Live action Avatar: TLA topic.

On a whim, I decided to spend my evening binging the first four episodes. Figured it's going to be hot topic over the next fews days and I won't be able to resist chiming in, so the least I could do is know what I'm talking about firsthand. So far it's very...uh, I honestly don't know how I feel about it, other than to lamely describe it as 'mid.'

Like TC said, the biggest issue is in the acting; but more so than that (since I try not to pick on child actors too much), every character just feels like a watered-down version of their originals. Katara doesn't have her temper, Sokka doesn't have any backwards upbringing to iron out, Zuko rarely shows any of his trademark bratty arrogance and hardly ever backtalks to Iroh. Sokka's actor is doing his best to pull his weight though, and honestly his chief shortcomings are in the dialogue department, so his faults are on the writers, not him. Surprisingly enough, the child actor who shows the most promise thus far imo is Azula . The actor playing Iroh is doing a pretty good job, and is thankfully doing his own thing and not attempting a Mako impersonation. I'm also kinda digging the new take on Commander Zhao, as more of a conniving upstart as opposed to the arrogant blowhard in the original series.

I can't deny that it's got its moments. Danny Pudi as the Mechanist was a treat. But it seems like every time I start getting into the show they have to dampen my enthusiasm with something weird and unwelcome. I won't spoil anything specific, but several plotlines from the original are heavy truncated and jammed together. Some fit well enough, others are very disjointed; and the disjointed ones were clearly meant to cater to fans of the original series, who will likely just feel put out that these characters were jammed in so awkwardly. The weirdest thing of all is that it feels at times like they're speedrunning through certain plotlines and character development, but they aren't actually saving all that much time (the Netflix s1 will only end up being 2 hours less than the original s1).

There's also a lot of weird editing choices. Particularly glaring was them cutting straight from the Air Nomads getting massacred to Katara practicing her waterbending a hundred years later in the span of a couple seconds.

I'm at least interested enough to finish out the first season. There's enough hints of promise here that they could get things together and make s2 more compelling.