'Avatar Aang': Look How They Massacred My Boy

Why do they keep trying to make 'Avatar' movies?

Disclaimer: None of this review will make sense without at least a slight working knowledge of Avatar: The Last Airbender. If you haven’t seen it, Run, don’t walk, and enjoy an amazing thing.

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“I know you’re not supposed to cry over spilled tea, but... it’s just so sad.”-Uncle Iroh

Sigh.

Listen. I went into this with an open mind.

I’ve dressed up as Katara for Halloween. I own a Momo plushie. I love the original series. And Avatar Studios made their debut film as a continuation thereof, promising that it was made by true fans, for true fans. So here we are. The intention is to set aside my powerful bias and talk about the movie qua movie. And the intention is also to not bring up The Legend of Korra, the Shyamalan war crime film, or the live action series at all (Though these have all hurt me). I went into Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender with hope, because I understood that it was made by people who loved the original series, and wanted to make something that held up to its predecessor. And I believed in them. Uncle Iroh would want me to.

To set the scene, this film takes place 13 years following the events of the Avatar: The Last Airbender finale. The gang are all young adults, bettering the world in their respective roles, and doing very well at healing a wounded world. But Avatar Aang falls into a quarter-life crisis (happens to us all) about how he is the last airbender and sole keeper of his culture. But! Then he encounters a mysterious other airbender. And a mysterious artifact. And a mysterious group of non-benders with mysterious nefarious intent. So he must reunite the familiar faces of Katara, Sokka, Zuko, and Toph to save the world yet again. And so the stage is set.

It is considered polite when giving one’s critiques to present them as a compliment sandwich: Good, Not-so-good, Good.

The Good Stuff:

The nostalgia hits right away. The theme music from the original series starts up in the opening scenes and you are in, baby. You are on board. You are ready to go, yip-yip!

The visuals are fairly spectacular. Avatar Studios shook up the animation a bit, adding texture and color that was dazzling in certain scenes. It was beautiful, it was exciting. The motion and the composition was visually interesting, and the scale of the world they created was enormous. They were also fearless in the action sequences, creating some incredibly inventive scenarios that were really fun, actually. (Like throwing an airbender into a tornado. Amazing.) The fight scenes were epic, the stakes were high, and the story beats were exciting.

And I’ve got to give it this - it was a tight plot. So tight in fact, that we are now going to gracefully segue into….

The Bad.

If the visuals were the shining star, it came at the steep cost of everything else. Truly, truly, I think this film would have worked if it was a series of episodes. Then at least we could have learned ANY of the supporting characters’ names. And motivations. And reasons to care about them. Perhaps then we could have a plot that didn’t feel like someone picked up pieces from the cutting room floor and then put it on 2x speed. Perhaps then Zuko would have had more than 4 lines in the whole movie, and perhaps Katara would have had more to do then say “But Aang, you’re the Avatar” and hug him in a tragic manner several times. In watching this film you can tell that there was so much more that was supposed to be in it. There were so many scenes that you could feel the absence of, conversations that you can tell were cut to squeeze in another fight scene, and consequences that just never get shown. What we are left with is a breakneck-paced action sequence extravaganza that feels incomplete as a film, but really impressive as a list of ideas on paper.

Also, though I think they did a really good job aging the characters up, it seemed as though they couldn’t decide if they actually wanted the characters to be perceived as adults. What this resulted in was a weird amount of scenes where the characters were looking like Vogue models but acting like the young version of themselves. It was odd, especially since this film has a heavier and more mature tone.

In prioritizing the look of the film, the story and dialogue got beaten up in a dark alley and left for dead. Exposition was, to put it kindly, heavy-handed, and yet somehow, simultaneously, the voice actors were left fighting for their lives with the most repetitive, robotic simple sentences ever gleaned from a Duolingo prompt. Some of that could be forgiven if the essence of the characters remained, if not intact, at least recognizable. And to that end, we gracefully segue back into…

More Good:

They absolutely nailed the facial expressions of the characters. Sokka was spot-on. Toph was exactly the way she should be. The continuity of the world was there. There were moments of heart and charm that convinced me that this was not a mere cash grab taking advantage of a successful franchise, but rather a true passion project that unfortunately had a troubled production and was forced to make compromises. There were subtle and not-so-suble nods to the original series that made me happy. There was a frankly bizarre Spirit World sequence that did not make me happy. We can’t win them all. But we can keep trying, and strive to keep the standards high.

The original series was an amazing show. It was light, it was funny, it was creative, heartfelt, and sometimes deeply profound. It could make a stupid joke as easily as it could make a grown adult cry. And it has proven itself an exceptionally difficult act to follow. But this is what inevitably happens. The stuff we love gets blitzed in a blender and served to us in fresh new ways, because “fresh” and “new” is exactly what a crowd craving nostalgia wants….. right?

While I deeply appreciate that this film is not the worst of the indignities The Last Airbender has suffered, it didn’t do it for me. But I hope it inspires thousands to watch or rewatch the original series. It’s immediately what I started doing after finishing the film, and it made everything better.