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Variations Can be difficult, especially when the source material is animated. Often, they are criticized upon appearing, because they often feel like they are faking or turning the original into something it is not. Seeing something you grew up with lose its identity can be a frustrating prospect, and things get even worse when you can’t really let it go.
Last weekend, I saw the last Airbender, M. Night Shyamalan’s 2010 Nickelodeon adaptation Avatar series. I made an active choice to avoid the film at the time, primarily because the cast was horribly whitewashed. And other than watching the last 15 minutes forever on TV, I never watched it in its entirety. Now that I’ve done it, after years of hearing it described as the worst thing ever… it’s just a mediocre adaptation. There’s nothing remarkable about it being bad, except for how it sure sucked for an entire generation of kids. To be honest, I was a little disappointed that it wasn’t actively worse, but then I started thinking about it Why The film and its evil remained in the minds of the audience for a long time.
In the mid and late 2000s, studios were trying anything they could possibly do with the same effect. harry potter Movies. At that time, films based on children’s books were preferred. eragon And The Spiderwick Chronicles cured or finished, and until dragonball evolution Despite anime having hurt Hollywood’s aspirations for a decade, the medium had yet to fully evolve. Original Avatar The show arrived at the right time in 2005: it resembled anime enough to be different, but without any of the negative aspects associated with anime at the time. And what made it feel even more special at the time was that it was actively aging with its audience, something that cartoons at the time weren’t really doing.
Avatar It was a show for 11-year-olds, and it was creative in the way that good shows often are when they come at you at the right time. the last airbender The film was clearly aimed at fans of the show, which ended in 2008. Two years was plenty of time for some curiosity about the original show to begin… which made the movie all the more heartbreaking. kills. Whatever small bright spots it does have, such as Dev Patel and Aasif Mandvi trying to deliver performances as Zuko and Zhao, they are quickly overwhelmed by a movie that makes it clear it’s going to be a stinker. The movie is going to happen.
It was never going to be easy to condense a 20-episode series into a movie, and it would be foolish to think that the movie would contain as much of it as possible. But it’s still quite shocking to see this film adapt a few episodes and leave it at that – a half-hearted effort made even worse. The “best” of the group is really only the attack on the Northern Water Tribe at the end, and that’s really only because the movie does a good job of giving a sense of scale to Aang’s water-bending big tidal wave. (But even that doesn’t impress as much as giant water kaiju In the finale of the show.)
In that sense, I can understand why series creators Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino would team up with Netflix to take another live-action take on their work. (After separation from Netflix “creative differences,” they headed to Nickelodeon to move on Avatar Studiowhere they are developing Avatar animated film, among other projects.) As far as the general public is concerned, it feels strange to still be giving oxygen to a 2010 film; At its best, the premise of Netflix’s upcoming live-action content — an eight-episode series created without Konietzko and DiMartino, and arriving on the streamer on February 22 — really only has us thinking, “Well, this last one. is better than.” but the bigger Avatar The series largely recovered from this around the third season. legend of korra, And it’s not like it’s ever going to be reexamined star wars Fox’s prequels or several pre-MCU Marvel movies.
The Last Airbenders The biggest mistake was that it didn’t actually do what it did right in terms of the source material or even have its own new spin on things to distract from what it lacked. As an adaptation, it commits the cardinal sin of existing for its own sake and not being additive in any real way. Overall, it’s just dull and annoying – but not enough to warrant 14 years of resentment.
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