Avatar: The Last Airbender Review: This Netflix Remake Is an Insult to Everyone Involved

It's hard to identify even one truly successful detail in Netflix's Avatar: The Last Airbender.

While the original Nickelodeon series depicted its world using colorful, expressive animation, this live-action remake exists in a gloomy morass of flat lighting and soulless CGI. Instead of well-realized characters exchanging lively banter, we're treated to clunky exposition and an overabundance of miserable conversations about war. Vast swathes of world-building are simply edited out.

Things pick up speed in the final few episodes, but either way, you're still watching a Spirit Halloween knockoff of a much better show. For longtime fans and newcomers alike, there's no reason to watch Netflix's Last Airbender when you can just stream the animated series instead. 

The original Last Airbender, which aired for three seasons in the late 2000s, earned praise for its memorable characters, imaginative setting, spellbinding music, and effervescent sense of fun. Its cross-generational appeal made it a valuable Hollywood commodity, which is why we're now saddled with two different flavors of terrible live-action remake. M. Night Shyamalan's 2010 movie infamously cast white actors in roles that were meant to be Asian or Indigenous American. Netflix made sure to avoid that problem, but the new show finds plenty of other ways to screw up. 

3.8

Avatar: The Last Airbender

at Netflix

Like

• Dallas Liu makes his mark as the sympathetic antagonist Prince Zuko

Dislike

• The compressed storyline eliminates most of the original show's charm and humor
• Ugly lighting and CGI
• Transforms a delightful children's fantasy series into forgettable Netflix slop

Structured around the ever-popular Hero's Journey quest formula, The Last Airbender takes place in a world divided into four elemental nations: earth, air, fire and water. Modeled as a kind of magical martial art, some people can "bend" one of those elements, an innate talent that takes extensive training to perfect.

Airbenders glide and spin, achieving gravity-defying feats. Waterbenders fling shards of ice or soak their opponents with a sudden jet from a nearby stream. Earthbending is all about weight and impact, while firebending is flashy and direct. Only the Avatar can wield all four elements, harnessing them to promote peace and spiritual balance.

12-year-old Aang (Gordon Cormier) is the current Avatar, a cheerful kid raised by pacifist Airbender monks. He faces the intimidating task of ending a century-long war perpetrated by the tyrannical Fire Nation. Accompanied by two friends from the Inuit-inspired Southern Water Tribe, he explores the world while fleeing the Fire Lord's short-tempered teenage son, Zuko (Dallas Liu), who is desperate to capture the Avatar and earn his father's approval.

To Last Airbender fans, the Netflix show's storyline will feel familiar yet unsatisfying. It truncates and reorders key points from Aang's early adventures, traveling on his flying bison, Appa, with his friends Katara (Kiawentiio) and Sokka (Ian Ousley) — a budding waterbender and her goofy older brother. This time around, they receive far less character development, and instead of being a lovable companion, Appa is little more than a mode of transport. (As we know from countless "live-action" Disney remakes, photorealistic CGI is the kiss of death for adorable cartoon animals.)

You can explain the remake's narrative problems using simple math, exposing how Netflix squanders its own runtime. Clocking in at about seven hours, this remake is only slightly shorter than Season 1 of the original show and covers similar territory. But while Netflix splits that time over eight episodes, Nickelodeon aired 20 episodes per season: bite-sized chapters balancing longform arcs with short adventures, character-focused subplots, and comedic detours.

Netflix's version plows ruthlessly through "important" narrative milestones, eliminating much of the source material's vibrancy, depth, and imagination. Disguised in the trappings of grown-up TV, it's a far less sophisticated piece of storytelling. 

Helmed by Albert Kim (Sleepy Hollow) after the original show's co-creators quit over creative differences, Netflix's Avatar feels like the CliffsNotes highlights of a more rewarding work. Beloved locations are reduced to mediocre CGI backdrops. Katara and Sokka are woefully oversimplified. And with a few exceptions, most of the bending scenes just aren't particularly interesting to watch.

The Last Airbender's world-building drew a lot of inspiration from the wuxia (historical martial arts) genre, offering an obvious blueprint for live-action stunts. Plenty of Chinese wuxia or xianxia (mythic fantasy) dramas feature elaborate, fantastical martial arts sequences. However, Netflix's Last Airbender team didn't have access to that artistic infrastructure and skillset. Despite recreating the distinctive choreography for various bending techniques, the show's action scenes lack visual flair. There's no pleasure in watching people fling gouts of blurry CGI fire across a poorly lit soundstage.

Dallas Liu gives the standout performance as Zuko, benefiting from visibly superior combat skills and the show's most interesting arc. Zuko's angsty, morally conflicted role translates well to Netflix's more mature tone, leaning into his family drama and rivalry with Commander Zhao (Ken Leung), an ambitious Fire Nation officer.

Meanwhile, young Gordon Cormier often feels a little stilted as Aang, something we can partly blame on the format. Aang's high-energy, fun-loving personality works well in a children's cartoon with exaggerated body language and stylized superpowers — less so in a live-action drama with far less comedic content. 

The depressing thing is, The Last Airbender's problems were entirely predictable. Live-action remakes have a notoriously high rate of failure, usually because they're cynical cash grabs rather than sincere attempts at reimagination. Studio executives see the success of something like Ghost in the Shell or The Lion King and try to replicate it with an artless copy.

All too often, this goes hand in hand with the idea that animation is somehow unserious or childish compared to live action. This subtext is unmistakably present in Netflix's Avatar, whose grittier tone and longer episodes render it unsuitable for younger kids.

Dark themes were always present in the Nickelodeon show: death, genocide, abusive parents, authoritarian regimes. Yet the outlook was optimistic and energetic, poking fun at its own characters and embracing a sense of childlike wonder. By contrast, the remake offers a facsimile of an "adult" drama, coupled with shallower world-building and a palpable absence of fun. And like so many sci-fi/fantasy shows right now, it spends Game of Thrones money (allegedly $15 million per episode!) to create something with zero aesthetic personality. 

When I find myself fixating on shoddy production values — in this case, patchy VFX, bad lighting, and cheap-looking costumes — I make sure to ask why this stuff feels like a problem. If you love classic Star Trek or Doctor Who, you're obviously not bothered by cardboard sets or dubious prosthetics. Why? Because these shows tell great stories. We love the characters, we care about their struggles, we laugh at their wacky escapades.

In the right context, we'll happily ignore (even embrace!) any amount of low-budget visual malarkey. But that clearly isn't happening with Netflix's Last Airbender, for two obvious reasons: We have something better to compare it to, and this show simply doesn't have anything else to offer. Its thin writing and lack of emotional resonance provide a poor distraction from its technical flaws, reiterating that there's no good reason for this remake to exist in the first place.

Premieres: Thursday, Feb. 22 on Netflix
Who's in it: Gordon Cormier, Dallas Liu, Kiawentiio, Ian Ousley, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, Daniel Dae Kim 
Who's behind it: Albert Kim (showrunner), Michael Goi and Roseanne Liang (directors)
For fans of: Disappointment
How many episodes we watched: 8 of 8