Seven episodes is not a season. I don't care, I don't care if each one is an hour long. Has it occurred to anyone that maybe we weren't supposed to be able to binge a season of television in a day?
That opening complaint aside, it's been a while since I did a written review of anything, and I happened to binge this yesterday so...yeah let's do this.
Okay, let's get the big questions out of the way first, before elaborating. Is it great? No. Is it at least better than season 1? Mostly. Does it at least look good? In places! That being out of the way, let's get to the meat of the matter. I am, unclear on the need for this show to exist. It feels very "Disney live-action remake" to me, and that's not a compliment. If you aren't a fan of the original show or otherwise don't have that to compare it to, you might find this entertaining, or at the very least, nice to look at now and then, but "it's entertaining as long as you're not the target audience" is damning by about as faint praise as faint gets.
I've never understood this fascination with live-action adaptations of properties that clearly weren't designed for live-action. Imagine if someone talking to you said, "Hey, remember that thing we loved as kids? Here it is again, with 50% more compromise and 80% lifelessness!" That's what these pitches feel like to me. I find it baffling that the only Netflix live-action adaptation to work really well has been One Piece of all things!
So I guess that sums up where I'm at, Netflix's live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender adaptation is, in my opinion, a series of compromise. The first season felt, to me like it was embarrassed to be what it was, which, in my opinion is always one of the worst forms of compromise because it's insulting to the target audience and comes off as insecure to people who have even a passing familiarity.
Season 2 is much better in that regard. I must say, I believe the source material may have done more to win the showrunners over this time around. That said, I think the show definitely could've done with at least ten episodes, and not just to spend more time in the world, which is, in places, beautifully realised (in other places it looks like they could've done with another pass or two, but let's not dwell on that.)
To explain my main issue with the series' runtime to anyone not familiar, I'll have to explain why people are still so enamoured with a 20 year-old Nickelodeon cartoon. The simple reason is, that 20 year-old Nickelodeon cartoon features some of the best character-writing ever contained within 23-minute episodes of television. Personal aside incoming so if you already know what I'm talking about, or just have little patience for rambling and don't want to hear part of my life-story, skip the next few paragraphs, I'll put some bold lettering where you can skip to.
I never caught Airbender on TV back then, I was more of a Cartoon Network kid. I typically had an hour and a half of TV time after school and I spent it with Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy followed by two episodes of Dragon Ball Z before I retreated to my room to play videogames and not do homework.
I did happen to put Avatar on once, one day, and do you know which episode was on? The Great Divide. The universally agreed-upon singular episode we don't talk about. It wasn't terrible to be fair, it just didn't sell me on the show. It came across as a generic kids adventure series and I didn't think much about it after that.
I've always wanted to be a writer, so a decade or so later I got (and remain) quite into writing videos on YouTube. My favourites are Overly Sarcastic Productions and Hello Future Me both of whom frequently referenced Avatar so I thought "I should probably watch this show." With all due apologies to the friends who recommended it to me for my not giving it a chance when they said to, you were right, all of you were right.
Yeah, it ended up being really good, even to my 25+ year-old self. It was still kids media, so certain preset parameters must exist. But it was kids media that respects its audience, in the vein of something like Star Wars: The Clone Wars or Animorphs (which I'm currently going through with my friend Dan every other week for Tome Raider, our book club series plug plug plug.) If you can keep in mind the target audience, and tolerate a bit of childishness in the main characters, who after all, are children, you'll find characters in here whose journeys will stick with you. A series building on foundations episode by episode until that wonderfully sad moment when it's over and you don't know what to do with yourself. That's the kind of show this was.
Okay, aside over, skip to here if you already knew all that stuff
So, season 2. For the most part, they have the aesthetic down, and I even like at least one of the changes made, but I do have to say that, even at an hour an episode, seven episodes leaves us with only half the runtime of the original that this is trying to tell the same story as, which means cuts have to be made. That didn't have to be a problem, it can be done, but unfortunately, season 2 falls a bit short. I'll get to that later but I want to talk a little more positively about it first.
As I mentioned, they've got the look down pat when it counts, the casting is incredible and some of the establishing shots are great. This season feels much less ashamed of the source material and some scenes are adapted beat-for-beat, line-for-line.
One of the big changes is the timeline. The original story takes place over a year or two, I think. Obviously, that's not workable in a live-action format where the cast ages in real time, so they incorporated time-skips to account for that. Good change, you'd be surprised how often people don't account for child actors ageing.
Unfortunately that's about the only change that enhances immersion rather than detracting. There is one that is fun, but in their haste to get through the story they omit important character moments. Even some of the ones they keep in are either muted or outright uncharacteristic.
The one spoiler I will give is that they cut out the Avatar State training with the Guru, the part where, in the original, Aang is told to let go of his attachment to Katara, he chooses not to, even at the cost of never being able to use his greatest weapon as long as he holds on. I understand that it was cut for time, but without it, his decision to use the Avatar state later carries much less weight than it originally did.
I bring that example up specifically, because A), technically telling you something that doesn't happen is a much less egregious spoiler, and B), it's a microcosm of this show's compromises to fit a reduced runtime.
So many of the moments we remember fondly from the show are in here, but they don't carry the same weight because important context is changed or outright missing. It's not always in aid of pacing either, important decisions are simply not made. Also, minor spoiler, Aang is uncharacteristically unkind to his friends towards the end. I get that they're arguing in that scene but no version of him, including this one, would've believably gone that far before he did. That moment really took me out of it, what can I say?
There are improvements made over season one in characterisation (particularly early on) but unfortunately not in dialogue, it's...I don't know what to call it. I'm thinking of one scene in particular I'll say "the metalbending scene" and if you haven't seen it that should probably be vague enough, that seems like it was going for grandiose but just came off...well...
I'm reminded of hearing once that entertainment executives suggested that characters should state aloud what they're doing in dialogue in case "someone is making spaghetti or something" (apparently ignoring that they would need to turn on the show and deliberately ignore it for that to happen, and the fact that audio-description has been an option since streaming began) at least that's how I remember it.
That particular moment strikes me as the writers having been worried that the audience wouldn't understand what was going on, and had the character just...announce it to camera. It's presented as a moment of triumph but feels like one of exposition. That's probably the main offender but he dialogue, while generally not as bad as that is still fairly clunky throughout. That said, there isn't a single actor involved in this that isn't doing their damnedest to make it work, the performances are unquestionable.
I didn't want to fixate on the negatives, but I find myself with little else to actually say, as even the good parts of this show are muted versions of the original. There is enough good to be going on with though, I did enjoy it despite my misgivings, and if you don't have the attachment to the original source that I do, I can see the uninitiated having a good time with this.
Overall, season 2 represents a big improvement, but leaves a lot of room for more. If you didn't rage-quit season one, you might actually enjoy this one, and if it's the only version you've seen, you might even be taken in by it.
What could've been though.
