Avatar: Fire and Ash review – Something borrowed, something blue

With the recently released Avatar: Fire and Ash having earned $760 million in the last ten days, things are looking likely that Director James Cameron will have the commercial capital to take us back to the planet of Pandora at least one more time after this. And I could not be happier. No, I wasn’t blown away by this blockbuster franchise’s latest bout of sci-fi cultural appropriation and now find myself champing at the bit for more. Rather, my desire for more Avatar stems from the fact that this three-hour-plus behemoth ends on one of the clunkiest lines of dialogue in the entire series, and the 71-year-old Cameron is too important to cinema history for this to be the final discordant note on a story that has taken up so much of his life.

Despite living with aspects of this world in his head for four decades, Cameron’s Avatar films have always been a collection of common tropes and archetypes. I didn’t mind this aspect much in 2022’s Way of Water, as that film was able to distract and dazzle with unprecedented visual effects work (courtesy of 13 years’ worth of bleeding edge filmmaking development by Cameron since the first Avatar in 2009). It also introduced us to an entirely new ecology of Pandora’s flora and fauna courtesy of the “Water People” tribe, pushing the creative worldbuilding envelope over its predecessor. With Fire and Ash, there’s no such evolution.

The visual quality continues to tower above its peers as watching this in IMAX 3D with High Frame Rate is a seriously jaw-dropping experience (HFR is a very contentious technology but in the ultra-colourful sci-fi fantasy world of Avatar it works). However, the lack of screenwriting progress is egregious when you realize that Cameron and co-writers Rick Jaffer and Amanda Siver haven’t just pulled from established motifs yet again, they have also copied their own homework this time. It’s not so much an original screenplay, as it is sections of Way of Water’s Wikipedia page printed out and held together with tape, with some new scribbled notes slotted in between them.

The Sully family, led by ex-human-marine-turned-alien-Na’Vi-warrior Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), are still on shaky ground with the aquatic Metkayina tribe that is hiding them from the human-run Resources Development Administration (RDA). Hardnosed reborn RDA military man Col. Miles Quarritch (Stephen Lang) is still trying to hunt the Sullys down, while very reluctantly trying to bond with his estranged human son Spider (Jack Champion). Jake and Neytiri’s adoptive daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) is still trying to unravel the mysteries of her birth and powers, while their son Lo’Ak (Britain Dalton) is still getting into trouble as he tries to find his place in life.

These and several other plot points are basically repeats of what come before, with just a few added wrinkles. The death of the eldest Sully sibling in the previous film has left Neytiri in rageful mourning, unfairly directing her anger at Spider as the only human target. Meanwhile, despite Neytiri obviously not wanting him around, Spider is desperate to fit in with the Na’Vi. When the family decide to take him back to live with their human scientist compatriots, they run into trouble courtesy of a raid by the hyper-aggressive Mangkwan clan, a.k.a., the “Ash People”, led by the fiery Varang (Oona Chaplin). This brutal attack results in a surprising development for Spider which in turn makes him incredibly valuable to the RDA, sparking a whole new series of clashes.

Seeing as they get mentioned right there in the title, you would expect the introduction of the Ash clan to be a big gamechanger here. You would be disappointed. Much like how the Water People were just Polynesian stand-ins, so too the Ash People are just Cameron’s way of transplanting the real-world Baining fire dancers of Papua New Guinea into a sci-fi setting. But outside of a smattering of scenes showing the Mangkwan living in the ashy slopes of a volcano, their culture is barely explored.

To be fair though, Oona Chaplin’s Varang, finely walking the line between sultry and psychotic, still makes for a magnetic villain despite this lack of development. With her violent rejection of the goddess Eywa due to past trauma, she’s almost a dark mirror image of the pious Neytiri, who Zoe Saldana once again brings to life powerfully. The two of them are definitely the thespian standouts here (the rest of the cast are actually all really solid, with one exception), and exploring their link further would have been an interesting angle if Cameron didn’t just turn Varang and the rest of the Mangkwan people into Quarritch’s hired goons.

Screentime that should have gone to them instead is often devoted to Spider who gets elevated into almost lead status here. Just a pity that Jack Champion is not quite up to the task. The level of acting maturity the young actor possesses was fine when he was just a second-string character in the previous film. Here he’s simply in over his head. What doesn’t help though, is that Spider gets the bulk of the film’s hokey dialogue (including an entire bit about how much he needs to pee right as the film gets to one of its most dramatic moments).

It’s not all Spider all the time though, as several other important narrative threads also get tackled here. It feels that with Cameron’s initial uncertainty about the franchise’s future, he shoehorned in as many of these plotlines as possible, resulting in that bladder-destroying 197-minute runtime. But credit where its due, because Fire and Ash is never boring during that time.

There is a noticeable familiarity to action beats due to no new variety in terms of setting or creatures on Pandora, but Cameron always keeps things moving and interesting. He’s just innately too good at making crowd-pleasing blockbusters to fully drop the ball here. Nothing quite reaches the badass peak of a rampaging Neytiri from Way of Water, but it’s still very entertaining. And as I mentioned before, it always looks phenomenal.

That combo of eye-popping visuals and fun action will more often than not be plenty for general audiences to call Avatar: Fire and Ash a good time. Had more effort been spent on developing the Ash People into the gamechanging antagonists Cameron hinted at in the past – not to mention, another much needed pass on the dialogue – this could have been a great time.