Live Action Avatar the Last Airbender

Realistically, time wise, they only had to cut 2 hours from the original series’ first season. These episodes are an hour long and there's 8 of them, so literally change nothing about how much time you allowed yourself and you could have given us an almost beat for beat adaptation without cutting anything important. Instead so far, we have gotten an obscene amount of unnecessary context and exposition that does nothing but call the audience stupid. If you need these things spoon fed to you like this then you don’t need to be watching tv you need to be either in therapy, or staring at a blank wall because you are too stupid to consume anything that takes brain cells.

The first scene between Katara and Sokka was all kinds of wrong. They added such a weird tone to their relationship, like Katara wasn’t always the more mature one? Like sure you didn’t outwardly make Sokka sexist but you definitely made your writing misogynistic. Also not only is Sokka wildly miscast because he lied about being native but this is a grown man…Sokka is a kid, his voice cracks, he is a child. What the fuck is this casting?

Also I’ve seen some internet discourse on this but they absolutely made Aang fly and it's so stupid, it's literally why he has his glider and Appa because in fact, can not fly.

The iconic intro is said by gran gran 30 minutes in? Weird and terrible choice.

We at least kept the music the same or similar, that really helps tie the show together and they made everything else weird so I guess I'm glad they kept something.

God this dialogue is so cheesy and terrible. “There's more to being a leader than just catching fish” That could have been an okay line if the delivery wasn’t so terrible. I’m sorry but someone needs to take responsibility for this, is it a terrible script, horrible actors, or an unqualified director? It is probably all three. But I really am going to blame the director, because Katara and Aang give us glimpses of emotion but then the rest of their delivery really falls flat. There is no way that all of the actors are this terrible, the director is definitely responsible for making these guys so flat. Clearly the director didn’t understand the assignment.

I will admit that the air bending is probably the hardest to translate into live action because it's literally air. That said I still believe that they could have done more to make us see it.

The bending looks good, the problem is that the cinematography surrounding it sucks. Why are we zooming in so close to the element as it flies away? Do you not trust your work? Do you think if the audience actually gets to see what's happening that we’ll hate it?

Fast forward to the air temple I guess, that’s fine. The transition into the avatar state and Aang losing control was actually done really well. I actually like the change from Katara being the one to calm him to his mentor because at this point he and Katara don’t have any connection so it just makes more sense.

Visually I think the show is beautiful, the bending cinematography is super weird so I’ll go ahead and give the overall visuals an 8/10. The casting seems like it was mostly fine but the director did not let these kids act at all and the show is suffering for it. Zuko is the only one that seems to fit his character. Most of the dialogue is really…questionable. I am hoping that this improves over the season but I honestly highly doubt it.