A Painfully Honest Review of Netflix Avatar

gaming anime Comics some fourth thing long ago the fandoms would get hyped when a thing they loved became a movie but everything changed when Dragon Ball Evolution attacked only the Avatar master of cartoon comedy and Anime storytelling could save us but when the world needed him most we got M Night Shyamalan my name is an and I'm the Avatar bring me all your elderly that child was being arrested for what he was bending tiny stones at us from behind a tree it really hurt he's making fire out of nothing Well actually what we got was a whole lot of Studio meddling that ight got blamed for he's honestly the biggest victim of the whole debacle having his name irrevocably attached to this barely watchable lump of garbage that barely resembles his original Vision to be fair that original Vision probably still would have pissed a lot of Avatar addicts off but more in the quirky fun 8s Super Mario movie way you know where the film is clearly doing something just not the something most people wanted to see which is still infinitely better than doing nothing anyone would want to see but that's a story for another YouTube video which several other people have made already I'm sure as a jumping off point for today's story all you really need to know is there was a Last Airbender movie once and it has a legitimate claim on being not just the worst adaptation but the worst Hollywood film of all time ultimately that had two lasting effects on the legacy of Avatar firstly the whole brand kind of collapsed in on itself for a while and every time its creators tried to build it back up the Nick exec who actually caused the problem would lose their nerve at the last second and now suddenly the last season of Kora gets to Premiere in a a crappy web player just for example but second the film's honestly miraculous complete lack of any redeeming qualities left us all with one burning question what if not even what if we did it right this time just what if we tried it again it can't possibly be worse right like the eternally hypothetical Final Fantasy 7 remake the dream that there could one day be a good liveaction Avatar became so fixed in the imagination of the fans and creators alike that its manifestation as some kind of consumable product was inevitable as was the absolute [ __ ] storm of discourse that proceeded and followed its release on Netflix last week you've probably heard a lot of passionate takes on this show since then ranging from it killed my entire family in front of me too it sucked my and gave me free cake but today we're going to try to cut through all that noise to find honest answers to three key questions is this new series worth watching for fans of the original does it work as a standalone adaptation and most importantly was this whole thing just a fundamentally bad idea before I tell you the answer to all three questions is yes mostly I really ought to tell you about today's sponsor gamer Subs the Fire Nation the fire nation's coming oh no I have so much flammable stuff who will save us look over there it's the legendary destined hero with the power to take down firebenders the smoke show the new gamer Subs cup waiu when she gently rubs her magic hose not pictured it shoots great spurts of liquid that can douse any flame so just like a water bender no idiot water benders shoot boring old water smoke show shoots the greatest liquid known to man gamer sus which she can also suck right out of the hose at any time to instantly gain its focus and energy related benefits plus essential antioxidants which is kind of like the Avatar state but better it tastes delicious too and that's why you should go to Gamers subs. g/ basement to buy some at a discount now plus also maybe some of the sexy firefighter merch while supplies last future Jeff here supplies did not last cups already sold out they got a few t-shirts and uh trays I believe left so get those while the getting's good or instant Ramen they make instant Ramen these days and tea do you have calming Jasmine nah but they do got sleepy time hey where'd everyone go oh my nephew is burning them all to death right now huh how about that oh no so how many can I put you down for the pain let's get the obvious questions out of the way up front is Netflix's avatar the Last air bender as good as Nickelodeon's avatar the Last air bender okay yeah expected that but is it as bad as Nickelodeon movies The Last Airbender an M Night Shyamalan film that depends on who you ask and how much of a liar they are notable Twitter blue engagement Farm discussing film said at worst the Netflix show makes M Night Aman's 2010 The Last Airbender film feel like a mercy because at least that poor effort was only 2 hours long and the only way I can square that statement with any sane view of reality is if the writer has never seen the movie cuz even if you only watch the last flick spinger [ __ ] garbage pilot episode and never actually get to any of the good parts the difference in quality is still night and day the show's dialogue can be a little cringy and overe explaining sure but the movie's dialogue is literally almost 100% Exposition it is uniquely excruciating