Also ... I hear there is a new spin off series set 80 years later. The teaser art looks cool!
It's just a mini-series. Only gonna be something like 12 episodes long.
Still looks like it'll be good though.
As for the movie, it did some things right: the fights looked awesome for the most part, although there was a lot of unnecessary movement (whirling arms around and spinning just to levitate a rock in the air), where in the series each single movement generally corresponded with some act of bending. The special effects were amazing too. I was wondering if they were just gonna try to ignore Appa somehow, but they went ahead and animated him! It didn't look half-bad either. I also thought the recreation of the series opening was pretty cool (the four different Benders against a red background).
However, the story fell flat on its face. Most of the characterizations were wrong in some way, the acting was just bad, the name pronunciations were bizarre, and they made a bunch of weird changes (the Avatar not allowed to have a family? WTF? And what was with Roku's dragon being Aang's spirit guide, rather than Roku himself?). And the Earthbender prison camp was just... the way it was handled was just stupid. Really stupid.
Which is really a shame, because if you look at the tiny details of the movie it is obvious the director was very familiar with the source material... it wasn't that he didn't understand the series. He knew it pretty well. So why did he change so much?
To clarify: I'm not bashing the changes for the sake of being changes. The changes I'm mad at were ones that were detrimental to the story (IMO). Some were beneficial: the Firebenders needing a source of fire makes a certain amount of sense, and was handled well for the most part, and the change in Sozin's Comet from "the end of summer" to "three years away" makes a lot more sense given that Aang needs to master three whole elements before it arrives (mastering them all in a couple of seasons, as was done in the series, is a little unbelievable to me).
