In the wake of the devastating war against the RDA and the loss of their eldest son, Jake Sully and Neytiri face a new threat on Pandora: the Ash People, a violent and power-hungry Na'vi tribe led...
Alright, let’s knock this one out quick: “Avatar: Fire and Ash” is exactly what it promises to be, whether it be a comfort or a psychic threat depending on your resting heart rate, your tolerance for the world of Pandora or your distaste for the white savior trope. I may not consider myself a card-carrying member of the Na'vi appreciation society and I have no love lost for the previous two installments….
….but for some strange reason, this is the one where I gotta draw the line.
I’m convinced this entire narrative was being run purely on inertia: there is little genuine novelty, no unexpected midpoint turn, no tightly constructed narrative twist and most damningly, the tiny threads of intrigue that are present, the potential ideas that really could’ve undergird the visual splendor? They unfold with the type of dramaturgy one would see daily during the days of the Arrowverse. My hand to god, it felt like a bottle episode most of the time, straight-up rehashing most parts of the first Avatar and then copy-pasting the “best” bits of Way of Water despite already being a two-part continuation to that aquatic fable that already failed badly at describing the destructive nature of humanity’s survival instinct in a compelling way; it's like watching someone build a billion-dollar sandcastle just to show they can afford the beach only to quickly get bored with it. Yes, this was apparently written as one LONG script with the last one, but that doesn’t justify the bizarre repetition or how emotionally stagnant getting from Point A to B here is, and with such lethargic energy too.
Focus is sporadic, plot points twist and fold into and out of the story haphazardly to where the narrative could barely care less about its own stakes, it follows a predictable wavelength to where every "twist" telegraphs itself from miles away and by the time it inevitably has to wrap up, it doesn't conclude so much as it collapses from exhaustion, shrugging and dragging its carcass to the finish line to where you can practically hear the franchise wheezing for breath while steadfastly refusing to die. What was tedious in the previous installment nearly calcified into coma-inducing cinematic NyQuil, with the only saving grace in that being able to laugh at it with some friends.
And yes, this movie continues to be blind to its own racial implications; if anything, it’s getting worse and they’re not even trying to hide it anymore. Despite not being shy about the inspirations with each Na’vi tribe, these movies do next to nothing to lift up indigenous voices despite blatantly ripping off culture, traditions and jewelry. Sure, this plot does drop interesting wrinkles that seem to channel the real, troubling histories between European conquerors and Indigenous peoples in North and Central America—Varang being a metaphor for the complicity/cooperation of some tribes and nations siding with their longstanding enemies during colonial inflection points and the dual tragedy of Spider being born of two worlds/civilizations that reject him—and how everyone eventually has to adapt or die in the fire of their hatred, but it all rolls back to the same hippy-dippy new-age finger-wagging spirituality they keep bashing you over the head with in these films.
Nothing is wrong with making an anti-colonialist, anti-industrialist blockbuster; that within itself is a very noble goal, but this is the third time in a row the very appearance of Jake Sully, Spider and these asshole humans throughout the film somewhat sullies whatever message the film’s aiming for. Extrapolating the franchise’s settler-adoption space fantasy into the same damn story over and over again with superficial patches and cosmetics are not going to change that and if you hadn’t made your point by the third entry, you’re not doing a good job.
Seriously, can James Cameron’s direction feel anymore self-indulgent? If anything, it’s morphed into something more childish and careless like an obsessive, adolescent pageantry—so committed to his own relentless maximalism that he forgets to even pretend there’s a soul under all that bioluminescent skin. He stitches almost every scene like an overcooked demo reel, losing internal consistency by the thinnest membrane of logic just so the coral can explode again in prettier colors and the sense of evolution is so contrarianist and triple-glazed, it keeps playing off like “This is what you’re getting and you will like it!”
