If you’re wondering how James Cameron was going to squeeze five entire films out of the “Avatar” series, the third, “Fire and Ash,” has the answer. It’s padding. Lots and lots of padding. And a lot of the filler is repetition. Repetitive, repetitive repetition. Disney gave James Cameron carte blanche and a blank check to do whatever he wanted, and he wanted to remake “Avatar: The Way of Water,” but not as well.
“Avatar: Fire and Ash” begins with a dragon sequence flying high and extremely disorienting. Not because of James Cameron’s acrophobic, swooping 3D CGI photography, but because we’re following the Sully children, and they still suffer from an extreme lack of personality. It’s hard to remember who is who and how to tell them apart. Except, of course, Kiri, Jake and Neytiri’s adopted teenage daughter, who is voiced by Sigourney Weaver and still looks like a 76-year-old woman. It’s distracting in general, but when a romance blossoms between her and human teenager Spider (Jack Champion), it’s scary.
We’re catching up with the Sully family. Their son Lo’ak (Brittain Dalton) blames himself for his brother’s death. Jake (Sam Worthington) is mad at him too, even if he doesn’t want to admit it. Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) blames the “sky people” — read: humans — and is now a full-blown racist who reluctantly takes her husband’s orders when he tells her, hey, you know, to be less racist. Spider, the son of their nemesis Miles Quaritch, has this blossoming romance with Kiri – who, again, phew – but he needs a gas mask to breathe Pandora’s poisonous air, and he doesn’t have one anymore, so the Sully family takes him to live elsewhere.
Along the way, they are attacked and separated by the Mangkwan clan, led by Varang (Oona Chaplin), a cartoonish evil witch who wants the Sky People’s weapons so she can do even more evil things. The Mangkwan clan are James Cameron’s version of the offensive indigenous stereotypes of old racist safari films like “Trader Horn,” and although they have a superficial and tragic history, they undermine almost all of Cameron’s efforts to make “Avatar” a modern refutation of these outdated colonialist tropes. (Then again, the plot of the original “Avatar” already did this.)
So Spider is captured by humans and begins to form a relationship with his father Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who is now in a Na’Vi avatar body. And yes, that’s exactly what happened last time. Except this time, no one is keeping tabs on Spider, even though, through a series of shady machinations, he’s now the most important person on the planet and he’s in a small cell in the middle of their lab, so you’d think there would be at least a camera in there. But no, because otherwise the plot could not be realized.
Meanwhile, Lo’ak – just like in the last film – spends most of his time dealing with the exile of his best friend, the subtitled space whale, and somehow it’s still very funny. Even funnier is the scene where we discover that space whales have a rather complicated legal system, full of strict bureaucracies and decorum.
Then, of course, there’s Quaritch, who followed a very specific character arc when it came to his son and his new Na’Vi body, and who isn’t allowed to move forward more than an inch in that arc no matter how long this movie is. And it lasts three hours and seventeen minutes. Quaritch is part of the Mangkwan clan, which could have been a dark, dramatically intriguing mirror to Jake’s storyline in the original “Avatar,” except James Cameron doesn’t want to use his excruciatingly long runtime to get into that weeds. Cameron is too concerned with revisiting his old notes and getting everyone back, especially, after all that funky falderal, to where they were before “The Way of Water” ended. And also a few more passages about the awesome power of white colonialists, because apparently that’s a staple of this franchise.
“Avatar: Fire and Ash” is, in fits and starts, thrilling. But it’s thrilling because the characters are running for their lives, and it’s inherently engaging regardless of the context. When the movie slows down — and boy, does it slow down a lot — the context gets in the way, because the plot is silly, the characters travel slowly, and whatever James Cameron is trying to say is undone by the way he says it.
This is another “Avatar” movie about why indigenous people are amazing, where they have to be constantly saved by the colonialists, who are more important in the story. This is yet another “Avatar” movie about the evils of militarism in which all the thrilling, jaw-dropping action sequences are about soldiers looking cool while fighting wars with cool-looking weapons. And it’s yet another “Avatar” movie about the evils of capitalism, brought to you by a giant mega-corporation for the sole purpose of profit. The only way “Avatar: Fire and Ash” could be more hypocritical and taken less seriously is if the characters also screamed “Hypocrisy sucks!” » sitting on Whoopee cushions.
You’d think, at least, that with all this money and creative freedom, James Cameron would be able to put something new and clever before our eyes. But aside from a few odd images, “Fire and Ash” tries to get away with doing what “The Way of Water” already did. Remember how “Avatar” and “The Way of Water” ended with a giant battle sequence, a series of cavalry charges, and finally a one-on-one fight between hero and villain? Get ready to find out more, except this time there’s a celestial ray. And not even a celestial ray that would have a reason to be there. Everyone says, “It’s time for the final battle! Hey, wait, what’s a celestial ray doing here? Try to avoid it, I guess.”
What’s particularly frustrating about “Avatar: Fire and Ash” – aside from the incredible number of other, more interesting and meaningful films that could have been made with the same time, talent and resources – is that James Cameron repeatedly comes close to doing something different. Several scenes show these characters on the verge of making a choice that could send these films in a new direction, both in story and tone, but then walking away from it. The film deserves credit for being almost daring without ever actually being so.
I’m sure it will bring in at least two billion dollars.
“Avatar: Fire and Ash” hits theaters exclusively on December 19.
