Ok so I finished watching all the currently out episodes of the new Avatar the Last Airbender live action last night and I wanted to write down my thoughts. Warning ahead of time, I thought it was mid and when it wasn’t mid it was pretty bad.
That said, I’d like to start off with some good stuff. The effects for the bending were great, there was never a point where I thought they looked particularly bad at all. The fights are well choreographed too and look very nice, if you want to see what some of the fights would look like in live action there are a handful of fights here that are practically 1 to 1 with the original that look super clean even in the live action medium.
Ok on to the mid
To start off with some issues that would be an issue even if it wasn’t an adaptation so I don’t seem biased, the acting is pretty bad for Aang and Katara especially. Both of them are just incredibly flat and annoying to listen to. Obviously this is a pretty big issue when they’re the main characters so we have to watch their terrible acting every episode. While to be fair, they are pretty young, both being the actual ages of their characters at the time of shooting, that excuse is not gonna make the poor acting any less annoying to the viewer.
The dialogue makes me want to off myself. Did you forget that Aang’s culture and people were wiped out 100 years ago, or that Zuko was banished and needs to find the avatar? Well not to worry because they’ll remind you every single episode. There is constant spouting of exposition that has already been told to us by the same character in the previous episode, gives the feeling that the writers might just think you’re braindead. There’s also a lot of extra unneeded dialogue added to scenes where it isn’t needed and often takes away from the scene. For example in the finale when Aang is about to go into the avatar state with the ocean spirit he says just like he did in the show, “No, its not over”, but instead of immediately sinking into the water, becoming the giant fish, and starting the rampage, Yue instead shouts that if he does this he’ll be gone and the ocean spirit will take over and he’ll be gone, to which he responds “I couldn’t save the world 100 years ago, but I can save it now” needlessly making what was once a cool moment longer and awkward. If this just happened once or twice it’d be whatever, but its all the time, Aang even had like a whole debate with Zhao while Zhao is holding the fish.
Any complex themes have been pretty much dumbed down to the generic “friendship is power!” type bit. Like all the previous Avatars tell Aang that he can’t have any friends and the avatar has to do everything alone. Then Aang will go off and see that his friends are his power multiple times through the show. Its season one and Aang is already repeating character arcs he already had here.
Most of, if not all the characters are totally dumbed down or changed for the worse. Like I said before all the Avatars are on the “no friends allowed train” and kinda blend into eachother. Kyoshi and Kuruk(who admittedly was pretty cool to get to see here), are basically the same and Roku is just weirdly goofy instead of having the more wise and sage-like personality he had before. Bumi was turned into a complete jerk, instead of being a goofy guy whos excited to see his long lost friend, he completely resents Aang for being gone for 100 years and is on the same “no friends allowed” boat as the previous avatars. At the end of the episode he turns nice again, but he’s also decided he wants to reenter the war from the more neutral stance he took before, which is like the exact opposite of his philosophy that he had in the show.
Aang probably suffers some of the worst changes. All he cares about is how he’ll do as the avatar and he’s super depressed about his people all the time. He said in the first episode that he didn’t want the responsibility of the avatar and just wanted to be a kid, but obviously he’s a fucking liar because he’s practically all business constantly once he leaves the south pole. He even hops on the “no friend” train for a bit and when Katara is upset Pokku won’t teach her and she isn’t allowed to fight, instead of trying to teach her in secret, Aang tells her its for the best because he doesn’t want to put her and Sokka in danger by hanging out with him anymore.
Remember how Zhao was like a decent tactician but would allow his pride and anger to get the better of him leading to incompetence? Well now his incompetence multiplied by 10 and he practically makes zero decisions himself. Instead most decisions are made for him by Azula. Oh yeah she’s here, she doesn’t really do much, and she doesn’t act like herself either, she’s practically Zuko 2.0 with the same bursts of anger, just this time she’s weirdly obsessed with Zuko and wanting to be better than him. She entirely lacks of her calm, tactical, and intimidating demeanor she had in the original. The scenes where she recruits her friends are entirely removed, they’re just already with her instead, so no scene of her intimidating Ty Lee into joining her which was kinda important for when Ty Lee eventually switches sides.
There’s a lot of dumb changes and decisions just all around too. If you saw my post about episode 4 you’d know that badgermoles see through the power of love instead of using earthbending to sense vibrations. The moon and ocean spirits just come down like one night per year to be mortal and apparently spend the rest of the time in spirit form, so like pretty unfortunate circumstance they were down there at the same time the fire nation attacked. Jet is blowing up houses in Omashu because of fire nation spies instead of attacking fire nation towns, so now he seems a lot less morally grey and a lot more just straight up bad guy who’s also completely delusional. He’s legit hurting more earth kingdom people than any fire nation people. The mechanist is in Omashu instead of the air temple so Aang doesn’t really get mad at them or have any character development there, and the mechanist is only really there to be a plot device for the fire nation to get air balloons. When Zuke goes to save Iroh from the earth kingdom soldiers, Aang and crew don’t fly over until after Zuko already has Iroh so the whole part where he’s supposed to choose to save Iroh over catching the Avatar never happens. Speaking of things that don’t happen, Zuko never catches Aang in the north either so no clue what Iroh is gonna tell Zuko when he tries to capture Appa, if that even happens at all.
If the one thing you hated most about the original was Appa, then I got good news for you because he’s barely in this show. He has like 5-10 minutes of screentime in the entire show so far max. Obviously it probably has something to do with their CGI budget, but that means either A, they should’ve gone with a different method like puppetry, or B, it just shows that a live action adaptation was simply never within their means in the first place. Momo is barely there too and he’s also really ugly.
So the first season is called “Book 1 water”, can you guess what Aang does this season? If you guess “learn waterbending” you’re a dumbass! He doesn’t waterbend once outside of the avatar state the entire season. He doesn’t even try, he’s just as strong at the end of the season as he was when he started. Speaking of strength they did this weird thing where Aang has to like hold himself back because his bending is “too strong” and he could accidently hurt people. I don’t really care for this, bending was all about technique and this whole thing with his bending just being too strong by accident and him having to hold back is a bit too “dragon ball-y” for me.
Those are pretty much all my major issues I’d like to list some other more minor things that may or may not upset me, but is more subjective.
- Iroh doesn’t sound anything like his cartoon counterpart and it kinda makes you realize how much the voice makes the character cause Iroh just sounds off throughout this whole show. Similar issue for Roku too.
- Aang can only communicate with the previous Avatar’s within or near their shrines, which personally I think is dumb especially since he’s supposed to be able to contact them for guidance whenever need be, but I also understand that they’re trying to explain away why he can’t just use them to solve all his problems. Could’ve been done better imo though.
- Some of the effects in the finale are kinda bad with the color changes when the moon is messed up. When the moon spirit is killed the colors flash between red and grey a lot before settling on grey and it just doesn’t look great. When it is grey instead of just having it so only fire and the water Aang is using have color, everything that has light cast on it gets its color back which is everything because there’s fire everywhere so the grey filter might as well just not be there.
- Koh is the one capturing people instead of Hei Bai, so you miss out on the big Panda and personally I think Koh better fit in the finale than this early.
Overall at best I can give this adaptation a 4/10, don’t listen to anyone who tells you that people who hate it are just bandwagoning. Good for them that they can turn their brain off and enjoy it, but personally I think if a show requires you to not pay any attention at all to enjoy it, it’s a bad show.
