After the 13-year gap between the original Avatar and The Way of Water, the subsequent three-year wait for the third part (of five) has felt almost like nothing at all in comparison. Fire and Ash arrives, inevitably, with less ‘event’ hype but also a more immediate and intimate familiarity with its world and the intricate circles of life within it. It’s a solid grounding for a still-affecting but now rather wheel-spinning chapter 3, one that entertains in the moment and still has some of the best villains in the modern blockbuster business, but really does not change the status quo enough given that we’re still years away from any proper conclusion to this story.
With James Cameron still in the saddle, the return to Pandora is still, of course, a technical masterclass that makes almost every other blockbuster look downright amateurish. Every Na’vi, every weird and wonderful Pandoran creature, every sea and forest and floating mountain; they all look more real than reality, even if Cameron’s commitment to the 48fps high frame rate can be a bit of an eye-strainer at times. We don’t get the sort of new biome leap that accompanied The Way of Water, though, and most of these settings, gorgeous as they are, are getting perhaps overfamiliar.
In fact, overfamiliar is the name of the game here. Across its mammoth three-and-a-quarter hour runtime, Fire and Ash repeats so, so many of The Way of Water’s beats, both story and action, that it often feels more like Avatar 2.5 than 3. At least on the action side, these beats are still fantastic – Cameron remains a master at the geography of a battle sequence, and it remains wrenching to see our heroes suffer and wildly cathartic to watch the human forces get massacred. On the story side, though, this running in circles becomes a pretty huge problem.
Some conversations seem to have been lifted wholesale from The Way of Water as the Sully clan argue or the Tulkun whales debate the ethics of violence, and Cameron’s often tin-eared dialogue hasn’t got any less clunky in the last three years. With Jake (Sam Worthington), Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), and their various kids all stuck in a rut, it’s up to new arrival Varang (Oona Chaplin) to breathe some freshness into things, and, despite not quite getting enough screentime, she delivers in a hell of a way.
In Varang, the ultra-sultry chieftain of a brutal raider clan whose home forest burned in a volcanic eruption, we have the franchise’s first Na’vi villain. Driven by hate and lust for power, she’s a real threat who is a lot of fun as she revels in her own evil-ness whilst also managing to bring out the best and worst in Quaritch (Stephen Lang, having a ball), who is still hunting the Sullys in his blue-skinned form, though developing a healthy scepticism about the human mission on Pandora along the way. Chaplin and Lang make a great double act, all violence and chaos and outrageous flirting (this is the sexiest Avatar by a distance), easily the highlights of the ensemble, whose performances across the board remain impressively convincing in this entirely unreal world.
By the end of the near-200 minutes you spend with Fire and Ash, not enough has felt new and the forward momentum has been minimal. In many other directors’ hands, or in many other franchises, this is the kind of thing that could prove entirely fatal but here there is, ultimately, enough beauty, earnestness, and whales wreaking violent revenge that those same 200 minutes will have been, most importantly, a hell of a lot of fun.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 