The Vapid Spectacle of Netflix's 'Avatar: The Last Airbender'

Image; Albert Kim Pictures, Rideback, & Nickelodeon Productions

The original Avatar: The Last Airbender is about a pan-Asian society where some genetically predestined individuals can learn a type of martial arts that allows them to manipulate the four elements (i.e., Earth, Fire, Air, Water). Each society specializes in an element-bending martial arts, and our series follows the Avatar, the only person who can master all four elements. The Avatar, who in the reincarnation is an airbender named Aang, is a cosmological figure who has been charged with the metaphysical task of keeping "balance" in the world.

The live-action Netflix series is retelling the exact plot beats of the original cartoon but in a hyper-condensed fashion. The original first season of the cartoon was twenty episodes long, while the live-action one only has eight. So, although the overall plot structure is the same, things have been understandably shuffled around. Most of the on-the-road aesthetic of season one has been abandoned for visiting some key locations, such as the Earth Kingdom fortress city of Omashu or the Northern Water Tribe's fantastical capital of Agna Qel'a.

The Netflix series isn't a good retelling. I honestly found it to be a struggle to get through. That's not a shocker to anyone following the critical reaction to the first season. While the original cartoon has a critical aggregate of nearly 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, the live-action reboot currently has one below 60%. It's just fine, the definition of 'mid,' 'meh,' or whatever your generational slang for mediocre may be. It's the perfect show to keep in the background while doing other things because it requires nothing of the viewer at all.

And yet, despite being critically panned, Avatar remains an intriguing spectacle. In fact, spectacle is at the heart of what makes this series so entertaining and such a disappointment.

Spectacle reigns supreme

For a pop culture commentator like myself who is interested in the political and philosophical messaging of media, we could spend a long time picking apart this series' supposed flaws. Maybe, like Jenna Scherer in AV Club, you find the pacing and dialogue to be off. Perhaps the defanging of the political content offends your sensibilities, as argued by Jessie Gender in her video essay The Avatar Remake Doesn't Understand Avatar.

Yet I hesitate to do so because I don't think the creators of the Netflix series put much effort into this show beyond ensuring it was bingeable. It's been a blatant cash grab from the start. The original creators of the animated series, Konietzko and DiMartino, left as showrunners of the live-action one in 2020 due to "creative differences" — Hollywoodspeak for not wanting your name attached to a bad project. And now that we've seen the final product, it's clear those concerns were valid.

For all its faults, the original show cared deeply about what it was trying to say, so much so that its creators had a sometimes hostile relationship with Nickelodeon executives. By the time the sequel series The Legend of Korra came around, the condensed last season didn't get an actual premiere on Nickelodeon but was dumped on their streaming service with little promotion.

However, the live-action show's number one focus has been on spectacle, by which I mean a product that is more concerned with being seen than about what it is. The point of a spectacle is not to think about what you are looking at but to be enraptured, transfixed, and almost taken over (see Society of the Spectacle).

Sometimes, these examples are small. For example, there is a slight pause with the introduction of Firelord Ozai, played by Daniel Dae Kim, a famous actor (see Hawaii Five-O) who long-term fans will recognize as voicing General Fong in the original Avatar cartoon. The pause is for the fans to comment on his appearance, and it's a common practice for modern blockbusters such as the MCU. Still, to those unfamiliar with who Firelord Ozai is, the scene lingers too long — a moment of spectacle that overtakes the filmmaking.

Overall, the text has a lot of similar exciting moments. It is very good at creating fantastic (though sometimes mixed) CGI and fight scenes, but there is no interest in the actual substance of what it says: it's just a vehicle for spectacle. The influencer Jessie Gender, in her commentary of the series, mentioned how this was reflected in one comment made by the actor who played Aang (Gordon Cormier), who had this to say on the Fire Nations genocide of the Air Nomads: "I think the Airbender genocide is really cool… Well, no! No! Not like that…I mean, yeah, my whole family's dead, of course. It's not a good thing, but watching it is going to be sick!"

Like Jessie Gender herself, I bring this up not to express how uniquely awful Cormier is (he's a teenager; don't harass him) but to point out that presenting the psychological horror of the Air Nomad genocide was not a priority. In the episode "The Southern Air Temple" of the cartoon, which deals most directly with the Air Nomad Genocide, Katara (Mae Whitman) and Sokka (Jack De Sena) spend a lot of the episode hiding the remnants of the genocide from Aang, so he can hold onto his childlike excitement of returning home after 100 years. This plan inevitably fails, and the viewer is left to see the horror on Aang's face as he stares at the sun-bleached bones of his massacred comrade, a "subtlety" described by its successor as tame.

