CNN
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Translating youngsters’ animation to live-action is a difficult proposition, as Disney and the 2010 film model of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” can attest. Netflix will get the look and motion proper in a lavish sequence based mostly on the Nickelodeon present, however too-elemental dialogue and uneven performances make this eight-episode sit a little bit of a grind for anybody who has gotten previous puberty.
Constructed round 4 tribes of “airbenders” with the flexibility to regulate water, earth, hearth and air, “Avatar” establishes a legendary world full of unfamiliar beings and improbable powers, none extra so than these possessed by the Avatar, the legendary determine who alone can command all the weather.
That heavy burden falls to a 12-year-old boy with a strategically positioned arrow on his brow, Aang (Gordon Cormier), who awakens after a century in ice to find the firebenders and their chief Fireplace Lord Ozai (Daniel Dae Kim) have sought to take over the world, and, fearing the Avatar’s return, dispatched Prince Zuko (Dallas Liu) to neutralize him.
Taken in by Sokka (Ian Ousley) and the waterbender Katara (Kiawentiio), Aang embarks on an episodic quest by way of this elaborate mythology, yielding acquainted conditions, the occasional fleeting trace of romance (which a lot of the logical viewers will seemingly name “icky”) and no small quantity of spinning, kicking, element-hurling motion.
Tailored by writer-showrunner Albert Kim (“Sleepy Hole”), the sequence appears to consciously search to right the missteps of M. Night time Shyamalan’s evenly regarded movie model, with out overcoming the inventive hurdles raised by having two-dimensional youths as its featured gamers. The credible visible results thus adorn what too usually appears like a community-theater package deal, replete with stilted traces about how saving the world should wait if it means endangering buddies.
Whereas derived from the animated sequence, bringing its trappings into live-action maybe most charitably recollects the tone of “The Neverending Story,” a 40-year-old artifact (with extra sensible particular results) that additionally put a younger boy on the middle of its magic-filled journey.
Finally, although, this appears like one other fairly costly guess by Netflix to capitalize on a confirmed title and the nostalgia surrounding it, after different animated-to-live-action sequence just like the short-lived “Cowboy Bebop” and extra just lately “One Piece.”
As with the latter present, the result’s usually inoffensive, with the potential to run a number of seasons, however executed in such a blandly earnest approach as to be unlikely to win over many who aren’t properly versed within the materials and desperate to make the leap.
On the plus aspect, by way of reality in promoting, at the least Aang’s arrow is pointed in the correct route.
“Avatar: The Final Airbender” premieres February 22 on Netflix.