Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender

Avatar is a bit of a weird franchise, because it hasn't ever matched the peak it reached with its first outing. It's a bit like if Marvel was still trying to match the first Iron Man movie today. Back in the early 2000s, a 12-year-old took up the mantle of the Avatar and brought peace to the world. When he passed on, we met his rambunctious follow-up Avatar, who had her moments but never quite matched the success of her predecessor (in terms of critical reception to her show, that is). Now, we're back with Aang, but he's older, as is the rest of the OG team Avatar, as they're on a quest to find the secrets of an ancient Avatar and see if they can restore the Airbender Nomads.

It's a plot that may sound familiar, if you've seen The Legend of Korra. Season 3 of that show focuses largely on the return of the Airbenders as a people, but of course Aang isn't around to see it come to fruition. There's an interesting premise still to be had with this film, as we see what The Last Airbender does when he finds out he's not alone anymore.

There's a great sense of pressure in Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, both for fans watching the film and the creators. This is the first bit of animated Avatar media we've had in many years. It's new content, returning us to the most beloved characters the franchise has ever produced, and it also has to pull off a big screen feel, even if Paramount only wanted to stick it on its streaming service. It's unfair for a simple 98-minute movie to have that kind of weight on its shoulders, but at the same time, fans have come to expect the best from Avatar, even if it can't always deliver.

The big-screen feel is definitely achieved through Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender's visuals. It is lit brightly, with a consistent, cinematic glow, and while the animation isn't always the most fluid, the bending sequences have a great amount of motion to them, letting you feel the flow of the action. The character designs for the adult versions of team Avatar are a bit hit or miss, with most of them feeling quite generic compared to their appearances as children. Aang and Katara's faces feel quite expressionless at times, which doesn't help when their relationship is one of the main emotional cores of the movie. Like in the original series, Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender isn't afraid to make its characters look goofy, which means we do get to see some variety in the designs throughout the movie. Heads growing bigger, bodies becoming boneless in the welcome return of the goofy, more physical comedy.

There are flashes of the old Avatar here, just as there are moments of well-written themes and hard-hitting action. The problem is that Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender never feels like it has the time to keep all of its plates spinning. It's the grand return of team Avatar, yet it's also a personal story of self-discovery and forgiveness for Aang. We've got a villain in Dave Bautista's beefy but scarred Airbender, and yet we also need a troupe of extremist non-benders because we need to steal another plotline from The Legend of Korra. There's just a lot going on, and it feels like you're watching a checklist being ticked off rather than a movie. There's a sense the movie doesn't trust any one part of itself long enough to let you hold onto it for more than ten minutes. When our heroes find themselves defeated, on the brink of a complete loss, they can teleport back to the final fight within minutes of making up a solution to their quite dire situation. That could have been a moment to see team Avatar back up to their old tricks, but instead we can't linger long with our beloved characters, because they've got a plot to complete.

By that final fight, things have got a little silly to allow for a near-apocalyptic final showdown between Aang and the villain. That fight itself is quite disappointing, as the rest of team Avatar is stuck fighting jobbers, and the main villain's power up feels rather needless and ineffective. The loose, vague Spirit World is leaned on a bit too much in order to wrap everything up in a neat bow by the end. Again, the movie is balanced between a fun, fan service adventure and a very serious story themed around the survivor's guilt associated with those left behind by genocide. It doesn't do the best job, but at the same time the world of Avatar is so beloved that it's hard not to appreciate getting another adventure with the Gaang.

That said, it's not the same Gaang we know and love. Everyone from the main cast has been replaced, even Zuko despite him having one of the most-iconic voices in all of animation. Most do a decent job in their new roles, but I found Eric Nam as Aang very hard to adjust to. He has quite a generic, soft-boy hero sound to him, like a more adult Deku, which in my opinion doesn't capture Aang well. It's hard to write a character who has his childishness rooted at his core getting to the ripe old age of 25, but at the same time I felt that Aang becomes a sum of his parts in this movie, rather than a believable person. Tagha, the antagonist, creates a similar sense, mostly because his friend-to-villain pipeline is so rushed you're given whiplash from the heel turn. Tagha's appearance as an Airbender also raises a lot of problems in the canon of the world and the following timeline. Him nearly destroying Republic City in its early days and having no lasting impact on the world only serves to make the movie and its consequences feel unnecessary.

As I watched Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, I came to a bit of a tragic conclusion. If Avatar is to ever reach its old heights, it has to move on from Aang. Either forwards, into a completely new age, as we're seeing in Avatar: Seven Havens, or (preferably) backwards, to a point where we can delve into a world long before the Fire Nation attacked, and see how other Avatars dealt with the world they found themselves in. If we keep digging up the nostalgia of the Gaang, we're only going to be reminded of that original, phenomenal series that mesmerised us twenty years ago. The bar set by that show may never be surpassed, but you're giving yourself much less of a chance if you don't move on.