But for all of showrunner Albert Kim's talk about wanting to show the horror of this genocide in real time, the emphasis of the Air Nomad genocide in the live-action series is clearly on the special effects and fight scenes — hence Cormier's reaction. We see charred corpses but also fantastic fire-bending and explosions that are a wonder to behold. The scene ends with an epic fight between an air-bending monk and a fire-bending warlord—fascistic violence that, from a cinematic perspective, feels more like we are supposed to be enraptured by than horrified.

That focus on spectacle impacts not only the subject matter but also how this show was made. There was an intense effort to manage old and potential new fan expectations. Sometimes, this care was immensely positive, such as making sure that this Asian and Indigenous-inspired show actually starred Asian and Indigenous actors (something both the "M. Night" Shyamalan movie and the original series were not always the best at).

And yet other times this emphasis on expectations was an active detriment to making good art, or even a good product. For all the talk of "actor fit," there appears to have been little attempt to connect actors to the actual material in the auditioning process. Showrunner Albert Kim talked in depth about how, like many current tentpoles, he had to write fake scenes for actors to audition because "this whole project was conducted under top secrecy." As Kim tells Hollywood Reporter:

“A lot of times they were reading off scenes about being in math class or playing basketball, stuff like that. I often joked with my producers that I wished we just compiled all of my fake scenes and we could create a whole new pilot by itself….A lot of times we weren’t, or at least I wasn’t, even listening to the lines being spoken, because they had nothing to do with Avatar. It was more about trying to envision these actors as the characters.”

When it comes to leads Aang (Gordon Cormier) and Katara (Kiawentiio), this approach painfully shows, as the acting is simply not there. They might have shined with different material, but in this show, their acting was often stale and lifeless. The decision to manage fan expectations (by building hype and preventing draft leaks to the public) was clearly more important than connecting with actors who were good fits. And no, it's not because there are not "good" Indigenous and Asian actors out there. I have seen enough works to know that justification to be a racist lie.

Everything about how this show was made feels backward. The series was created almost in a Frankenstein fashion, where the creators worked hard to ensure that Avatar's main plot remained unchanged and, from there, stitched together a story. As Albert Kim described to The Hollywood Reporter:

“Yes. The first thing I did was lay out all the episodes of the first season on a big whiteboard. We [the writer’s room] wrote them all out and what each was about, and then took a look at them, and sort of unraveled all of them. Then we looked at which of these threads go together where we find some thematic parallel between characters and storylines and scenarios, and how we could weave them back together to create something that felt more serialized.”

The focus was on keeping as many original plot beats intact as possible. And yet, while the plot elements remain more or less the same, the emotional arcs of the original series are distorted to the point of being virtually unrecognizable. In the cartoon, Aang spends seasons grappling with his role as Avatar, a plot point that is more or less resolved in a single episode. Sokka must overcome his sexism in the first season to become a better strategist, which in the live-action show is recast as not being a "good enough" warrior for his father, completely sidelining Kyoshi Warrior Suki in the process. The plot may be intact, but often, the soul of what made the cartoon so poignant does not make the transition.

However, you can be sure that all the nostalgic beats of the original series did make it. Fans will not miss characters like Jet or the Mechanist or renditions of the song Secret Tunnel. Even fan favorites such as Princess Azula and her friends are introduced a season early (cramming in more arcs in a series where, according to Albert Kim, one of the most significant constraints was time) so that OG fans could get excited about their introduction and say things like: "ooh, remember Azula? Remember Secret Tunnel? Remember this other series you loved?"

Again, what mattered more to this show's current creators was that this product was a spectacle to watch, and the show suffered (artistically, not commercially) as a result.

An unbalanced conclusion

We can spend all day bemoaning this show's mediocrity, but I hope you realize that this critique is about more than merely arguing "thing bad." If you take away anything, it's that the series' focus on spectacle above all else led to a frustrating product.

Yet, in the end, I don't know whether such criticisms even matter regarding this show's success. After all, the show's negative critical response has not dampened its prospects. Netflix's Avatar is allegedly the streamer's latest hit. According to Gizmodo: "the new series debuted on the streamer's English-language TV list with 21.2 million views and reached the top 10 in 92 countries." Although not officially announced by the time of writing, the greenlighting of a second season at this point is inevitable.

For all my complaints, this focus on spectacle exists for a reason. It's what our capitalist society runs on, a point you hopefully don't need the power of all four elements to understand.