Better Than the Movies Isn’t Enough: A Review of Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender

Mixed Asian Media - April 2, 2024

By Hayley Palmer

*THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER (2005) AND AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER (2024)

It has been a long road to Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender live-action series. Since the original animated series debuted back in 2005, the world of Avatar has expanded in the form of an animated spin-off series, a widely disliked live-action film, and several lesser-known graphic novels. I got to attend a virtual press conference a week before the show came out to celebrate the release and hear from the cast!

Spanning three seasons, the original cartoon told the story of a world composed of four nations, represented by four elements: water, earth, fire, and air. People who can telekinetically control these elements are called “benders,” but they can each only control one element. Only the Avatar, a reincarnated being tasked with maintaining world harmony, can bend all four elements.

The show follows the current Avatar, a 12-year-old from the Air Nation named Aang, who wakes up after being frozen in ice for a century. To his horror, he finds that the once-peaceful world he knew has become embroiled in war, as the Fire Nation attempts to conquer the other nations. Accompanied by Water Tribe siblings Katara and Sokka, Aang must master all four elements to defeat the Fire Lord, all while evading capture by Zuko, the banished teenage prince of the Fire Nation.

Each fictional nation — from its architecture to its clothing and traditions — is inspired by aspects of Asian or Indigenous culture. But unlike its predecessors — namely, the 2010 live-action film that starred a nearly all-white cast and a 5% Rotten Tomatoes rating — this rendition of the show finally can boast an all-Asian and Indigenous cast. The ensemble includes several mixed Asian actors, namely Gordon Cormier (Aang), Dallas Liu (Zuko), Elizabeth Yu (Azula), Maria Zhang (Suki), Sebastian Amoruso (Jet), and Danny Pudi (The Mechanist).

Dallas Liu was the standout act of the young actors for me, bringing believable anger and desperation to the complex tragedy that is Zuko. His three-season arc in the cartoon has frequently been lauded by fans as the epitome of a redemption arc. And Liu knows the importance the original show holds to fans. “I don’t think anybody [in the cast] would want to do an impersonation of these characters,” he said during the press conference. “I think we really did our best in making these people real and allowing for everything that was going on in the world to be grounded.”

At the same press conference, I was able to hear from Elizabeth Yu who plays Azula, princess of the Fire Nation and one of the main villains of the series. Her character does not receive the full redemption-arc-treatment Zuko is given in the animated series, but Yu deeply empathizes with her villainous character. “She’s a woman in power surrounded by a male dominated kingdom, and I think that struggle is something a lot of women can connect to,” she says. “It gets thrown around a lot, that she’s crazy or she’s insane. I feel like that is really telling for what women in power go through in real life.” Yu emphasizes the importance of understanding the audiences’ view of the characters, citing fan-made YouTube analysis videos as a resource for developing her version of this complex character (Liu did the same).

Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender succeeds in several areas. From my untrained eye, the CGI seems likely as good as you can get when creating a purely-fantastical world. The fight scenes are a marvel to watch, and look just as impressive as they did in the cartoon. And there is so much going on in each episode that it is quite entertaining.

However, the pacing of the show itself feels incredibly rushed, likely due to its 8-episode run time. While the hour-long episodes total to roughly the same run time as the cartoon, every plot point is crammed into 10 minutes, resulting in awkward, unnatural expositions from the characters in place of actual context. This results in a flurry of events in each episode, fight scenes rarely lasting longer than a minute, and conflicts arising and concluding in singular scenes.

Take, for instance, episode four, where Katara and Sokka brave the secret tunnels that run underneath the Earth Kingdom city of Omashu to save Aang from capture. They briefly bicker, culminating in Katara’s yelled insult of, “You’re not Dad!” This is supposed to be a great betrayal, a hit at one of Sokka’s biggest insecurities. But we have gotten little information about the siblings and what makes them tick thus far. Her outburst loses all impact and their conflict is solved within two minutes, with a quick apology from Katara and more stilted exposition. The focus throughout the series seems to be much more on keeping the audience’s attention through flashy fight scenes and ever-changing conflicts than the quieter moments from the cartoon, which added layers of depth that made the show more memorable. Any development of the relationships between the characters has been sidelined in favor of hitting a majority of the cartoon’s plot points.

As such, the series seems to waver between wanting to stay faithful to its original and catering to its now-adult audience. While the animated series didn’t shy away from serious subjects, it was generally humorous and light-hearted. By contrast, the new series has a TV-14 age rating and opens with a jarring scene of the Fire Lord burning someone alive. The first episode continues from this dark opening by showing the entire population of Air Nomads being brutally murdered by Fire Nation soldiers. Despite these mature changes, the dialogue feels like it’s been dumbed down significantly from the original material, taking an overall tell-don’t-show stance to every single scene.

The characters also come off as watered-down versions of their original. This comes from not only a lack of attention given to characterization, but also an unwillingness to allow any of the heroes to be flawed. Despite giving their all to Zuko’s upcoming redemption arc, the flaws of the other three main characters were ditched in the adaptation process. Sokka’s central character growth in season one of the cartoon is that he goes from spewing childish sexism — mainly targeted at his sister — to realizing that women are actually his equals upon meeting Suki and the other Kyoshi warriors. In the live-action series, his sexism is entirely erased, and his interactions with Suki lose all depth, simply becoming a romantic side plot and doing a great disservice to her character as well. Katara is no longer assertive, bossy, or even particularly ambitious. As a result, she is now generally one-dimensional and debatably the least interesting character in the show. And Aang’s attempts to avoid the crushing responsibilities of being the Avatar by suggesting pointless adventures like riding giant koi fish have been erased. This causes him to not only lose most of his childish traits — an important contrast to the weight of his role as the Avatar — but also any growth he had to go through in the original.

While the season’s plot points remain generally the same, something is decidedly off. Whether it is a symptom of compressing 20 episodes into Netflix’s 8-episode standard or simply trying to translate a cartoon to real life, the heart of the original series is noticeably absent in the remake. But ultimately, it has garnered lots of conversation, an interest in the original series for some and a sense of nostalgia for others. Adaptations seldom wholeheartedly win over their original fans, and mixed reviews are better than overwhelmingly negative ones (as I’m sure 2010’s The Last Airbender director M. Night Shyamalan would tell you). The cast and crew behind Netflix’s adaptation show obvious passion and care when talking about their project, which is definitely appreciated. Hopefully, the upcoming seasons will give the show a chance to improve, and bring harmony to their audience.

You can stream Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender on Netflix now, and keep an eye out for the upcoming seasons in the future!

Hayley is a student living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. She spends her free time sitting around with friends, re-reading the same books, and playing ice hockey. Hayley makes all sorts of art, from digital illustration to photography to collages. You can find her work on Instagram @twohalftruths.