Released: 25th July
Seen: 3rd August
From 2005 to 2008, the animated TV series Avatar: The Last Airbender was released to massive love and acclaim. It was a huge hit series, widely considered one of the best animated series of all time and spawned countless imitators. It also has spawned a stunning amount of attempted reboots, from the successful follow-ups like The Legend of Korra to the much less successful (indeed, downright hated) live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender movie made by M. Night Shyamalan and the middling live-action series that’s been rated as “Fine” by most critics. It seems obvious to anyone looking at this that the franchise is at its best and most loved when animated. Of course, eventually they were going to probably do something to follow up the adventures of Aang the Avatar and so we got Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, a perfectly fine animated movie that fans are gonna love… which is all it had to do, I guess.
Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender picks up several years after the main series where all the nations are living in harmony (that’s how you know this is fiction). The Last Airbender, Aang the Avatar (Eric Nam) along with his friends Katara (Jessica Matten) and Sokka (Román Zaragoza), who are technically in this film, are all helping run a new place called Republic City where all the benders can live together in harmony, until the powerless group known as the Denied attack. The Denied are looking for a special relic that can give them special bending powers and so Aang, his friends, the leader of the Fire Nation, Zuko (Steven Yeun) and an earthbender named Toph (Dionne Quan) all go off to find the relic. On the way, they find a person frozen in ice, it’s another Airbender named Tagah (Dave Bautista), meaning that Aang is not the last Airbender anymore. This makes things complicated for Aang who must deal with the emotions brought on by finding another Airbender while trying to find the relic and stop the Denied from getting it first… It’s complicated, it’s all very complicated.
Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender certainly tries to help make it easy for new viewers to jump in. It quickly explains all the core terminology, shows you what bending is, fills you in on the key points of backstory you’ll need for this to all make sense and then just kind of throws you in. It’s a rich world with a lot of backstory, it’s not a simplistic property to understand but even with the explanations being given it is still a little hard to really get into. If you go into this without knowing anything about the series, it’s probably not going to be the easiest watch. This is clearly supplemental material for the die hard fanbase who will relish getting to enjoy another adventure with their favourite team of benders but for those of us who maybe only have a passing knowledge of it, it’s gonna be harder work.
It certainly helps that Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender is absolutely gorgeous, proof that classic 2D animation can still be stunning to look at in an era where it feels like every animated film is CGI. The worlds look lush and full, the big action sequences have a real sense of intensity to them thanks to the animation. There’s an entire sequence that takes place above the clouds and it’s some of the most beautiful visuals I’ve seen in an animated film in the last year. You can feel the work that went into every single shot, that they were truly determined to make this look as big and bombastic as possible. They’ve clearly taken everything from the original and supersized it, which is really all you could ask for a feature-length follow-up to any TV series. This feels cinematic in all the best ways, it kind of sucks that images this beautiful will flounder about on Paramount+, possibly the worst of the major streaming services.
The big problem Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender has is that it feels really dense, like you have to know a lot about the original series to properly enjoy it which is fine for the fans but it’s not gonna really bring new people in. If anything, it kind of reminds me of that Breaking Bad movie El Camino, that was just a tacked-on ending to the series that you really needed to watch in full to understand. It feels like a story that they just threw out there because it’s been 20 years and they need to celebrate the anniversary somehow and this seems like the best option. Not saying it’s bad, but it does feel a little pointless. It’s almost like an alternate-universe take on Aang, here’s another airbender that’s been frozen in ice who we have to free and help with some big mission. There are three seasons of a better version of this story that you can watch anytime you want. Hell, that version makes better use of the side cast while this version is really just the Aang and Tagah show with an occasional guest appearance by the rest of the main cast and while I admit to not knowing a ton about the original series, that side cast is an important element that this film kind of pushes aside.
If you are a fan of The Last Airbender, then Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender is probably going to be right up your alley. It’s got a lot of charm to it, some brilliant animation and more than a few very cool scenes but boy, if you’re a casual viewer who hasn’t watched the show in a while, you might want to do a little bit of catching up first to really get in the zone for this one. It’s not bad, but it’s not going to be the thing people use to bring more people into the Airbender fanbase.
Movie Meister Reviews 