The Live-Action Avatar Series Is Out Now – But Reviews Aren’t Great
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Avatar Last Airbender Netflix Close Up
After Netflix’s live-action One Piece series was surprisingly good, all eyes were on the streaming giant’s take on Avatar: The Last Airbender. Sure, there was YuYu Hakusho in between the two, but that wasn’t really poised to set the world on fire. Avatar is big, but after everything we’ve heard about it, people got concerned.
We learned last month that Netflix’s Avatar series would be toning down Sokka’s sexism, something that fans certainly weren’t happy about. But the trailers for the series looked good, and despite some slightly dodgy-looking CGI, it did seem like the spirit of the original animated series was there, even if the heart wasn’t.
Related: The First Netflix Avatar Trailer Is Here – And It Looks Spectacular
The good news is that the live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender series is now available to watch on Netflix in its entirety. It spans for eight episodes, each one lasting about an hour or so depending on how much needs to be squeezed into an episode. All up, you’re looking at a little over 7 and a half hours of live-action Avatar goodness. Well, goodness might be stretching it, honestly.
That’s where we come to the bad news. The reviews for the series are not great, unfortunately. At the time of writing, it sits on a 68% on Rotten Tomatoes, which isn’t terrible but is just a little bit above what most people would consider average. Things are a little more dire on Metacritic, where it’s currently sitting at 56/100, with scores from critics as low as 25/100. That’s not great.
Criticism has been levied against its visual effects, changes to characterization, awkward line delivery, and some strange changes to the story that take away some of the impact of the original animated series. There have been some positives listed though — the casting is apparently very good, with some solid choices across the board, and the costume design is apparently stellar.
We unfortunately weren’t offered screeners for the series ahead of time, so we’ll be checking it out over the weekend – look out for a review sometime next week – but despite the reviews, we are excited to see how it all turns out. Sometimes there’s a little bit of magic in something like this, even if the consensus is that it’s a little bit lacking.
