Warning: I have watched the entirety of the Netflix adaptation of Avatar: the Last Airbender. While this post isn’t heavy on the details, if you haven’t watched yet, I would suggest you do so without my personal opinion coloring your reception of the new show.

Aren’t there enough people out there telling you what to think? Go watch the show and form your own opinion. Then come back and tell me how wrong I am! =)

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Still here? Cool, let’s go!

I’ll start here: I got into Avatar: the Last Airbender quite late. My kids watched it when it was airing on Nickelodeon, but I wasn’t able to watch it with them. I finally got to it when it arrived on Amazon Prime and the whole family had a very enjoyable month where we ticked off a couple or three (or four) episodes a night.

On the whole, I found the original series to be a wonderful take on elemental magic, cast over a panoply of quasi Asian cultures, and centered on a tight group of young friends determined to beat all the forces arrayed against them. It had the same kind of heart and joy I experienced when first reading books like the Harry Potter series, or the Camp Half-Blood Chronicles. Despite being aimed squarely below my age bracket, the show didn’t shy away from hard lessons, and it carried the central characters through plausible, satisfying arcs.

A:tLA is also one of the few shows that stands up to repeat viewings. Honestly, I could watch the final fight between Zuko and Azula over and over. It’s an amazing climax to the development of both characters. (Next favorite is Mai and Ty Lee turning on Azula. Poor Azula.)

Of course, when Netflix announced they would be creating a live-action version of Avatar, the internet predictably exploded. The franchise is beloved by many, and fandoms are nothing if not protective of what it loves. Thankfully the trailers and news leading up to the release had been primarily good.

I did my best to keep my expectations down. Live-action adaptations have burned me before. I’m looking at you, Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell, and, the elephant in the room, the panned live-action movie of A:tLA from 2010. So I dove into the Netflix adaptation last week with a very large grain of salt on my plate.

How did it fare? Well, if my inability to stretch my viewing out over more than three days is any indication, then it did quite well. =) I had intended to watch one or two episodes a night to let the experience marinate, but I ended up watching five episodes on the second night, and finishing it off on the third.

Overall, the Netflix adaptation rates a solid B- in my book. It’s not the original by any stretch, but I think comparisons to the original don’t necessarily serve us well here.

The first two or three episodes were the most uneven, in my opinion. As the season went on it felt like the actors all found their footing, along with the writing and the directing. The biggest challenge the adaptation seems to face is whether to stay true to the kid-focused vision of the original animated series, or to stretch out into more adult themes and interpretations.

While the original series didn’t shy from tough lessons such as discrimination, sexism, and personal redemption, it maintained its center as an adventure tale centered around very young protagonists. But if you consider the setting, their world is at war, and that brings some very harsh realities that were only touched on lightly in the animation.

In today’s cultural landscape, it isn’t hard to see how the creators of the Netflix show would be tempted to delve into these themes. At its heart, the show is about five kids trying to stop a terrible war that’s been going on for a hundred years. There’s a lot of pain and trauma to unpack there.

I can see how the new show could have been adapted into a completely different beast, and I caught a hint of that in the first ten minutes of the first episode.

I mean, look at this scene. I nearly cheered when I saw it. It’s dark, dirty, gritty. If you’ve watched any recent SFF shows, you know this aesthetic. Our unnamed earth bender runs for his life and uses his skill in a clearly martial fashion, with intent to subdue/kill the pursuing fire benders. The scene ends with him sacrificing himself to ensure that the information he’s recovered can make it safely to his superiors. The earth kingdom is at war with the fire nation, and war requires awful sacrifice.

For most of the first season, the Netflix adaptation slews back and forth between the feel of the cold open, while also trying to recapture the innocent wonder of the original series. That gap is a lot of ground to cover, which makes many scenes feel strangely off kilter. There are several scenes where Aang, Katara, and Sokka revert to acting like the young kids they are. When it happens, a glimmer of that original magic is recreated, but it’s fleeting.

I’m not going to lie, if they had simply aged all the kids up into late teenagers and stepped fully into a new, grittier version of Avatar, I would have been more than intrigued enough to watch. At least with something like that, I could simply put the original series out of my mind, and judge the new adaptation on its own merits. (And with a much older Aang, I think the Aang-tara problem would be neatly solved.)

As I said earlier, the unevenness is more pronounced in the first episodes. By the second half of the season, the show is more adept at finding and staying in the middle ground. Yes, a lot of liberties are taken with the original story, but those are clearly in service to covering the same ground in fewer episodes. So far I haven’t seen any glaring changes that will mar the core of the story.

The quality of the visual production is great. The effects are clean, and the fight scenes are clearly choreographed. Some of the action scenes did leave me wanting, but I think again this was due to the push pull between the two conflicting visions.

Overall I’m happy with this new version of Avatar: the Last Airbender. I think it’s best to consider it as that, a new version. A reboot, if you will. The original will always be there for us to return to, but this new vision of our beloved franchise is here now and I think we should see where it goes.