Yeah, I can't.
I'll preface this by saying I had low expectations. Or rather, tempered expectations. I expected this to be not as bad as the film, but not anything special either. I expected it to be like, a 5-6 out of 10 safe little series. Yet somehow, it ended up worse than that. Just because it's not as bad as the film, doesn't mean it isn't bad.
I hate to make comparisons between both this and the film, but that seems to be the general method people seem to be using to form an opinion on this series. It's almost as if the reviews for this show are just reviews for that 10 year old movie instead. But whatever, I'll join in.
If I were to distinguish the two wrongs of both adaptations, it'd be that one was a disservice to the source material, and the other is just a disservice as entertainment. Obviously this series is the latter.

I feel as if the writers were so focused on trying to put the concept onto the screen to the point where they didn't care to make a good series. While there are some creative differences, they're just meaningless little nuances. By large, this series is an extremely accurate adaptation of the original. To a fault.

To start with, the quality for this series is so low, in like every regard. Even visually. I thought I heard that Netflix put a lot of money into this expecting it to be their next Stranger Things or something? There are some standout scenes that you just know were expensive, but everything else looks so off. Hell, for a majority of the series there's a noticeable bad green screen effect outlining everyone, with such an amateurish looking blur that you can mistake this as a fanmade webseries. I'm not even one to be picky about special effects or anything, but this series really feels like it's written around making everything a "grand epic" visual spectacle moment; yet it looks like a Spy Kids film.

The writing and storyboarding itself is also just as amateurish, with so many weird cuts. It all just feels like it's trying to tick all the boxes of what makes a cinematic experience. Every character acts like a robot, and I don't necessarily mean from the acting itself. "Lighthearted scene" okay time to smile and look at your surroundings to make it clear that this is a joyous moment; okay now immediately it's a "serious scene" time to put on your serious face and say generic tension building lines so we know that this is serious. I don't mind a lot of exposition dumps, but the way it's handled here just has no tact at all, everyone acts in such a robotic way that sets up the exposition simply for the exposition sake. These actors are obviously not as experienced, but with good direction you can 100% make these guys' acting convincing, that's just simply not the case here.

It's all honestly a bit hard to describe but needless to say this is the biggest negative of the series. It's like it's made from someone with only a basic understanding of storytelling in filmography and this is their project they need to turn in. It's honestly such an amateur quality that it makes it very clear this is a kid's series, as if it should air on PBS Kids or something. Which would've been fine if that was the creator's intent, but that doesn't seem the case with all the weird edge thrown into it, blatant somewhat gruesome deaths, and mild swearing. That plus all the marketing, you can tell this was meant to be the type of series that adults can easily come to love, just as the kind of thing the source material was.

There's like generic blockbuster movie-esque score playing all the time despite Avatar being a series with a distinct soundtrack. It constantly uses that technique where every character generically stops in wonder over every fantasy setting/event even when it doesn't make sense for them to do so, as an obvious way to try and get the audience to see that same thing in wonderment. The dialogue is so on the nose, and it can't even be an intentional cheesy decision since it's being used as the main driving force for the narrative. There's a lot of the series that doesn't even make you roll your eyes, just blankly stare.
It's not offensive in any way. Not that I agree an adaptation could be offensive, but compared to the kind of fire that sparked from that era of Dragonball Evolution and The Last Airbender; this is definitely not that type of adaptation of "taking things and hollywood'ing it up for a larger audience" It's pretty accurate, just shitty and frankly, boring as hell. Really, if this weren't a preestablished IP, would you really watch 8 hours of this and even remotely care what's going on?
Less concentration should've been put onto making this as "respectful" to the source as possible, and more into making this a genuinely good series... Ironic how two drastically opposite approaches this and the film end up being.


If I were to sum it up, I guess. It has most of the technical details from the series, but it doesn't have the heart. A live action adaptation of Avatar shouldn't be IMPOSSIBLE, but frankly it's hard not to see it that way from these failures.