to sit through a singularity of bad filmmaking unlikely to be rivaled in our life times if this crew had made anything even half that bad the second time round it would force me as an atheist to concede that the devil is real also that he's one and God is dead luckily God is still only dead for all the nche reasons and everything that's bad about this Netflix show can be explained by natural means which is not everything about the show to be clear the praise this version of Avatar is getting definitely ain't coming from nowhere but the hate definitely isn't either and I think a lot of that ultimately boils down to the incredibly bad first impression that the first two episodes leave especially that aforementioned [ __ ] garbage pilot which absolutely butchers some of the series most sensitive moments in a misguided attempt to be more adult that ends up feeling less mature than the way the cartoon for babies did it I am talking of course about the show's much public ized Capital C choice to open on the Airbender genocide depicted in the most gruesome detail a tv14 rating will allow so got to cover up the blood mostly but there are dead bodies that Ang can poke with his big stick now and when the fire lord gets mad he can go all Darth Vader on their asses but with fire yeah kid this ain't your little brother's after school Avatar this one's all hardcore and junk this fire lord wouldn't just sit back and manage a genocide he's going to get in there on the front lines himself to make sure there are no survivors remember no survivors see now clumsy as they are these scenes do at least attempt to expand the series lore and history a little bit the idea of disinform Earth Kingdom spies to draw troops to bosing se and away from the air temples in preparation for San's comet is kind of strategically interesting and it sets up a call back later on where xiao's assault on the water tribe is revealed to merely be a diversion enabling azula's taking of omashu because obviously a bunch of enemy boats going to the North Pole would pull Earth Kingdom Ground Forces away from one of the only two cities they have left you know one of the advantages of the original Avatar's age rating required reluctance to directly depict the more direct aspects of warfare is its writers didn't really have to account for all this strategic logistical crap they could simply say for example that the Fire Nation managed to eradicate all of the flying Nomads on the entire planet off screen without having to Grapple with the tricky tactical question of how exact L anyone could pull that off and inevitably coming up with some laughably stupid answer like the entire race just happened to be in the same town for the big Centennial Comet Festival better go help set up for the great Comet Festival before the aads from the other temples AR how many are coming all of them we have to kill them all don't get me wrong part of me definitely sees the vision in a more brutal version of Avatar that gets to fully explore all the horrible things things one could do to other humans with its power system when Zahir assassinated the Earth Queen by airbending a vacuum around her head and Kora 20-year-old me thought that [ __ ] was metal as his words not mine I I prefer to swear sparingly for maximum effect these days and that same principle is exactly why that moment hits as hard as it does it's a truly Savage act of violence far worse than anything shown in the Avatar univ to that point though not for [Music] long and even more shockingly Zahir uses the most peaceful defensive of the bending Arts to do it in so many ways it feels like a taboo was just broken like the world of Avatar has been fundamentally and irrevocably Changed by this one crime you know like that Community episode where Jeff commits the first murder in GI Joe history and that gives the moment the gravits a regicide leading up to attempted Demi deide really should have but moments like that can't have that kind of impact in a show where horrific violence is just you know part of the general Vibe the kind of impact that facing the aftermath at the southern air Temple had on Ang and the audience in the original series after three straight episodes spent goofing off and trying not to think about it this version reduces that masterfully wound up gut punch to a pathetic slap in the face an afterthought of an epilogue awkwardly tacked on to the end of its clumsy overly expositional retelling of the boy in the iceberg like and so Ang made a daring break from Prince Zuko's Brig riding off into the new world with his Newfound friends and his oldest friend apaa then he went to a room full of skeletons to scream and glow at them the end what's happening what is he doing this one quiet shot from the original anime of gatso the kindly old goofball we only got to know from Ang's funny cartoon flashbacks lying dead in the snow surrounded by the countless firebenders who fell trying to take him says more about the tragedy of this war CRI crime and the ferocity with which it was opposed then all the CGI Sound and Fury $15 million an episode can muster which is still a lot better than what the movie mustered with 10 times that many dollars