4 Errors of The Last Airbender (the movie)

When we talk about movies that should never be mentioned again, very few can get as much hissing from its fanbase as The Last Airbender. Yeah, this movie was quite a piece of work. It was released over a decade ago, and even though only one was made, it has had a very impressive legacy in the eyes of the fanbase. It managed to top movies like Dragon Ball Evolution for a bit, but nothing could knock that one out of place. What we have with The Last Airbender is a very well-worked, but poorly executed attempt at bringing a beloved animated series to the big screen. We had hope that it could work out, but sadly, our hope was misplaced, and honestly, out of place. There was no way that Avatar: The Last Airbender could be adapted properly into a movie unless it’d be 4 hours long, and not many people have the strength to sit that long in the theatre to watch a movie. To make it worse, it wasn’t even the longest it could be as a movie with a normal runtime. This article will look into 4 errors of the The Last Airbender.

The Bending

Avatar fans know the bending of the elements all too well. There are certain people who are born with the ability to control one of the four elements: water, earth, fire and air. The only one who can bend more than one element at a time is the Avatar: the bridge between the human and spirit worlds. The Avatar is meant to maintain the balance between the two worlds and within the two worlds. To maintain the balance, one would need to learn about the world of humans in its entirety and learn the arts of the different elements. The problem with the movie is that it shows a difference in what it takes to bend the elements, most notably with fire. The fire benders were changed the most. The way they bend fire is almost ridiculous to think about. It was already very hard to sell that anyone would be able to pose a huge threat to the Earth Kingdom in the original show, and the movie just makes it worse by having the fire benders only be able to bend lit fires. They could not generate flames like they did in the original show.

What it takes to be the Avatar

Live action adaptations aren’t known for translating everything from the IP that they are adapting. Some changes are minor. Other changes are major. Some are made to tell the story that is being told in the movie, just for the sake of it, or to enhance the drama. That is what happened with the story of The Last Airbender. In the animated series, we see, through an introspective episode, that Roku had a wife, and we also learn that Zuko is Roku’s great grandson. The movie still didn’t explain how it would navigate that, because it told us that Aang didn’t want to be the Avatar because he wouldn’t be allowed to have a family. It’s a really bizarre change that they made, considering that it’s a change made to a very hard-hitting message about choice and destiny, told through Zuko’s arc in the show. Potentially having removed that (since the movie never got a sequel, we’ll never know how far they were willing to go with that) really decreased the emotional impact of the saga.

Character Ethnicities

The ethnicity of characters in live action adaptations are always a messy thing to talk about. A lot of the time, they trigger unnecessary arguments and lead to very senseless statements being made both by the people behind the choices and the fanbase that will be paying to watch the movie or series. Sometimes, the people against the changes have a point, and this movie had one of those instances. The people in the water tribe were Caucasians. In the show, they are clearly not Caucasians, and have a tanned skin tone. This was purposely done by the creators of the show, in order to showcase a different kind of people being the heroes of the story. It doesn’t stop with the water tribe. The people in the fire nation were meant to reflect Japanese imperialism, and so, were envisioned as Japanese. What we got in the movie was certainly not Japanese people playing fire nation natives.

The Year it takes place in

This one was a bit tricky to navigate, because when it was done in the animated show, the production crew never had to worry about things like the characters aging quickly or even at all. The characters could remain the same age for twenty seasons if they wanted to. That would have been tricky to pull off with a live action movie. That led to them making it a three year journey for Aang to learn how to firebend. The movie takes place three years before Sozin’s comet comes to earth. The show had it be the same year, and Aang’s training had to be hasty. From the moment we learned about the timing of the comet in season 1, we knew that there was very limited time for Aang to learn to use all the elements.

There are many errors to be beheld in every movie, even the best ones, although some errors are easily avoidable if one is to put a little more effort in adapting the IP with care. Perhaps the biggest error that could have been done with the movie was making it at all.

Did you like our list? Do you agree with it? Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments below: