Adaptations might be tough, notably when the supply materials is animated. As a rule, they’re reviled upon reveal, as a result of they usually really feel like they’re going by way of the motions or twisting the unique factor into one thing it’s not. It may be a dismal prospect to see one thing you grew up with lose its identification, and issues get even worse when you may’t actually let it go.
Final weekend, I watched The Last Airbender, M. Night time Shyamalan’s 2010 adaptation of Nickelodeon’s Avatar sequence. I’d made an energetic option to keep away from the film again then, largely as a result of the forged was whitewashed as hell. And past catching the final quarter-hour on TV eternally in the past, I hadn’t ever seen the total factor. Now that I’ve finished so, after years of listening to it described because the worst factor ever… it’s only a mediocre adaptation. There’s nothing outstanding about it being unhealthy, aside from the way it sucking was definitive for a whole technology of youngsters. To be trustworthy, I used to be slightly disenchanted it wasn’t actively worse, however then I began to consider why the film and its badness caught round in audiences’ minds for therefore lengthy.
Within the mid and late-2000s, studios have been making an attempt to something that might presumably strike with the identical affect as Harry Potter films. On the time, movies based mostly on children books like Eragon and The Spiderwick Chronicles did okay or fizzled out, and whereas Dragonball Evolution damage anime’s Hollywood aspirations for a decade, the medium wasn’t fairly a juggernaut but. The unique Avatar present arrived on the proper time in 2005: it appeared sufficient like anime to face out, however got here with out having any of the destructive baggage hooked up to anime again then. And what made it really feel much more particular again then was the way it was actively getting old up with its viewers, one thing cartoons weren’t actually doing on the time.
Avatar was a present for 11-year-olds, and it was formative in the way in which good exhibits usually are once they hit you on the proper second. The Final Airbender film was very clearly geared toward followers of the present, which had wrapped in 2008. Two years was simply lengthy sufficient for some wistfulness for the unique present to kick in… which made it all of the extra heartbreaking that the film simply blows. No matter small shiny spots it has, like Dev Patel and Aasif Mandvi being the one ones making an attempt to present performances as Zuko and Zhao, are rapidly overwhelmed by a movie that makes it clear from the leap it’s going to be a stinker.
Condensing a 20-episode sequence into a movie was by no means going to be straightforward, and it’d be silly to assume the film was going to get as a lot in as potential. Nevertheless it’s nonetheless fairly startling to see this film adapt a handful episodes and go away it at that—one thing made worse by how half-hearted the hassle feels. The “finest” of the bunch is de facto solely the assault on the Northern Water Tribe towards the very finish, and that’s actually solely as a result of the film does a good job at giving Aang’s waterbending huge tidal wave a way of scale. (However even that doesn’t hit the identical because the giant water kaiju within the finale of the present.)
In that sense, I can get why sequence creators Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino would align with Netflix to take one other live-action stab at their very own work. (After a break up from Netflix on account of “creative differences,” they headed to Nickelodeon to move up Avatar Studios, the place they’re growing an Avatar animated movie, amongst different initiatives.) As for most people, it feels bizarre to nonetheless give the 2010 movie oxygen; at its finest, Netflix’s upcoming live-action tackle the fabric—an eight-episode sequence made with out Konietzko and DiMartino, and arriving on the streamer February 22—can actually solely make us go “nicely, it’s higher than the final one.” However the bigger Avatar sequence just about recovered from it across the third season of Legend of Korra, and it’s not like that is ever going to get a reexamination just like the Star Wars prequels or a number of pre-MCU Marvel films from Fox.
The Final Airbender’s largest fault was how a lot it didn’t actually do proper by the supply materials and even have its personal novel spin on issues to distract from what it lacked. As an adaptation, it commits the cardinal sin of current for its personal sake and never being additive in any possible way. General, it’s simply uninteresting and annoying—however not sufficient to carry a 14-year grudge.
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