Unlike the premature leak and ChatGPT controversies preceding the release of “Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender” on Paramount+, the actual movie itself is far too plain to warrant much attention. If you were to subtract the amazing visuals and soundtrack from this movie, you aren’t left with much substance. The characters we all know and love haven’t shown much growth following the events of the main show as well as the conflict itself feels contrived. Finally, this is yet another case of corporate nostalgia-bait.
While the movie teased promising ideas, it failed to deliver on all of them. Fortunately, many of these issues can be remedied with a complete script overhaul from de-centering Aang’s character all the way to getting rid of bizarre tropes.
A movie titled “Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender” (ATLA), should be expected to focus on Aang following the events of the original TV show. In the show, Aang and his buddies/mentors — later referred to as “Team Avatar” — Katara, Sokka, Toph, and later Zuko, work together to fight against the Fire Nation’s 100 years of imperialism while navigating the difficulties of Aang’s duty to maintain peace among the different nations as the Avatar. The show also focuses on Aang’s guilt towards fleeing his home before the fire nation attacked and brutally slaughtered all his people, known as “air nomads,” 100 years prior.
This brings up a question: “How should Aang deal with the loss of his people?” Should he procreate? Does he need to find out how to give people the power of airbending (the ATLA universe’s version of controlling air with one’s body)? Or should he just let it go and shoulder the responsibility of creating another airbender race?
These dilemmas are hard to tackle in adult shows, let alone in a children’s intellectual property. However, in the past, the show never shied away from the uncomfortable truths of genocide and political unrest. Since the original co-creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko oversaw the production of this film and they partnered with one of the original series’ screenwriters, Tim Hedrick, surely they should know how to handle this problem. Right?
Wrong. Instead of building off of the previous worldbuilding, the writers brought in the clunky additions of the “lost” Avatar Sonam and new twist villain Tagah. The main plot also centers around a magical macguffin even the writers seemed to think was stupid as the movie progresses. Allison Hambrick, who wrote a Multiverse of Color review article on the movie has a similar opinion: “Unfortunately, Avatar Aang does follow the MacGuffin trope with Avatar Sonam’s staff, but this flaw isn’t necessarily fatal.”
Why is there a macguffin?
This macguffin is known as Sonam’s staff, a staff that has an unidentified amount of concentrated spirit power that can give people the ability of airbending. This staff is somehow also the cause of all airbending as we know it because Sonam got its power while studying lion turtles. Lion turtles are a species of animal which the main series acknowledged as beings who gifted some humans the ability of bending as a whole when the writers needed to deus ex machina Aang out of killing the fire lord in the final episode.
Now, Tagah comes into the picture because he was Sonam’s favorite student and the first person she gave airbending to. Things were looking up as she taught the first group of air nomads to use their abilities for keeping the peace among nations, until most of them were brutally slaughtered by the earth kingdom. After seeing most of his comrades fall, Tagah steals Sonam’s staff for himself to create an air-nomad imperialist army to “protect” them from the other nations. He fatally wounds Sonam and before she passes away, she traps him in an air bubble underwater — similar to how Katara and Sokka found Aang in the first episode of the original series — and sends all the air nomads into temples in the sky so that they can avoid the other nations before she hides her temple in the spirit world, somehow erasing herself from all Avatar history.
If this all sounds very convoluted, it is. That the movie invented so much random lore instead of just building off of previous information raises alarm bells. Reddit user Sha489 shared a similar sentiment, stating: “This movie’s plot felt like one of those animes that decided to make a filler movie that is not connected to the overall story.”
ATLA isn’t a story about characters solving geopolitical conflicts with magical weapons. It has spiritual elements in it, but still relies on grounded storytelling.
Take season one, episode seven, titled “Winter Solstice, Part 1: The Spirit World.” In this episode, the panda spirit Hei Bai turns into a mysterious six legged creature which abducts the inhabitants of a nearby village everyday at sunset until the beginning of the winter solstice. Hei Bai does this because the fire nation burnt down its forest and it mistook the villagers as the cause of this destruction. Once Aang realizes this, Aang shows an acorn to Hei Bai to symbolize that the forest will regrow. This calms Hei Bai down.
Using natural symbolism to represent regrowth is an intentional creative decision on the writer’s part because the natural world fluctuates between repair and destruction all the time much like the human world does. In ATLA, this acorn represents that despite the 100 years of destruction the fire nation inflicts on both the earth and other parts of the population, all damage will eventually repair itself. Throughout the show, this idea is prominent for all the characters and especially Aang because of the aforementioned reasons.
The bastardization of the spirit world
The spirit world isn’t only a source of power to use whenever it’s convenient. Instead, the spirit world is a separate but integral domain that interacts with the human world. Spirits can feel the pain of the human world, it can become angry towards humans and sometimes it helps humans so as to maintain spiritual balance.
