that out, the movie wasn’t released yet, so I watched the cartoon instead, and as a 30-year-old man I was captivated. By the third season I was watching hugging my Appa stuffy.
It’s an amazing story in an amazing world. It is full of goofiness while dealing with very serious themes in a story with weighty stakes.
Now Netflix has brought it back with another stab at a live-action version. Version feels right as it’s sorta basically the same story, but with plenty of intentional changes.
It’s pretty good!
I really wanted to like it (who wouldn’t? ya weirdos), but I admit my brain really wanted to reject it for the first few episodes. It’s different in so many ways. A big one is that it moves a lot faster, and for the most part, that’s for the worse. There just isn’t time to let the characters simmer and for their relationships to feel grounded and make sense the way they do in the cartoon. If this is anyone’s first Avatar watching experience, I think this will fall flat for that reason. This is more for existing fans I’m afraid. Eventually I was able settle into the accelerated pace, especially as the plot marches forward.
The pace also means that so much dialog is like HELLO. IM GOING TO SAY OUT LOUD WHAT IS HAPPENING IN AND AROUND RIGHT NOW. Not a lot of idle chatter for flavor. One thing the cartoon was great at was being able to weave in and out of goofiness, seriousness, and flavor really quickly. I think that’s a virtue of the format, and just wouldn’t work in live action.
What was good about the live action is that some things can feel big in a good way. You could really feel those gnarly strained relationships. You can feel the beads of evil sweat drip off the Fire Nation baddies. You can feel the giant icy waves smash up against the bows of the giant Fire Nation ships. Aang soaring through the air feels as big and grand as it should. The stakes ultimately feel just as big, as they should.
The actors did great, the story adaptations were understandable and sometimes fun, the CGI and action stuff was way better than I thought it would be. It’s not a 10/10 perfect thing, but hey we got some more Avatar and I hope they do another season. This is still funny.
Still, if I had it my way, let’s just stay in cartoon land and keep expanding the universe like we did with Korra. Apparently there is all sorts of that stuff coming up, so GOOD.
We’re about halfway through and I’m on board with your review exactly. I was really hoping it would be paced out into more seasons, like a full-on game of thrones style show. I think that totally would have worked, but it seems like the “networks” have really pushed show creators to cram their complete stories into 1-2 seasons.