Summary
It’s certainly flawed, but Netflix’s live-action take on Avatar: The Last Airbender is a valiant attempt to repackage one of the most beloved fantasy stories ever for a new audience.
For a live-action remake that had a lot of work to do, a ginormous fanbase to please, and countless ways in which it could go wrong, Season 1 of Avatar: The Last Airbender is mostly a success. This is more of a compliment than it sounds.
Adapting acclaimed animated shows into live-action is a big risk, for reasons both obvious and not. They cost a fortune. The fanbase tends to be possessive. And the results are often garbage. But it’s easy to see why streaming giants such as Netflix keep taking that risk since the upside is limitless. The source material can sustain multiple seasons, the existing audience will watch it regardless, and there’s a whole mainstream market who probably missed it the first time. As sad as it is, plenty of adults won’t watch an animated Nickelodeon show simply because it’s an animated Nickelodeon show.
But Avatar: The Last Airbender is not your average animated series – it’s the animated series, one of the most popular and beloved ever made. It carries a pedigree similar to that of One Piece, which was also recently adapted by Netflix with surprising success. It’s a fantasy adventure with the same scale, energy, and humanity as any of your favourites, making a live-action re-do riskier than ever, but also more worth it than usual.
The world of Avatar is defined by four elements – earth, air, fire, and water – around which kingdoms have developed and wars have been fought. Warriors of each element can manipulate it in a process known as “bending”, but while the kingdoms are rivalrous, they’re kept in a state of uneasy peace by the Avatar, a semi-celestial hero figure who can control all four elements at once.
At the start of Season 1, this status quo is upended when the villainous Fire Nation indulges in a brutal conquest before the latest Avatar – when the previous one dies, their spirit is reborn in another candidate, which takes a bit of time – emerges. They lay waste to the Airbenders, from whose ranks the next Avatar will be plucked, wiping out everyone except 12-year-old Aang (Gordon Cormier), a prodigious bender who ends up entombed in a glacier for 100 years.
By the time Aang is defrosted, the Fire Nation has conquered most of the world, and the kingdoms have all become paranoid and isolationist. Teaming up with 14-year-old Waterbender Katara (Kiawentiio) and her older brother Sokka (Ian Ousley), not to mention his sky bison Appa, Aang sets out to live up to the title of Avatar, complete his training, and liberate the world from fiery tyranny.
If this all sounds familiar, that’s because in its broad strokes, it’s the plot of every fantasy hero’s journey ever embarked upon. But don’t worry about that, since Avatar is an extremely distinguished variety of the formula, full of engaging characters, cool ideas, large-scale action, and a surprisingly dense world full of politics, history, and mythology.
You’d be forgiven for not realizing this, though, since the first episode of the Netflix show is a real mess, leaden with exposition and ropey-looking VFX, moving at such a rapid clip that it’s a genuinely disorienting introduction to the characters and the world. Some of these issues undeniably persist throughout all eight episodes, but not to the same extent. Once it settles down, Avatar: The Last Airbender is a much better show than early impressions suggest.
Through a medley of intriguing locations, from a frigid Arctic to a city built into a mountain to a razed forest full of spirits, the young characters get embroiled in one adventure after the next, learning plenty about themselves in the process. The young cast is imperfect, but always game, and the core group is pleasingly fleshed out as things go. Plenty of time is even spared for so-called villains like Zuko (Dallas Liu), a prince of the Fire Nation with daddy issues, and his uncle Iroh (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee), a wise general with a fearsome reputation. Almost everyone here is worth spending some time with, and reveal layers to their characters that are fun to peel off as we go.
In the meantime, well-choreographed action sequences keep the excitement high, with the elemental bending adding a slightly unique quality to the fisticuffs and excusing all manner of novel ideas. Some areas of the show don’t always look great and sometimes don’t even look finished, but the bending is reliably awesome to behold.
A flawed but worthwhile adaptation
I’m certain there will be long-time fans of the franchise who hate Avatar: The Last Airbender. It’s an unavoidable consequence of adapting such a beloved property. But the personable sparkle of the characters and the rich imagination of the world are preserved here, keeping that same fundamental appeal intact. Sure, it’s not as colorful, not as nuanced, and certainly not as well-paced, but the underlying essence of friends taking on the world is there. And it works.
For its boyish charms and impressive action, Avatar is well worth a look for everyone, even the naysayers. It isn’t perfect, and the first few episodes aren’t the best indicator of how good it’ll get down the line when the stakes are raised and you’ve come to care about the cast. But even though mileage will vary, it’s hard to fault Netflix’s efforts in bringing this story to a new audience, and even harder to imagine a future in which we don’t get more Avatar sooner rather than later.
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