to be fair but let's be real that bar is underground a few of the show's fights do feature some seriously impressive stunt work and choreography and the big final battle scene where everything goes all black and white except for a few splashes of color after the the moon gets dead that's legitimately breathtaking I wish they did more stylish stylized stuff like that because while the CGI here does look by and large better than the movie it's just not up to the level of realism the rest of the shows shooting for Earth and firebending do look fairly believable years of Hollywood Research into perfecting fake explosions and Rubble really works in the show's favor there but fluid simulations are still very tricky and EXP expensive so water bending mostly looks like wet slimy [ __ ] except when they're using ice and to complement that air bending looks like Dusty [Applause] farts though to be fair it is basically impossible to make realistic airbending look like anything else because realistically speaking wind's supposed to be invisible but that's obviously not very cinematic so they had to add some kind of visual component even though it was basically guaranteed to look silly and when you throw those silly looking effects over the Unreal Engine ass environments on the big Mandalorian LED wall behind the actors the whole thing kind of just looks like a video game especially when the Benders start flying around and they got to swap in 3D stunt doubles at which point this live action remake just becomes an uglier cartoon with extra more expensive steps that's his real power connection Building Bridges that's how he's going to be the Avatar even if the bending effects had been perfect though the attack on the southern air Temple still would have sucked [ __ ] cuz they made monk gatso go down like a little [ __ ] without killing anyone the one thing this scene could have done to justify its tasteless tacky take on Ang's tragic backstory was show us how the heck that room got like that and they completely [ __ ] it up I was so mad after watching this prologue I could have sat down and started roasting right there but I'm glad I kept going because it did get quite a bit better eventually not now to be clear cuz now is when we're introduced to Saka and qara and with them another much publicized Capital C Choice Saka is not a sexist pig anymore what again I do see the vision here this one more of the prophecy of Doom type Vision in which many many tweets are made by people who don't know what a character Arc is about how Saka is all problematic and poorly aged now I'd be wary of that too if I just dropped a Scott Pilgrim anime but by taking the coward's way out on this Netflix has fundamentally changed where Saka comes from and what his whole character Arc means he's supposed to be a y a crude rude kid with tud who's never seen the world Beyond his very small town and says a lot of dumb crap but only because he legitimately doesn't know any better his regressive attitude toward women is the most obvious expression of that and when Suki knocks it out of him in episode 4 that's his first step on a very long journey to becoming a real man of the world also toward a genuinely compelling Romance especially for a Nick show where the fact that these two characters fall for each other really says something about both of them I'm so glad to see you Saka I knew you'd [Music] come anime Saka is a real good guy deep down but cocky and very rough around the edges stupid with a Grace and confidence that makes competent driven women like Suki and UA think I could fix him and freaks like Tye think I want to make mistakes with him sand those edges down and what you're left with is a mostly together fella with some confidence and daddy issues a great sense of humor and an impressively Progressive worldview for a dude who's only ever met like 70 total people all with that jawline no mystery why he's pulling princess he still got a lot of the important Saka stuff you know the meat and sarcasm bet you taste like chicken what are you doing here we're doing what we're doing right but why are you doing it here Ian olley definitely gets the character but take away his key flaw that confident ignorance and Kyoshi Island suddenly just a story about a hot guy who meets a hot girl and he likes martial arts and she likes martial arts and he's got daddy issues and she's got mommy issues so they kiss this is barely CW tier ship bait i'llbe it better directed than most CW shows but the real problem one that has immediate consequences for the entire story is how this changes Saka relationship with his sister because now he's not a pigheaded jerk who doesn't take qara seriously because women can't Warrior and she's not the unwilling surrogate mother forced to clean up after that jackasses messes they're just siblings who bicker a bit about the age-based pecking order meaning they have nothing to really fight over like ever meaning that the inciting incident of the whole story where qara gets so mad at Saka for being a sexist idiot that she accidentally water bends the Avatar free gets changed to oh no the boat we were just mildly arguing on is too far away well I guess you