Avatar: The Last Airbender

Netflix's Avatar: The Last Airbender is a rather confusing series when you look at it on paper. As a fan of the original - which more than holds up to this day - you do wonder why this live-action series needed to be made? Could it improve on the original work? No, not really, and even though it has been 20 years nearly since Avatar: The Last Airbender first graced our screens, there's very little about that series that screams dated. Instead, you're left with the obvious explanation: Netflix wanted views and money and so decided to once again leech off a popular IP in order to achieve both.

It's a rather cynical outlook but it is our most likely option. To some diehard fans, this means this adaptation shouldn't exist. To those people, sorry to say but too bad. The show is here, and it's actually quite good.

I'm going to get the bad parts out of the way because surprisingly, Netflix has managed to do a pretty decent job with Avatar: The Last Airbender. But there are more than a few hiccups. First and foremost, I once again have to address how Netflix continues to make content that largely looks the same as its other big-budget shows. The lighting is a big giveaway, and it always feels like the characters are being blasted by rays of light when they're out in the daytime, and this only serves to make some of the backgrounds look fake, which is a shame when a lot of the other effects, costumes, and set designs show a good portion of effort. It's a personal problem I have with a lot of Netflix's latest stuff, but it can often force a show to feel like it's lacking personality.

Speaking of lacking personality, it does feel like the live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender is lacking character at times. The show overall has a much less goofy and light-hearted approach than the original, which means that characters like Iroh and Aang especially lose a lot of their charm. It doesn't help when the show tries to depict that original cartoonish nature of its characters as it ends up feeling contradictory to what they've shown so far. For example, in episode 4 Aang meets up with an old friend, Bumi, who challenges him to a series of games. Aang starts off the episode saying he can't afford to play games when the world needs him most, but then mid-way through that same episode, suddenly Bumi decides he's not playing games anymore, while Aang wants his friend back who loved playing games.

There are a lot of moments like that in the dialogue where it feels like the the characters are saying too much while this show is showing us too little. There's never a moment to let something linger, or just allow a scene to portray itself visually. When something big happens, five seconds later a side character gives an explanation of exactly what's going on, which feels like it's ruining any sort of mystery for the sake of treating your allegedly more mature audience like bigger babies than the original, children's show. It's just content happening in front of you most of the time, without room for intricacies, introspection, or nuance. It's not helped by the fact that the pacing can be all out of whack, especially early on, but even later it feels like you're given very little time to see Team Avatar as friends. Instead of character bonding, a lot of the lines are spent explaining plot-related elements, which give the characters excuses to be where they need to. I found this odd, especially when we're rarely focusing on Aang's bending training. You know, the one thing he needs to become the Avatar. By Book One's end in the original show, he's no master, but he's learned a good deal of waterbending and even some firebending.

Okay, enough negativity. As I said, I enjoyed my time with Netflix's Avatar: The Last Airbender. Compared to adaptations like The Witcher and even One Piece, I'd say it's the best Netflix has done in some time. A lot of that is down to the understanding the people behind the show have for the source material. As mentioned, they don't get everything right, but visually, it's exactly how you'd have imagined a live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender to look. Most of the effects are pretty good, and there's so many of them that you forget the ones that don't quite look amazing. As well as the special effects, the choreography of the action is also very solid, as is usually the case with Netflix's big-budget stuff. With the visuals especially but also generally in the show there's a feeling that the creators aren't just making changes to bait-and-switch the original audience. It seems like everything has been done to either streamline certain aspects and shed light on less-utilised characters.

Azula, for example, is not present in the show's first season, and yet has a bigger role to play here, setting her up for the villain she'll become. Ozai also gets a lot more screen time, letting us see who our big bad of the whole thing is rather than keeping him in shadows. Some of the extra added scenes don't help, and yet a lot of them offer interesting deviations from the source material without being frustrating subversions of it. We just get more backstories around our cast, and while that can serve again to spoil some of the mystery, it also gives both old and new audiences something they've not seen before.

Episodes are structured in a different way to the original, too. We get fewer and longer episodes, but even though they end up having more time than the first season of the animated show, it would be weird if we hopped through three different complete arcs all in an hour, and so instead multiple episodes worth of story are condensed into one or two locations. It's quite clever to keep as many fan-favourite moments in as possible, and while most of the middling episodes are quite forgettable, by the end it leads to a very strong final two episodes where the focus is properly brought back in.

From images of the cast you've probably seen online, you can probably tell the physical appearance of a lot of these characters is as close to perfect as you're ever going to get. Their acting on the other hand, well it's mostly good, but there are a few outliers. Luckily, Gordon Cormier is giving it his all and is a really impressive Aang, but Katara and Iroh really don't feel like they've taken the characters to new heights or even their own places yet. It can often feel like a high-school stage production when they're left alone for too long, but mostly everyone else does a fine to great job. I'd particularly like to highlight everyone in the Fire Nation here (bar Iroh, unfortunately). From Zuko to Zhao, they each create their own spin on their characters without departing from the originals.

This show is far from perfect, and the secret to its success is largely that it has such strong source material to base itself from. All it has to do is not do what M. Night Shyamalan did. And yet, it very easily could have also been pretty terrible. There are fans of the original who would love for this show to flop, just so their perfect series is protected forever, and there will be live-action fans who think this is one of the best shows around, but in reality, neither of those groups are going to be right. Avatar: The Last Airbender is a good show. Sometimes it is very good, but it never reaches greatness. I struggled a lot with my thoughts on it because it is at its best when it is more closely following the source material, and so praising it for that feels like celebrating a successful copy of someone else's homework.

Still, I'll remain somewhat optimistic for this show, as even if it can't beat the brilliance of its predecessor, it's worth remembering that Season 1 of the animated series also had its teething problems (need I remind you of the Great Divide?) Even if it is just a cash/viewer grab at the end of the day, it's a pretty good one and if you really hate animation for whatever reason, I guess you can watch this instead of the original.