Through some combination of good fortune and a few persistent friends who refused to take no for an answer, I finally watched Avatar: The Last Airbender earlier this year. Even though my childhood had its Nickelodeon staples in SpongeBob SquarePants, Rugrats, Hey Arnold! and plenty of others, Aang and his adventures somehow slipped through the cracks (an anomaly that continues to bewilder almost everyone I know). Watching it almost twenty years after its premiere meant missing the nostalgia that has become inseparable from the show’s reputation. I don’t particularly mourn that. Without childhood memory smoothing over the rough edges, Avatar had to survive entirely on its own ideas, and I’m glad it came to me when it did, because few children’s shows have ever smuggled such a sophisticated understanding of empire and rebellion into an adventure this joyful.Nearly twenty years after Avatar: The Last Airbender finished its original run, Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender is the first feature produced under Paramount’s Avatar Studios banner, although calling it a film almost obscures what it actually is. Hollywood has spent the better part of fifteen years treating Avatar as a fantasy property waiting to be scaled up, first through M. Night Shyamalan’s disastrous live-action adaptation and later through Netflix’s considerably more faithful, yet just as egregious live-action remake. Both approached the series as a world requiring translation, but here, Lauren Montgomery’s spinoff sequel approaches it as a relationship requiring continuation. That distinction explains why Avatar Aang succeeds whenever it allows these beloved characters to simply exist together again, and why it struggles whenever the demands of feature filmmaking insist on compressing a season’s worth of emotional and political development into ninety-nine minutes. Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender (English)Director: Lauren MontgomeryCast: 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, and Ke Huy QuanRuntime: 99 minutesStoryline: Avatar Aang and his allies discover Tagah, a surviving airbender, and join him in searching for an airbending staff to bring back the Air NomadsSet several years after Fire Lord Ozai’s defeat, and before The Legend of Korra, the film follows an adult Aang, now voiced by Eric Nam, who has begun constructing Republic City as a shared political project where citizens from the Water Tribes, Earth Kingdom, Fire Nation and Air Nomads might coexist after a century of imperial conquest. That project acquires ideological cracks through the arrival of The Denied — a militant movement composed of non-benders who reject a society where bending abilities continue to determine political influence and social status. Their search for an ancient staff capable of granting bending powers intersects with Aang’s own desperate hope that the relic might restore the extinct Air Nomad civilisation after the genocide committed by the Fire Nation. Dave Bautista’s new character Tagah, another Air Nomad preserved in ice across centuries, transforms that search into something considerably messier because he represents an impossible temptation. Aang suddenly discovers somebody who remembers the world he lost, which means every political responsibility he has accumulated since childhood collides with grief he has never actually processed.