better use Magic Water to get it back even though we were just just arguing about that cuz honestly not that big a deal all right I'll just do some oh whoops there's a bald kid now and also meaning that later on we'll need a whole Messa Exposition about how bending power and control are tied to emotions because this adaptation failed to cinematically show don't tell us that in its opening moments unlike the lowbudget cable show it's based on season one of which is roughly the same length in minutes as the Netflix version just by the way but due to this shows much less efficient storytelling it's only able to cover about half of book one's plot points now some of that time loss is the result of a few new fire nation subplots that were added for the sake of having more scenes on reusable sets which honestly make way better additions to the story than what Netflix bbop tried to do with vicious for example though not as good as what one piece did with the Marines but the contrivances made to accommodate all these unnecessary changes to avatars characters also really add up especially when it comes to the most egregious Capital C choice this adaptation makes Ang doesn't want to goof off anymore you know Ang the Beloved iconic character whose first words in any piece of media ever were I need to ask you something what will you go penguin sing with me now he's all about Duty and saving the world and stuff this Ang didn't run away from home directly into a storm to throw off any air Benders following him out of sheer Terror at the overwhelming responsibility of suddenly being Kung Fu Jesus At The Tender age of 12 he just flew away from the comet Festival to clear his head for a bit real low to the open ocean for some reason and then a tidal wave snuck up on him it's a very silly change that seemingly makes no sense unless you're looking at the story from the perspective of a TV producer who's trying trying to make it fit a budget playing up Ang's avoidant wander lust means adding more locations to the shoot schedule or paying a CG team to mock up more Mandalorian sets which ain't cheap either way but if Koshi shows up at the start to give Ang a prophetic vision of [ __ ] going down at the northern water tribe thus forcing him to make a beine there now you can focus on making a handful of more prominent locations look as good as possible plus then you get to make the B plot of the KE Yoshi Warriors episode about a kid sitting in front of a glowy statue for a couple hours while his friend gets lucky as opposed to a kid trying to ride a giant monster that is in a very real sense made of time and money the Critter effects we do see in the show particularly Momo and jun's sheroe are legitimately quite impressive but every million dollars you don't spend filming penguin sledding is another million you can spend butchering the Airbender genocide and the stated goal of of the project is to make an explicitly less cartoony more adult version of Avatar so what's wrong with toning down Ang's childish goofy side nothing if you don't mind toning down Avatar's Soul avatar The Last Airbender is a fascinating media Chimera that fuses the more mature storytelling sensibilities of Japanese anime with the playful comedic energy of American cartoons when fans particularly adult fans look back on the series now I think we tend to overemphasize the anime part of that equation the lore the continuity the fights and romance all the things that made Avatar so special and distinct from the American Kids TV landscape from which it first emerged but both ingredients are equally essential to Avatar's Secret Sauce the tension between the series two identities as a wacky slap Nick tune about a goofy bald kid and his magic animal Pals and a serious serialized War anime with life or death world shaking Stakes reflects the tension at the heart of Ang's character the Carefree fun-loving kid he wants to be versus the responsible decisive young man he must become as the series goes on the balance of serious anime action to Goofy cartoon diversions shifts perceptively in conjunction with Ang's own increasing determination to see his Destiny through the very structure of the story grows up alongside its protagonist and when you take away the more childish cartoony aspects of Avatar to focus on the good anime bits you lose that effect entirely that's not to say the show's allergic to goofy fun it still plays the hits like secret tunel secret tunel and of course myab they even brought the original actor who played cabbage guy back this adaptation was clearly made by fans who love and care for the original series but they're also clearly more anime brained fans who treat the funny bits as non-essential comic relief and probably share the widely held Avatar fan opinion that the series only really gets great after book one that would explain why both Ang and Saka kind of feel like they just time skipped ahead to midseason 2 in their character arcs now don't get me wrong some of that reluctance to step up and grow up is still there in this version of Ang he'll tell you as much if you ask him at length this whole time I've been worried that I don't know what I'm doing you're not