Rewinding the clock almost six years, back to September 2018, the latest adaptation of the once animated “Avatar: The Last Airbender” was announced. This time it would hit the screens in a live action form, which had been done once in 2009 but executed as a film.
The new series version hit Netflix on February 22, 2024, and created many mixed reviews from many, including myself. There is a necessary comparison that needs to be made between the original cartoon series that began airing in 2005 as well as the 2009 film is necessary in order to accurately review the 2024 version.
The original series spanned across three seasons and is highly regarded by the vast majority of viewers. Critics online rarely have negative critiques and commend the show for its graphics and often comment that it is the best animated series to date. This obviously creates a high standard that is quite difficult to reach, let alone surpass.
However, the 2009 adaptation spurred the absolute opposite reaction. To this day the entire film is brought up as a joke and seen as a complete disappointment and sad endeavor that failed miserably.
The film missed the mark in several categories: casting, costumes, dialogue, general storyline, CGI, and acting. All of which combined to earn it a whopping five percent on RottenTomatoes.
The 2009 performance created a lot of fear in the audience to ever see another live action attempt; the idea of severe disappointment was already in potential viewers’ minds. It lingered in my mind as well as I awaited the release of the 2024 rendition. But excitement lingered too because my love for the original series reinforced hope.
To give a general review of the project as a whole, I can confidently say that it falls in the middle of the two extremes. It carries nowhere near the amount of disappointment as the film, but it could not reach the level of magic that the original created.
Still, there was an admirable and earnest attempt to match the magnitudinal success built in 2005.
The new “Last Airbender” does show respect towards the original storyline, and for the most part, remains accurate to the events that unfolded in the cartoon. There is also much more respect for the casting; the cartoon characters have Indigenous and Asian backgrounds that the 2009 film completely disregarded.
The CGI and visual effects are not completely cohesive, there are moments when the “bending” looks choppy and unrealistic, or the lighting issues cause the CGI background to look bad. Another drawback of the show is the costumes and wigs. The costumes might have been generally accurate but they lacked the minute details that brought the looks together. The wigs are the only things the film did justice to, and unfortunately, a majority of the wigs were obviously fake and caused the show to look cheap.
My biggest issue lies with the dialogue and some of the characters’ writing. Some of it is a little too cheesy, even though derived from a cartoon it just feels unnatural and lacking.
This leads to the worst part of the show for me, some crucial characters were stripped of their unique personalities. Katara, played by Kiawentiio, was once a strong-minded character with an attitude, witty comebacks, and emotional depth but she was failed in the writing, not at the fault of the actress. It seems done in order to please haters of the character but ruins the accuracy of the story by weakening a complex female character.
The first season of this series shows strengths and weaknesses, but it has time to grow and fix the issues keeping it from being great.