As Katara states in “The Siege of the North, Part 1” (season one, episode 19): “The Avatar is the bridge between our world and the spirit world. Aang can talk to them.”
Though the dynamic between the spirit world and the human world is established in the original series, The Legend of Korra (TLK) and this movie vastly dumb down the significance of the spirit world. Instead of being its own domain, it’s the writer’s solution to getting the characters out of tough situations. This becomes especially apparent when Team Avatar enters the spirit world because they’re in need of transportation after having their ship destroyed. For some reason, they encounter a James Cordon-esque spirit who molests Aang with its nose and stuffs Team Avatar inside of its eyeballs before rocket jumping to wherever Tagah is.
Even when not being plot convenient, the spirit world is played up for laughs or exposition and nothing in between. Despite the movie trying to make an effort to be more mature than its predecessor, it only feels like it’s a few steps above a “Minions” movie because of the animation-style and less because of the actual story.
Being subversive has its limits
After Tagah acquires the staff, he recruits a terrorist organization known as “The Denied.” These are non-benders who feel excluded from New Republic city’s peace efforts because it seems to ignore the tensions benders and non-benders have towards one another. They’re originally introduced in the beginning of the movie when they steal the map to Sonam’s staff from Aang, who should’ve easily been able to prevent this from happening. For most of the movie, they aren’t characters, just vague cronies used to prop up Tagah as the twist villain.
Tagah turns them into airbenders and becomes a glowy monster. The rest of Team avatar fight against “The Denied” while Aang takes Tagah head on. He eventually grabs the staff from Tagah and the day should be saved, but wait; Aang is now being corrupted by the power of the staff?
As mentioned earlier, the writers also seem to have thought a magical staff solving all of Aang’s problems was ridiculous. Instead, they made it so Aang “speaks” to his mentor, Monk Gyatso, in his head. Gyatso tells him the air nomads will be with him in his heart and Aang takes this as permission to break Sonam’s staff which rids the entire world of airbending.
Tagah dissolves because it seems he’s mostly made of airbending after turning into the monster and the “Denied” return to normal. Aang decides to continue collecting ancient artifacts to preserve his culture and the movie ends.
The ending feels overly dramatic because getting rid of airbending doesn’t resolve much of the actual conflict. As far as the viewer knows, “The Denied,” with the exception of one member who helps Aang look for artifacts, are still terrorizing New Republic City due to internal conflicts and have not been adequately brought to justice for attacking the avatar because Aang is too busy curating artifacts for a museum.
How this movie could’ve been great
Focusing entirely on Aang was the biggest mistake. Part of ATLA’s charm was the character interaction. When these characters are now completely sidelined and reduced to fanservice who get whooped in most onscreen battles, it feels cheap whenever they’re shown in the movie.
Hambrick agreed, stating: “The supporting members of Team Avatar are more or less one dimensional versions of their previous selves.” She also took issue with the lack of “B” plots for the members of Team Avatar because it kind of felt like the writers didn’t know what else to do with them.
If there was more focus on Team Avatar resolving internal conflicts within the city and “The Denied” being properly taken care of, this movie would’ve felt more conclusive than it is. It could resolve some of the faulty ways TLK “dealt” with this same conflict by actually showing why groups like “The Denied” exist in the first place.
The endless nostalgia-bait should also be cut. It’s too overtly corporate to enjoy because it feels like the writers are trying to meet a quota for references. Studios typically do this to deceive viewers into accepting glaring issues within the story because they get to see things that remind them of their childhood. Unless able to be naturally incorporated, they should have asked themselves if it’s really necessary to recreate the intro and to add fan favorite characters like “cabbages man” into the film.
“I feel as if these scores are way too generous for nostalgia sakes. Watching the movie, there was a lot to be desired on a number of things.” Reddit User IaMlEgEnD427 said after watching the film.
Lastly, getting rid of airbender should’ve never been included in the narrative. It’s overdramatic and disregards lessons like the one learned in episode seven about damage eventually being recovered with time. Instead, Aang could find a trusted group of individuals to give bending to and the conflict could instead be the pressure of purely adhering to tradition or allowing creative interpretations of old practices to maintain a positive relationship with his students. If Aang could take away the fire lord’s bending, he could likely give others powers without a magical stick.
The final verdict
This movie deserves a solid five out of 10 rating. The artwork is amazing and the soundtrack carries the emotional scenes. If you’re watching independently of the original series, this may be considered a decent treasure hunting movie. As a fan, the movie is a disappointment and as some fans put it, “the show was a lightning in the bottle” the series creators have failed to recreate in years since.
A few months from now, ATLA will be released as a novel and hopefully some of the issues with the plot will be resolved with a longer-paced medium. Until then, ATLA will always be near and dear to my heart and its lasting impact will remain despite its “tainted” legacy.
Featured image courtesy DeviantArt
Edited by James Sutton
