Movie Review: Wonder and war in ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’

When I came down with a cold the day after I saw the third and latest Avatar film Fire and Ash I half-wondered if I had picked it up on Pandora The promise of Cameron s D trilogy has inevitably been immersion immersion in a science-fiction world in technological wonder in a maybe future of movies Avatar is almost more a place to go than a movie to see Still it s now been two decades since Cameron set off on this blue-tinted quest The sheen of newness is off or at least less pronounced with new technological advances to contend with Fire and Ash is running with a behind-the-scenes video about how performance capture was used during the film s making The implicit message is No this isn t AI The Avatar films with their visual-effects wizardry and clunky revisionist Western storytelling have constantly felt preponderance of all like an immersion in a dream of James Cameron s The idea of these movies after all first came to Cameron he has revealed in a bioluminescent vision decades ago At their best the Avatar movies have felt like an otherworldly stage for Cameron to juggle so several of the things hulking weaponry ecological wonder foolhardy human arrogance that have marked his movies Fire and Ash at well more than three hours is our longest stay yet on Pandora and the one majority likely to make you ponder why you came here in the first place These remain epics of craft and conviction You can feel Cameron s deep devotion to the dynamics of his central characters even when his interest outstrips our own That s especially true in Fire and Ash which following the deep-sea family-focused part two The Way of Water pivots to a new chapter of tradition clash It introduces a violent rival Na vi clan whose rageful leader Varang Oona Chaplin partners with Stephen Lang s booming Col Miles Quaritch and the human colonizers For those who have closely followed the Avatar saga I suspect Fire and Ash will be a rewarding experience Quaritch Pandora s answer to Robert Duvall s Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now remains a ferociously captivating character And the introduction of Chaplin s Varang gives this installment an electricity that the previous two were missing But for those whose trips to Pandora have made less of an impact Fire and Ash is a bit like returning to a half-remembered vacation spot only one where the local ponytail style is a little strange and everyone seems to have the waist of a supermodel Time has only reinforced the sense that these films are hermetically sealed movie terrariums They re like a billion beta test that for all their box-office success have ultimately proven that all the design capabilities in the world can t conjure a story of meaningful impact The often-remarked light cultural footprint left by the first two blockbusters only hints at why these movie seem to evaporate by the ending credits It s the lack of inner life to any of the characters and the bland screen-saver aesthetics At this point in a trilogy nine hours in that hollowness makes Fire and Ash feel like almost theoretical drama more avatar than genuine article These movies have had to work extremely hard moment to moment just to pass as believable But almost every gesture every movement and every bit of dialogue has had something unnatural about it The high frame rate is partially to blame That s made these uncanny movies a combination in equal measure of things you ve never seen before and things you can t unsee Fire and Ash scripted by Cameron Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver picks up with the aftermath of the climatic battle of The Way of Water The Na vi and their seafaring allies the Metkayina clan are nursing their wounds and recovering the human weapons that sunk to the sea floor When a rival clan called the Mangkwan or Ash People come to challenge the Na vi those weapons represent an ethical quandary Should they use such firepower in their own local battles This is a more intricate question partially because the fire-mad Mangkwan are especially bloodthirsty led by their slinky sorceress Vanang played with seductive sadism by Chaplin granddaughter of Charlie But their fight is only a piece of the larger war of Fire and Ash The focus of this third chapter films four and five are stated to be written but not greenlit is interspecies coexistence As human and Na vi lines continue to blur the question becomes whether the human invaders will transform Pandora or if Pandora will transform them That puts the focus on the three characters in various in-between states First there s Spider Jack Champion the human son of Quaritch who lives happily with the Na vi while breathing through a machine to survive the Pandora atmosphere Champion has the double misfortune of wearing a mask and looking downright puny next to the tall and slender natives But in Fire and Ash he discovers he can breathe unfiltered a rise that prompts intense military interest in a potentially hugely profitable breakthrough in Pandora assimilation There s also Jake Sully Sam Worthington the former human who has made a Na vi family with Neytiri Zoe Salda a For Neytiri the growing menace of human warfare causes her to doubt her bond with Jake The prejudices of Fire and Ash seep even into the home Preponderance compelling of the three though remains Quaritch He may be violently trying to subjugate Pandora but he also obviously delights in his Na vi body and in his life on this distant moon You can see him flinch when his commander General Ardmore Edie Falco refers to their Mangkwan allies as savages Meanwhile Quaritch and Vanang hit it off like gangbusters You ve got new eyes colonel one character tells Quaritch All you ve got to do is open them The Avatar films have done plenty to open eyes over the past years To new cinematic horizons to the boundlessness of Cameron s visions to the Papyrus font But the the majority endearing quality of Avatar is that Cameron believes so ardently in it I might be caught up less in the goings on Pandora but I m kind of glad that he is There are worse things than dreaming up a better world with still a fighting chance Avatar Fire and Ash a th Century Studios release opens in theaters Dec It s rated PG- by the Motion Picture Association for intense sequences of violence and action bloody images a few strong language thematic elements and suggestive material Running time minutes Two and a half stars out of four Source