Retro Review: The Last Airbender

It is often hard to adapt one work to another, film adaptations are no exception to this. This is because when adapting a book, television series, or even video game to a medium such as film, it is very important to make sure of two things. The first is that the filmmakers should develop the adaptation with care to the fans of the original material. The second is that if the elements need to be changed from the source material, then those changes need to make sense to fit the story into a new, three-act structure. The developers of the 2010 film, The Last Airbender, did not seem to take either of these two things into account when they adapted a unanimously acclaimed animated television series called Avatar: The Last Airbender. The result was a blatantly rushed, nonsensical adaptation that not only fails to properly translate the source material to a new medium, but fails as a stand-alone film as well.

The series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, is a timeless story of a group of adventurers named Aang, Katara, and Sokka who set out to save their world from the evil Fire Nation. Each character is written well, animated well, and everyone gets their own story arc that they accomplish by the time the series is over with. The animation is done beautifully, in some cases looking precisely like a flowing Chinese ink painting when the situation demands for it. The backgrounds are given great detail and each area looks different from the next. The vocal range of the actors portraying their respective characters is impressive considering their youth. The action sequences felt engaging, and when a character controlled their respective element, it felt like the manipulation was a part of the characters themselves, an extension of their own body. Also, while it was an animated series on a station geared for children, the series dealt with dark issues such as genocide, murder, war, parental loss, and even contained a scene where a father burned his own teenage son’s face for speaking out of turn at a war meeting. Despite, or perhaps because of, the dark tones, the series gained a massive following. On the Internet Movie Database, a user-driven entertainment website, the series holds an average user rating of 9.1 out of 10, out of over eighty-four thousand users (IMDb).

By contrast, the same site holds the user rating of the 2010 film adaptation at 4.4 with a vote count of over ninety seven thousand users. In the opening line for the written, one-star review on his site rogerebert.com, Roger Ebert stated that The Last Airbender “is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented." Every single positive aspect one can have for the original series is completely reversed for the film. The actors speak their lines with such stilted lines and so little emotion that it is hard to be invested in the characters. The special effects are slightly impressive at best, and impossible to make out at worst, with there being no visual impact on the world around the characters from certain use of fire and water at times. The writing is hard to follow, with a narrator providing unneeded exposition for scenes involving her and her traveling party, even as we see the exact same thing she is describing on the screen at the same time. The original series had narration, but that was limited to the opening titles and even then was repeated each episode in the intro. The characters have no arc to them, no emotions are addressed, and critical scenes and characters are either cut out entirely or given such little care to them it makes one wonder if the director had ever watched the original series at all.

The story is overly condensed, which would make sense from a certain point of view considering the 10+ hour length of each season, but the film employs so many changes that make little sense that it is hard to understand why the filmmakers chose certain ideas. The big change from the series is apparent from the beginning. The 2005 series had a heavy Asian-styled influence, from the characters themselves to the world around them. The filmmakers, however, employed actors from all over the world, including Caucasian actors to play characters that, in the series, were of the Arctic “Water Tribes” with tanned-skin and an Inuit-based culture.

Another perplexing change to the film is the simple fact that the characters are portrayed as incompetent or completely different from their animated counterpart, especially in regards to the Fire Nation. Aang, the eponymous Avatar, is portrayed in the series as a joyful yet strong individual who has fun but also commits to his duty, which is helping others. The film portrays Aang without any of the joy and quirky personality that his counterpart has and seems to have him held back from using “waterbending” thorough the entire film whereas it was incredibly easy for him in the series. Katara in the series is a strong-willed young woman who holds the team together and has a wisdom beyond her years, while her brother Sokka is the comic relief, always bringing jokes to the table and coming up with inventive ways to defeat the enemy. The film removes these elements and makes these two characters interchangeable plot devices there only to provide exposition or move the plot forward. The Fire Nation is seen as incompetent and useless as well. In the series, they were a threatening force, able to shoot fire out of their hands at will and utilized clever tactics to imprison Earthbenders on heavily-guarded metal rigs far away from shore so that they couldn’t use the earth as a weapon. In the film, however, the Firebenders need to use an already-existing source of fire as a weapon and imprison Earthbenders in a rock quarry where they are surrounded by Earth. Even then, the Earthbenders need to get riled up to fight back through a speech from Aang, so it is not only the Firebenders who seem to have questionable characterization in the film.

In the end, Avatar: The Last Airbender is completely superior to its later adaptation, succeeding as beautifully-told story. The Last Airbender, on the other hand, is a failed adaptation in every meaning of the word, especially when compared to the series. Even without taking the bizarre changes into account, and not looking at it from an adapted standpoint, The Last Airbender does not even hold up as a standalone film due to its stilted acting and emotionless storytelling and will forever be an upsetting spot on the history of the Avatar franchise.

Let us hope Netflix learns this particular history lesson.