going to lose us but just the thought I I could is going to hold me back the other kids always say I'm lucky because the things I could do but I trade places with any of them I don't want the responsibility I'm scared of my power I'm scared of being alone this was my home and now it's gone it's only after we've lost something that we realize how much means to us you can't just have your characters announce how they feel that makes me feel angry but then he kind of has to tell you as does basically every character in the show at some point or another how he feels because everything the original series used to show it has been stripped away and it legitimately sucks that Gordon Cormier has to waste so much of his time soliloquizing things that he should just be able to perform because holy crap can this kid ever perform someone in the Netflix casting department is clearly some kind of dark wizard because between him and inaki Godoy they keep finding these people who were just born to play anime heroes at just the right age to star in their adaptations it's kind of crazy though on the other hand they did miss the mark by like three decades with [ __ ] SP Ed here is actually a great example of just how wrong this whole thing could have gone Ang is after all also a weird little dude prone to bouncing off the walls sometimes literally and translated into a real human performance that could have easily been way too much but Cormier manages to capture the essence of the character in a more subdued grounded way that feels like a real kid his talent is seriously remarkable so it's a shame the script barely gives him any chances to actually play Ang which in turn gives Kio Ando Tarbell even fewer chances to play qara between Saka not being a jackass and Ang consistently staying on task she really has no no fuel for the fiery emotional outbursts that are supposed to define the character outside her relatively brief conflicts with jet and master paku and both of them are basically reduced to Side characters by the choice to blend their stories in with other episodes so yeah qara is just kind of there everything that happens between her and Jet now happens at the periphery of Sak's surrogate father story with Danny py as the mechanist which is truly inspire fired casting by the way whom jet wants to bomb to death for his traitorous dealings with the Fire Nation now and all of that takes place in omashu now where Zuko and iro are both sneaking around to you know capture the Avatar all of those plot threads eventually come together into a satisfyingly chaotic climax ending with iro and Ang both in jail and leading into the A and B plots of omashu part two where p reunites with and is tested by King bumi while while Zuko saves his uncle from the earth Kingdom prisoner Convoy also there's a SE plot where Saka and qara work out their watered down sibling issues down in the secret tunnel secret tunnel that bit kind of sucks except for the badgero badgero looked pretty cool but other than that I honestly really enjoyed how the omashu two-parter came together with the understanding that they probably had to blend all these plots together to just ify the cost of rendering a 3D omashu imagine doing all this to only tell one story there I think the ones they chose compliment each other very nicely the mechanists meddling with Fire Nation spies feels a lot more dangerous in a crowded city than an isolated Temple and helps to foreshadow the eventual fall of omashu having jet try to kill a character we actually know and love CU it's impossible not to love Danny py with a kid as an accepted casualty instead of some random civilians really underscores just how far the Freedom Fighters have fallen too and having iro get arrested to save Zuko instead of just because he got caught with his pants down heightens the drama of the rescue effort quite a bit and that really pays off in the second part especially which draws a very neat thematic through line between its exploration of io's past as the dragon of the West his many regrets and how Zuko saved him from them and this shows much darker take on boomi who's grown understandably tired and bitter after a hundred years managing a city at War and needs Ang to reignite his hope I wasn't here for the world more for you but I'm here now if you insist on making avatar for adults this is how it should be done instead of downplaying the innate innocence of Team Avatar use the extra flexibility of a tv14 rating the extra runtime of those hour-long episodes to set it in Starker contrast against the darkness of the war and the toll it's taking on the adults around them sadly this two-parter is the only part of the show that fully succeeds at or even really attempts that approach or at blending multiple episodes together for that matter the next two episodes adapt the winter solstice two-parter the blue spirit and some of the spirit world stuff from the siege of the north with just a little sprinkle of Bot of the water tribe on top so that Ang can get Shear shoed out of roku's Temple and takeen to iro and Zuko so that they can then take him to Xiao also the library owl's there for some reason I guess cuz in this version Xiao