Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025)
Third, out of a planned five, installment in James Cameron's Avatar series, the ongoing saga of humanity trying to conquer the alien moon of Pandora and it's native Na'vi people, lead by former human soldier Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his family, fighting back.
Fire and Ash is different to the previous two movies in that it does little to particularly advance any ongoing narrative, besides cataloguing one more large battle between Pandora and Earth, this movie is, when it comes down to it, almost solely dedicated to developing the characters. So what it deals with is on one side Sully's family working out some of their differences, particularly regarding Spider (Jack Champion), their designated Adopted Human Sibling, who is the biological son of recurring antagonist Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) whom Quaritch himself would like to take back from them and their daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) who's, like... Sexy Alien Jesus, born from a virgin and the great spirit Eywa. Meanwhile Quaritch himself reaches out to a different, more war like tribe of the Na'vi who let Cameron indulge in some of the less wholesome parts of native iconography, dancing around camp fires, snorting hallucinogenics, wearing white face paint that makes their heads look like skulls and certainly more than eager to become acquainted with that human invention called "gunpowder". Their leader the crazed priestess Varang (Oona Chaplin, for good reason noted to be the standout performance of the movie)who takes on the role of Quaritch's love interest and renders them a parallel to Jake and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) which kinda factors into this movies story but seems to be setting up some greater payoff in the sequels.
Avatar: Fire and Ash is an impressive effort. Not to repeat myself, but in a time where action films have come to be written and, even worse, look like television productions a lot of the time, James Cameron is a director trying his hardest to give theatrical audiences their money's worth. Avatar 3 is once again a big dumb movie with big dumb effects and big dumb action setpieces and big dumb emotions, this one in particular certainly being the one to lean the hardest into outright melodrama. But honestly, that is what I kinda liked about it. Seeing how many recent action movies have their characters primarily communicate in smarmy one liners, it feels refreshing to have a movie where people cry, yell at each other, hug each and tell each other they love each other. Basically the entire plot is in how peoples feeling towards each other develop, to the point that the actual battles have a tendency to feel a bit incidental, lavishly directed and exhaustively long as they may be.
And to be fair, this movie is probably a good bit longer than it ought to be. During its climax I often caught my mind wandering, thinking about what I was planning to have for dinner over what it was that I was watching. James Cameron obviously really expects the audience to be invested in Pandora's other civilization, the race of alien whales (or, you might say, whaliens) they established in the last movie and straight up, I really wasn't. