Get Bent

No one really had any idea what to expect from Netflix’s live action version of Avatar: The Last Airbender. The original animated showrunners leaving this project early in production several years ago wasn’t a great sign. But the live-action One Piece show seemed to turn out all right, and the marketing for the live action Avatar has been pretty good. At least, the costumes and the special effects looked the way they should. Everything else, well…the horribly confused purpose of live action Avatar is confirmed pretty quickly when this allegedly PG show based on a children’s cartoon opens with a 20-minute sequence wherein a large number of people are horribly burned alive. It was important that we see this, otherwise we might not be sure that the Fire Nation is bad, as our Airbending hero, the Avatar Aang, sets out on his hero’s journey.

I hesitate to really compare the live-action Avatar to its animated equivalent, since in theory this version should stand on its own. But live-action Avatar greatly complicates any such attempted reading by itself including so many elements for little obvious purpose except that they were in the cartoon, jumbled together in ways that border on the incomprehensible. The Omashu storyline features characters that the original animated showfeatured in an episode about a squatter’s colony in a mountain temple, another episode about a resistance cell that attacks Fire Nation colonists, and another episode about an eccentric king who forces Aang to undergo various weird challenges for reasons that were a plot twist in the original but this version just explicitly states.

Live-action Avatar appears to be trying to go for a more serious, grimdark kind of vibe by merging story elements in this way, its version of Omashu suffering from terrorist attacks, foreign subversion, and incompetent leadership. But the show’s moralist theming hasn’t likewise evolved to account for the change in the worldbuilding. Aang’s solution to every problem is still to optimistically rely on help from his friends and avoid killing people. At times the cartoon presented this  as naive. In the live-action show, the only challenges to Aang’s ethos come in the form of characters whose plans and reasoning are so obviously stupid and poorly thought and wrong we can’t take them seriously.

This version struggles with the idea that people can disagree on important issues without being either dumb or evil. This is a very modern idea that ironically enough flies in the face of possibly the main arc which made the original cartoon popular to begin with- the villains of Zuko and Uncle Iroh, who try hunt Aang down in the first season only for their political situation to become ambiguous in subsequent seasons after they run afoul of Commander Zhao, who has the same goal of advancement in the Fire Nation military hierarchy.

Live -action Avatar seems to take for granted that the only important part of Zuko and Iroh’s characterization that they eventually turn sympathetic, getting their arcs perfectly backwards. In the original outline for the animated Avatar, Iroh was actually a close, deep cover ally of Fire Lord Ozai. They revised this plan because of the powerful performance of the voice actor Mako in Iroh’s role; he perfectly blended fatherly patience and wisdom with silly dad jokes.

Paul Sun-Hyung Lee is comparably flat in this role- which is a bit surprising. On paper, he’s perfectly cast, since his goofy dad character on Kim’s Convenience is about as close to a live-action Iroh that anyone has ever done. In general the acting in live action Avatar is quite flat to such a broad extent I can’t really blame any of the younger actors for their inexperience. Even Daniel Dae Kim as Fire Lord Ozai comes off more like a small business tyrant than a genuine psycho, which in a way is impressive given how much of his screentime is just about him contriving excuses to give children burn injuries.

The uselessness of older characters in general is one of the live action Avatar’s odder departures. Whereas in the animated series, we understand from the beginning that Aang needs to engage in rigorous training in order to fulfill his destiny as the Avatar, the live action show is remarkably blasé about the notion that becoming the Avatar requires anything aside from Aang just being himself. We see Aang spend more time talking about what a terrible student he was in his old life than we ever see him applying himself to do better in this one.

I didn’t realize until the finale that Aang manages to go the entire first season without ever actually waterbending at all. There’s no obvious reason for this change except to just emphasize that Aang is the chosen one, here to break the wartorn world ruined by bigoted adults–so of course he doesn’t need to learn anything from them.

His new best friends, Sokka and Katara, are in the same awkward position of starting the the show out with the same outlook and never changing it. Sokka is a teenage Water Nation warrior whose bluster hides deep insecurity over his perceived lack of real skill. We know this mainly from the spirit quest episode, since Sokka never seems particularly incompetent or even upset at his relative incompetence in any other episode. Sokka’s sister Katara is even more boring because she lacks even that pretense of low confidence.

From studying a single water scroll offscreen, Katara becomes a waterbending master in time for the finale. Like Aang, she’s so easily able to figure everything out on her own there’s no obvious reason why she should even want to train with anyone else, except to have a storyline about how the Northern Water Tribe has sexist division of labor. Yes, I know this was also in the original animated series, but that sequence compels because Katara gets enraged and goes far beyond what she even thought she was capable of, precisely because she’s hellbent to improve her abilities at any cost. The live action version is weirdly low-stakes by tonal comparison.

The live-action versions of Sokka and Katara almost never emote by comparison. They don’t get angry or snap at each other or get jealous. The closest we ever get to that are a few scenes where Sokka and Katara have mild sibling arguments over character traits that were present in the animated show, but counterintuitively absent in this one. Any genuine potential conflict is simplified so much as to practically be nonexistent. The showrunners seem terrified that depiction equals endorsement, and so the series can’t conceive of a sympathetic character changing their mind about something through lived experience.

That much is a political culture change from 20 years ago that almost justifies the existence of a new version of Avatar: The Last Airbender. But the comparison is far from a flattering one. This is a more adult version of the show mainly in the sense that it depicts children burned alive on screen. The show has technically convoluted yet thematically simplified everything else about the narrative in such a way that it seems unlikely to appeal to an older audience, or, for that matter,  even a younger one.