From the very start, the live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender series has a lot of flaws: The acting is wooden, the writing is even more wooden, the costumes are garish, the score drones on annoyingly, and it all looks like it was filmed through a light glaze of mud. But worst of all, the self-serious, hourlong premiere of the new series is simply dull. It’s hard not to zone out somewhere along the way, and harder still to muster the enthusiasm to continue on for seven more installments. What should have felt like an exciting adventure romp instead feels like being handed a homework assignment, which is a rough fate for something based on a Nickelodeon kids’ cartoon.
That’s not meant as a demeaning phrase, either. The original run of The Last Airbender had plenty of relevant political insights, with its metaphorical setting overrun by imperialism. But it was also, crucially, a lot of fun to watch. Like a lot of millennials, I had seen bits and pieces of the show as a kid and then watched it all in a big gulp during the 2020 lockdown (on Netflix, which of course greenlit this remake). This time around, I managed to watch two episodes before being overwhelmed by inertia and scrubbing through the rest of the season. The total run time of the Netflix show’s first season is a bit shorter than that of the original cartoon (eight hourlong episodes, compared to 20 half-hour ones), but its tone and tediousness make it feel all the longer. The 2024 version has more pomp, and from the beginning tries harder to emphasize the stakes of the story, but it’s also more airless. The cartoon builds to an epic sweep and some big action set pieces, but what’s most memorable is how much texture it manages to develop along the way: Within a showdown between good and evil, there’s room for tons of charming side characters, goofy one-off episodes, and recurring gags (the poor cabbage merchant).
The Netflix remake, helmed by showrunner Albert Kim, makes the mistake of treating the original like a sacred text. (Ironic, considering the original creators, Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, left the project in 2020.) The series opens with a ponderous flashback to the peaceful Air Nomads as they’re attacked by the Fire Nation, as if to underline just how serious all this is, and then cuts back to the present, when the sole survivor and, essentially, chosen one, Aang (Gordon Cormier), is discovered by the Water Tribe pals Sokka (Ian Ousley) and Katara (Kiawentiio). The three of them set off on a quest to stop the Fire Nation, this world’s encroaching colonial power, with Aang’s antihero counterpart, Prince Zuko (Dallas Liu), in pursuit. The events from there will all be familiar to anyone who has seen the original series, but drained of any of the humor and color that made it feel alive. Aang, instead of acting like an actual child who wants to have fun despite the demands placed on him by his gifts, tends to just talk about the importance of his duty, and Sokka is merely a drip instead of a boastful idiot who doesn’t expect the women around him to outmaneuver him. (Apparently, Netflix decided audiences couldn’t handle that growth arc.) There are gestures at jokes — Paul Sun-Hyung Lee does what he can to make Zuko’s Uncle Iroh charming — but there’s little that connects.
If the team behind the new Avatar thought opening with an emphasis on the drama would help make this version more weighty, it has the opposite effect. The Netflix series tries to frame Avatar as a serious epic about colonialism and genocide, which the original was, in addition to its attributes as a coming-of-age story and picaresque comedy. You don’t need to discard the lighter aspects for the other elements to exist.
Without much apparent wit or perspective, the show is overwhelmed by a droning sameness. Avatar’s aesthetic resembles a lot of Netflix’s attempts at turning anime (or anime-inspired, in this case) into live action, as with Cowboy Bebopand One Piece, which is to say that it tries to replicate the visuals of one medium without paying attention to how they might read in a new context. In animation, for instance, the white makeup of the Kyoshi Warriors looks cool and expressive; when Netflix’s version re-creates it in live action, you just see adults wearing too much face paint. There’s a thread of faulty reasoning here connecting this Avatar to the Disney live-action musical remakes: that we should be impressed simply by a good replication of the original. That’s the kind of thinking that makes people believe an AI program regurgitating aggregated ideas is actually being creative.
Right out of the gate, Netflix’s Avatar fails to answer the big question facing any adaptation: Why does this exist? There’s the obvious point that, in casting Asian and Indigenous actors, the series has righted a wrong of the original series, which had a cast of mostly white actors (as did the best-forgotten M. Night Shyamalan film). But that kind of representation doesn’t amount to an artistic idea in and of itself. It’s possible the show, in later episodes or later seasons, does find a way to take this world in a new direction, but all indications point toward the central artistic vision here being about re-creation rather than reimagination.
Remaking a show comes with the opportunity to critique and redefine it, but Avatar, the live-action series,simply seems to want to remind viewers that Avatar, the animated series, was good. There’s not much new to get out of watching this version except the sinking feeling that you’re going to spend the rest of your life being served worse and worse versions of the stuff you loved as a kid. You may decide it’s more worthwhile to simply close the window playing the live-action series and open a new one to watch the animated version instead. But I might also just suggest closing your laptop, going outside, and leaving this whole IP sinkhole behind.
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Jackson McHenry , 2024-02-22 23:44:14
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