doesn't Rob him Fire Nation just got Scrolls about the water trib's greatest weakness lying around collecting dust anyway uh they do a gag where Ang's the only one who can hear the owl and that's pretty funny it really feels like they just mashed four Random episodes together based solely on word association with spirits and that's a little crazy when you consider two of those episodes were originally part of the same two-parter but so much gets stripped out of roku's whole bit that it's barely recognizable now the whole thing's just about Ang asking how to save his friends from Co the face dealer no mention of San's Comet cuz obviously that would add a ticking clock to the story that it really can't afford to have with the real world ticking Time Bomb of Ang's puberty just so my friends got kidnapped by co ah well they're probably fued kid no way to beat him sure about that well I do got this one thing I stole from him that he would definitely trade all of his hostages to get back but other than that then the rest of the episode is just you know the blue Spirit only at the end and goes back to deal with Hai and Co it's just a real mess of a script made all the worse by how relatively clean the omashu episodes were that said there are still bits of those episodes that I really loved as an avatar fan Co and heyi for instance are both very convincing very creepy effects and George Decay even reprises his role as the face dealer which was a very nice surprise so nice I almost didn't notice that Ang just completely forgets hey exists after saving the villagers from Co so I guess there's still a rampaging mutant Panda Spirit around there for the them to deal with NE there's also a decent emotional wrinkle thrown in where monk gatu appears to guide Ang through the spirit world and he's like I'll see you again after I save my friends right and you know he won't it's super obvious but you still get a little sad when Ang comes back and his dad's ghost is gone plus the adaptation of the blue spirit is pretty solid all around even if it comes out a left field featuring probably the best martial arts choreography in the whole series and one genuinely great addition to Zuko's backstory in this version Zuko's crew are the very same soldiers whose sacrifice he objected to at the war council leading to the agai with his father and eventual banishment it's a small change but it makes them feel like a lot more than just random faceless firebending mukes which they very much were in the original our Prince that's returned on the other hand the change is a bit out of character for oai it's framed as an ironic punishment but he's still you know giving Zuko exactly what he wanted by saving those soldiers and setting up the prince he just effectively deposed with a personal retinue that all owe him their lives which seems unwise from a coup prevention standpoint but generally speaking this adaptation actually handles ozai's character and the whole Fire Nation side of Avatar's story really well even if the palace Intrigue subplot was only thrown in to get more use out of those expensive sets it ends up adding a pretty substantial layer to our understanding of the fire Lord's abusive parenting style and how that reflects his control of the entire country the fire lord de your performance below average set before oai sends aula out to hunt the Avatar and Conquer omashu we see him taunting his daughter with her brother's success suddenly withholding his affection and pretending like his banished failon has a real chance at taking back the throne because he found the Avatar just to make his favorite work a little harder and aula ends up mastering lightning bending as well as finally attaining her iconic blue flames as a direct response to that pressure it's not a huge addition to either character we're not learning anything about their relationship we couldn't from how oai treats her and Zuko at the start of book three but it does feel true to all the characters involved like it could have plausibly happened in the Canon of the cartoon which is a hell of a lot more than anyone can say for Flicks Boy net bop's filler content put a bullet in me now because you will never be manad enough to stand up for yourself don't you ever tell me I'm not man plus going back and forth with aula and oai behind Zuko's back gives Ken lung's Admiral Xiao more opportunities to be a delightfully duplicitous little rat I swear I will not rest until I hunt down these villains a Brazen crime perhaps unsurprisingly though the characters who benefit most from this increased focus on the Fire Nation are Zuko and iro who are played to Pitch Perfection by Dallas louu and Paul Sun Young Lee have you got a plan yet the plan is to reclaim what's rightfully mine so no plan I'm working on it Uncle these two are the single greatest Saving Grace of this entire adaptation like the casting and costume design in this series are pretty spot-on across the board but as with Ang they 11 out of 10 nailed it with these two and unlike Ang they're actually written like themselves if a bit more stilted the love between them feels so genuine and warm whenever they're on screen together and individually both