Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender Review - A Franchise That’s Still Going Strong
There is a question embedded in the title of this film that the film itself takes seriously.
Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender bases its narrative entirely around how Aang feels about being the last airbender – not the Avatar, not the savior of the world, not the bridge between worlds, but simply the sole surviving member of a culture that was destroyed before he was old enough to understand what was being lost. That is a different question. It is a harder question. And the fact that this film, under the creative stewardship of series creators Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, has chosen to lead with it rather than with spectacle or nostalgia tells you almost everything you need to know about its ambitions.
The original Avatar: The Last Airbender – the Nickelodeon animated series that ran from 2005 to 2008 – was one of the defining artistic achievements in American animation of the past thirty years. Across three seasons of Aang’s quest to master all four elements and defeat the imperialist Fire Nation, the show explored genocide, totalitarianism, trauma, and the ethics of pacifism with a depth and a seriousness that its young demographic did not merely tolerate but actively embraced. It was a children’s show that trusted children completely, and Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender is a worthy cinematic continuation of a beloved story by being visually extraordinary and emotionally honest about its protagonist’s interior life.
The film is set years after the end of the Hundred Year War. The four nations live in harmony. Aang, now in his twenties and voiced by Eric Nam with a sincerity that anchors the entire film, has been struggling with a grief that peace has not resolved. He is the last airbender. He carries the memory of the Air Nomads – the monks who raised him, the friends who did not survive to see the world he helped build – alone, in a way that no one around him can fully share. This existential loneliness drives him away from his Avatar duties in Republic City and toward the abandoned air temples of his vanished people, where he searches for traces of what was lost.
What interrupts this private mourning is the arrival of a non-bending terrorist group called The Denied, who are seeking a staff capable of granting bending abilities to non-benders. Their motivation – the disenfranchisement of those born without bending in a world that has always organized itself around those who have it – is the film’s most intriguing dimension.
Complicating matters is the relationship between Aang and Tagah, an enigmatic airbender played by Dave Bautista – frozen in time, much as Aang was, and carrying his own variation of the trauma that has defined Aang’s existence. Bautista brings a gruff, effective physicality to the voice performance, and the film uses the Aang-Tagah dynamic to articulate something the original series never quite had occasion to explore: what it means for a survivor to encounter another survivor, and how shared grief can be both a comfort and a complication. Both are products of war. Both are struggling with the weight of being the last. They are foils in the most precise sense – not opposites but parallel wounds, examining each other.
But the animation is where Avatar Aang most thoroughly distinguishes itself. Director Lauren Montgomery, working with animators from Flying Bark and Studio Mir, has produced something extraordinary: 2D hand-drawn animation on a cinematic scale that has not been attempted with this ambition in Western studios in decades. The bending sequences are blisteringly kinetic and beautifully fluid, each element rendered with a specificity that communicates not merely action but character – the way Toph’s earthbending is blunt and improvisational, the way Aang’s airbending is evasive and elegant even in its most aggressive expressions.
The film suffered an unconscionable journey to its audience – a damaging shift from theatrical release to a Paramount+ debut, followed by an even more damaging leak, in a decision that deprived both the film and its audience of the theatrical experience the animation demands. There is real anger in watching something of this visual ambition rendered on a streaming platform when it should have been playing to packed houses. One week of Oscar-qualifying screenings in New York and Los Angeles is not sufficient acknowledgment of what the team at Avatar Studios has accomplished here.
What Konietzko, DiMartino, and Montgomery have delivered is the finest the Avatar franchise has ever looked on screen, and a story that earns its place in the continuity by asking a question the original series never fully had time to answer. But as a first chapter in a new phase of a beloved franchise – with this fall’s Avatar: Seven Havens soon to follow – it establishes something essential: that the people making these projects understand what Avatar is, and why it has mattered for twenty years.