The tragedy of Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender is that it may as well not exist

After suffering so many indignities, the embattled film turns out to be entirely inconsequential.

By Joshua Rivera | July 23, 2026 | 3:00pm

Photo: Paramount Pictures

Film Reviews Avatar: The Last Airbender

It is hard to be the Avatar, master of all four elements. The disrespect just piles up: A billion-dollar movie franchise cribs your title, forcing any of your cinematic efforts to carry a needlessly wordy name. A live-action Netflix series dilutes your brand. Your big sequel movie is first demoted to streaming, and then leaked ahead of its release. The four nations are very much not in harmony. Thanks to all this, Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender arrives on Paramount+ (and in a few theaters) with a palpable lack of pomp and circumstance. This is tough for a sequel film that is already burdened with fan expectations thanks to a hat trick of superlatives: It’s the first follow-up to Avatar: The Last Airbender since the sequel series The Legend Of Korra ended in 2014, the first to be about the Nickelodeon show’s cast as adults, and, of course, the first proper movie in the franchise. That’s a lot of needles to thread; a tall order for any film, much less a film that, at the end of the day, is merely serviceable.

Directed by Avatar and Korra veteran Lauren Montgomery, Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender is more of a gorgeous and breezy reunion special than a case for returning to this world. Very little energy is expended on courting new viewers; while there’s some exposition setting up the basics of the world (Benders can manipulate elements, the original series chronicled a war between nations represented by each of those elements), the film presumes familiarity with these characters, and portrays their adult relationships as progressing naturally from where we left them at the series’ end in 2006.

This fan-centric approach results in a movie that is mostly just a good hang with great action, hinging on Aang (voiced here by singer and The Traitors contestant Eric Nam), the Last Airbender, discovering that there is a second Airbender lying in stasis as an adult, the way Aang was as a child at the start of the original series. That this man, Tagah (Dave Bautista), will eventually turn on Aang is obvious from the moment he arrives, Avatar Aang is just one of those movies where the plot has to catch up to the audience.

At a brisk 98 minutes, Avatar Aang does not have time to give everyone an arc, choosing to streamline things by focusing squarely on Aang’s brief friendship—then conflict—with Tagah, and the fight scenes. And the fight scenes are good, taking full advantage of a status quo where its heroes are masters of their arts, complementing each other’s powers like X-Men, the lush, colorful animation making a meal out of the choreography. It is beautiful on the small screens it will be streamed on, and it would be even more so on a large theatrical canvas.

However, outside of spectacle, Avatar Aang does not make a case for cinemas as a home for the franchise. In fact, it merely underlines that television is the proper venue for Aang and his friends. Avatar: The Last Airbender‘s acclaim was built on the slow cultivation of relationships between its characters and its audience. Those relationships—if you are familiar with them—are why Avatar Aang is such a pleasant watch, in spite of barely having anything for its supporting players to do. Katara (Jessica Matten), Fire Lord Zuko (Steven Yuen), Sokka (Román Zaragoza), and Toph (Dionne Quan) don’t really have stories here, their presence is mostly felt in the fights (again, amazing) and the jokes (fine).

The film’s villain, Tagah, gets far more time, but his heel turn is so obvious and underdeveloped that it’s all the more disappointing that he appears in a story with Zuko, one of the great reformed villains in modern genre fiction. Tagah is—along with a barely-explored cult of anti-bending extremists called The Denied—another reminder of how much better all this would be served if it was a season of television, and not a hurried film with a fraction of the space to work with.

Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender is a litmus test, a painless way to determine if you’ve still got affection for these characters and this world, or if you’ve moved on. Penned in between shows set in its past and present, the film does nothing to move its characters forward or backward, or to complicate our understanding of their world. For longtime fans, it is a generous gesture, a pleasurable reassurance that the creative voices stewarding these characters have not lost a beat and kept this world exactly as you remember it. As a story, it is a tragedy, so inconsequential it might as well have not happened.

Director: Lauren Montgomery
Writer: Tim Hedrick, Christopher Yost
Starring: Eric Nam, Dave Bautista, Jessica Matten, Román Zaragoza, Dionne Quan, Taika Waititi, Geraldine Viswanathan, Ronny Chieng, Ken Jeong, Dee Bradley Baker, Steven Yeun, Freida Pinto, Ke Huy Quan
Release Date: July 24, 2026; July 24, 2026 (Paramount+)

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