Honestly it was enjoyable but to me completely misses the point of book 1’s journey.
Did Aang learn waterbending? No. Did Katara try to/struggle with teaching him while she was learning herself? No. Was Katara the strong female lead she was in the show? Basically the heart of the show? No.
Also I find the acting subpar. The more cold-ish faces clashing with experienced actors that embrace the goofiness is meh…
fuck this show, I am so sick of the constant live action reboot/remake garbage, avatar never needed to be remade or changed
I watched one episode and then gave up on it and finally started the animated version. I’m loving the original series so far.
While it has it’s own merits the live action doesn’t hold a candle to the original.
I don’t know how they managed to have less show in more screen time
The Netflix show has a runtime of 430 minutes. The original is 477 minutes. So it’s actually less.
This here is what bugs me so much about the adaptation, I’ve seen so many people defend the show “because they had to cover a lot of ground in such a short amount of time” the runtimes are so incredibly close it’s absurd how much Netflix botched it in favour of nothing.
Supposedly they argue it’s because they wanted to make Book 1 more exciting and “good like the other Books” which is a disservice to how good Book 1 was back then to make us excited about what comes next.
Obviously the episodic format of the original wouldn’t have translated well into live action and there were some moments that were expected to be cut, like riding the elephant koi or the fortune-teller episode, but the insane mish-mashing of episodes, especially during the Omashu stuff, was ridiculous. For example, between two scenes of Aang and Bumi walking through a hallway, we get Zuko chasing after Iroh’s captors, and the entire secret tunnel section, including the entire backstory of the city, and then it finally cuts back to Aang and Bumi arriving at their destination. All that comes at the cost of giving the audience a rushed and extremely watered-down cliff notes version of the original stories.
What was the backstory of the city
Oma and Shu were two lovers from feuding villages that were forbidden from seeing each other, but after learning Earthbending from the giant badgermoles, they went on to build an elaborate tunnel system in order to continue meeting in secret. Shu is killed during a conflict between the villages and Oma then uses earthbending to unify both sides, thus Omashu is founded.
The two lovers are originally male and female, but the adaptation ‘netflixes’ the couple into being two females instead. This of course has caused a stir between all sorts of opinionated folk. Personally, I found the change to be a half-assed attempt at inclusivity, it felt like someone just CTRL+F’d all the male descriptors and replaced them with female ones. It’s as if the series doesn’t already have plenty of representation they could have pulled from. Hell, they had Kyoshi on screen, they could have easily given her a line about “protecting your loved ones” and shown Rangi.
TIL they made a live action Avatar series, now I need to find a friend with Netflix
Don’t bother, it’s really not worth your time.
And I say that as someone that only fell in love with the OG three years ago and watched the live series all the way through. That’s to say, it’s not nostalgia talking, the OG series is just 100x better.
Not really. Imagine you take Avatar season 1, and have to cut a bunch of content for time. Now instead of trimming the fat and making a leaner, more focused S1 of ATLA, you trim out scenes integral to both the plot and character development and replace them with shorter scenes comprised entirely of verbal exposition.
Thats Netflix ATLA. Aang and Katara don’t come to terms with Aangs age and the reality of the war by exploring the beached fire navy ship, they just all stand around in a room and Gran Gran somehow tells them all that.
Sokka and Suki don’t butt heads over Sokka’s childish behavior, only for him to be humbled and realize what a fierce warrior she is, and later they start to have feelings for eachother, instead they just do martial arts together and like each other because the script says so.
They don’t head to the North Pole so that Aang (and by extension Katara) can learn waterbending, with them both learning to waterbend together on the way, instead they leave the water tribe village because… of no reason, and then after stopping in Kyoshi, Aang gets a vision that the northern water tribe will be attacked so he goes there to warn them. Aang doesn’t learn any water bending during the journey, Katara inexplicably becomes a master during the journey even though she’s not learning it with Aang even, and when they reach the northern water tribe, they somehow already know about the invasion, so there was actually no reason for Aang to go to the northern water tribe at all.
The whole show is like that. I understand the decision behind having the cut out the world building bits like penguin sledding, and riding the sea serpent, and all the junk not associated with the journey. But they didn’t just cut out the filler, they cut out entire plot points, motivations, and character arcs and just replaced them with choppy exposition delivered via poorly read dialogue.
I took a screen shot of your comment so I can show it to people who want to try and tell me “it’s not that bad.” You summed it up perfectly and so eloquently.
I didn’t have high hopes, but I have been a little irritated by the fact that people seem to be annoyed that I don’t like it. I don’t know why I have to lower my standards for a bad adaptation just because people think, “it’s hard to do an adaptation.” I have heard the live action one piece was fantastic, so I am sure it’s possible, although I don’t think it’s necessary to do live action adaptations of any of these great animes.
It seems Netflix and/or article are comparing it to One Piece numbers to say it is not doing as well.
Netflix’s live-action adaptation of the Nickelodeon’s hit animated series “Avatar: The Last Airbender” hit 19.9 million views from Feb. 26 to March 3, which earned it its second week at No. 1 on the Netflix Top 10. However, this marks a 6% decrease from the 21.2 million views it debuted with the week before, when it was only available for four days.
The viewership drop doesn’t bode well for the big-budget series, as Netflix’s largest titles typically grow in viewership between their debuts and their first full weeks of of availability. For example, Netflix’s live-action adaptation of the manga “One Piece” debuted with 18.5 million views in its first four days, then held No. 1 with 19.3 million views the week after.