The world of Pandora isn’t even safe now; there’s something uncanny gnawing at the edges of its once-convincing dream. I still have to acknowledge—God, how could I not?—the all-devouring, no-expense-spared, maximum-pixel-per-square-inch cinematic experience that James Cameron practically battered into existence and how this production design is able to hoist such a beautifully dense, colorful and extravagant environment and for a little while, the bioluminescent vacation spot hits brief highs of the meditative grace and attention to detail it gained in previous entries. Yet that same mask of spectacle has now cracked open and the illusion has faded—actually, no, it isn’t so much that the illusion crumbles but that it begins to cannibalize itself frame by frame the longer you stare and it gets even worse when I can actively nitpick three separate incongruities where the copious and three-dimensional CG vistas look unpolished. A victim of its own ambition, every single location imbues this creeping stasis of stagnancy where the scope and scale of these environmental threats drastically decrease. Watching this in Dolby HD further brought to my attention the constant switching of high-frame rates and it further took me out of the experience, cheapening everything shown on the screen.
Everything in how this looks feels the most like a screensaver and flattens the visual depth into abstraction.
Perhaps the best way for you to make heads-or-tails with this presentation depends on how everything looks: to me, I’ve grown numb to the spectacle, which means the film's thin veil of technical wizardry only highlights the films cracks with more alarming clarity. Russell Carpenter's cinematography has seemingly one default option whether it’s in motion or stationary: exhausting. The dynamic variety of camera shots start off initially intoxicating before gradually numbing you with its relentless visual assault and the end result is the type of looping pirouetting you’d see in an old arcade game, limited down to the same batch of tricks. I wish I can elaborate more on the over-cranked lighting, deep-focus vista and so-so color palette but they’re not worth nitpicking over.
The editing team—Brenner, Cameron, De Toth and their army of assistants—cobbled together something technically functional, but the seams show everywhere. Watch closely and you'll spot dozens of moments where scenes don't quite connect, transitions jar awkwardly, or sequences simply trail off with all the grace of a drunken banshee.
Pacing trudges forward with an almost primitive straightforwardness like a brontosaurus dragging its massive tail through tar. The ungodly three-hour runtime stretches each scene to its breaking point, transforming minutes into geological epochs. Momentum operates in a maddening push-and-pull rhythm to where hardly anything meaningful happens even when stuff does goes down, costume design is particularly uninteresting whether they’re human or Na’vi, and again, need I say more about the lack of tension rendering any peril meaningless? I know I’m beating a dead horse by this point but you seriously expect me to care whether anyone lives or dies when you baby us so much with this remedial, training wheels drunken plotting?
Simon Franglen does do a good James Horner imitation of orchestral swells and tribal pathos with his musical score but most of these compositions just start blending in and blurring into an indistinguishable sonic wallpaper, sound design offers nothing memorable beyond the expected whooshes and bangs, though I'll give the PG-13 rating points for consistency and the action sequences aren’t that thrilling either. I can only remember the very first one where the Ash people attacked and the rest of them work overtime to make arrows and explosions and death mean NOTHING.
Despite the motion capture performances still being very impressive, most of the actual acting is craggy and overwrought with the most uncanny valley of inauthentic emotional beats, blunt, unsharpened dialogue making everyone talk like twelve year olds on a 90’s playground and the characters continue to be dispensable and flatly uninteresting to the point of comatose, even with two films worth of worldbuilding. Quaritch gets some misguided laughs out of me and Jake Sully annoyed me something fierce in this movie; these are all archetypal vacant vessels and they weren’t built to carry a Lawrence of Arabia sized-epic. The only interesting characters by default is a grieving Neytiri disillusioned by the continued loss of her family and doubling down on her growing hatred for humans and Varang being this hostile witchy clan leader who abandoned Eywa and worships the flames of war and nihilism.
Zoe Saldana and Oona Chaplin also comfortably give the best performances despite how little they’re given to do in context of the story.
Despite my interest in this franchise constantly hovering between “archival curiosity” and “despairing bemusement at the global monoculture”, this is the first Avatar film where I can’t help but feel pissy towards, if not for the deluge of scenes and sequences they shamelessly recycle, then for how many actual intriguing knotty ideas are mostly straightened out, glossed over or abandoned in favor of the commercial beats Cameron knows how to play to the hilt. It’s excess for excess sake's; spectacle without purpose. I do begrudgingly understand that films like these are meant to be viewed strictly as a visual distraction for the holiday season so if you can make peace with that, this is your jam.