actors fully understand the little eccentricities that Define their roles the show even gives them a few new quirks that feel very in keeping with the original series like the fact that hunting the Avatar has turned Zuko into something of a lowkey avatar otaku with a figurine collection and everything it's real cute how Maddie gets about Ang Steel in his notebook now I don't want to get your hopes too high for this stuff most of their added screen time amounts to extended scenes that dig a little deeper into their personal traumas than the anime had time for but just giving these actors more time to live in those emotions and their roles kind of makes those scene extensions worthwhile they play it that well when leaves from the vine hits in this show it hits it feels a bit silly to say that two really good casting choices can save an entire show but Zuko and io's relationship is so vital to the soul of Avatar that I'd argue this alone elevates what would otherwise be like a three to four out of 10 adaptation to a solid six maybe even 6 and a half no matter how much I'm bothered by how much this show takes away away from Team Avatar I can't help loving every moment these two are on screen and I think a lot of Avatar fans out there will agree that the show is worth at least checking out for them and the rest of the Fire Nation alone though personally if you do I'd suggest skipping right to episode three you won't miss anything on the flip side if you're not an avatar fan already you really should just go watch the original series but if you do end up up watching this one by accident you will be able to follow the plot easily enough and you'll probably be as entertained as you would be by your average arrowe series it's not a great adaptation or show for that matter by any stretch but there are enough things to like about it that on the whole I'm okay with it existing now let me explain why it shouldn't exist unless no even if you've been living under a rock for the last decade you probably know that Disney's been raking it in hand over fist with artistically bankrupt liveaction rehashes of beloved animated Classics I'm definitely not the first YouTuber to say this and I definitely won't be the last but I hate these [ __ ] things and everything they represent these things are almost invariably a massive waste of time both for the artists who could be making cool new things things instead and the audiences who could just watch the invariably better original versions The Only Reason any of these things exist and the only reason they make money is because of the widespread misguided perception that animation is a lesser cinematic art form for kids and if you want to enjoy these stories as an adult it's got to be real people in them now Avatar is a bit of an exception in that regard there has been a lot of enthusiasm over the years for the idea of a liveaction remake from the fans and even creators of the original series before they walked off the project of course a lot of people who worked on this clearly have a ton of love and respect for the source material and wanted to do it justice and for all its faults the finished product still has a soul which is more than I can say for most of Disney's crap but even with all that passion behind it look how much had to be compromised to to just kind of make this story work as a midst streaming show Ang can't run around and play cuz every time he hops on an air scooter or pets a critter the director's got to go talk to an accountant for the same reason Opa and Momo's roles have basically been reduced to cameos every character Outside the Fire Nation has had some defining feature of their personality Stripped Away to keep the tone consistently adult and worst of all the world of Avatar this vast strange Place teeming with possibilities had to be compressed down to like eight or nine CGI backdrops a handful of small buildings and the Backwoods around Vancouver some of the physical sets do look really good like the mechanist workshop in Zuko's cabin and that makes me wish the whole thing could have been done practically but that's just not well practical when it comes to Impossible cityscapes built out of magic like omashu or the northern water tribe those models are impressively faithful to the original background art with an equally impressive amount of added detail but only when you look at them in a vacuum next to real people the unreality of these sets is instantly glaringly apparent so overall while there's way more realistic detail in this Avatar than this Avatar because the level of detail isn't consistent between the characters backgrounds and effects this shot of guys standing on a bleeding edge Sound Stage feels way less believable than this world made out of drawings and that's the Crux of the problem with all these liveaction remakes you're pretty much always spending more money to get less of something that looks and feels worse in this case over the exact same runtime as the original animation which starkly illustrates what a net negative the whole adaptation process was for Avatar and as for the parts it did manage to cover they're all at best pale imitations of the original so what's the point what's the point of remaking something in live action when most of the most memorable moments are so impossible to film you either have to cut them or just animate them again worse anyway what's the point of casting a perfect Ang if you can't afford to let him be Ang what's the point of telling a story we've already heard before in what was already one of the most streamed shows on Netflix money yeah it always is well almost always Netflix one piece had a clear Point beyond that to condense the original sprawling story to something more manageable and present it to an audience unfamiliar with the source material Speed Racer pioneered a bold new style of film making that still feels ahead of its Time battle Angel Alita was a personal passion project for James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez that actually does manage to fully capture the look and feel of the original Manga and Anime but only because it's running on Avatar Tech like blue people Avatar not this Avatar actually it kind of seems like James Cameron keeps making Avatar movies to fund the Elita adaptation which is just it's super cool even Netflix Death Note had something to say about American culture and the Lone Wolf phenomenon using the original death notes premise also the director clearly had a very powerful vision of a more realistic version of light and ru's first meeting all of those projects were born on some level from a real creative spark from Individual art artist with something to add to or say about the original idea and even if that doesn't turn out to be the something most fans wanted to see adaptations like that are pretty much always worthwhile in the long term but Netflix Avatar isn't really one of those like the Disney remakes Dragon Ball Evolution liveaction FMA heck the Shyamalan movie it exists mainly because the numbers suggested demand was there for some kind of liveaction extension of the brand and remakes take less thought than spin-offs this was never going to be anyone's favorite version of Avatar because it has no Ambitions Beyond playing to our Nostalgia for Avatar which it does pretty well at times it's honestly about as good as anyone could have reasonably expected it to be definitely better than the first movie Dragon Ball FMA and every Disney remake this side of the Jungle Book but in the grand scheme of art that's still a six out of 10 I can't help but think that the incredibly talented production team and cast who put this show together could have done so much more if only instead of asking what do we have to compromise to make a liveaction Last Airbender work they started by asking what stories can we tell in Avatar's world that fit the limitations of film like imagine a show or movie about the siege of Boss s say the fixed location means you can use more practical sets firebenders versus Earth Benders leans into the strengths of the bending effects and they already have a perfect iro heck they could have just made a whole show about just his life story and perspective on the hundred-year war with Ang and them as Side characters call it Dragon of the West I'd watch that but there's no point dwelling on what could have been as it stands the nicest thing I can say about the show that exists is it wasn't a waste of time I'm glad I got to see how it handled the Fire Nation plus a few of the more visually stunning fights and of course all the incredible work on the costumes and Props Plus the musical score it's got really good music but the painfully honest truth is despite all those good points I'm never going to watch it again cuz the cartoons right there like literally right there if you're watching it on Netflix and I think that's going to be true for most people who watch this show even the ones who do really like it some people will really like it though and I think any Avatar fan who can make it past the first two episodes will find at least one thing to love about it even if they end up hating it on the whole and the only way to find out how you'll feel feel is to give it a shot for yourself no YouTuber or Twitter blue engagement farmer can decide that for you all I can tell you is I liked it just barely enough as a hardcore Avatar fan and if I ever see this thing on an inflight Entertainment System I'm going to watch a Dwayne The Rock Johnson movie I'm Jeff th professional anime adaptation appraiser and for anyone who's curious on that big list I made last year of all the Hollywood anime stuff I'd put this in eighth place right ahead of Netflix bbob also one piece comes in second

Channel: Mother's Basement

Views: 988,735

Keywords: Mother's Basement, Anime, review, netflix avatar, avatar the last airbender, netflix avatar review, the last airbender, live action avatar, netflix anime, netflix live action, m night shyamalan, aang, sokka, katara, zuko, iroh, azula, ozai, zhao, momo, appa, avatar the last airbender review, cowboy bebop, netflix, one piece, netflix one piece, death note, live action anime, cartoon, netflix avatar bad, the last airbender netflix, avatar analysis, live action

Id: kQ0dUNb7CwY

Length: 48min 37sec (2917 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 03 2024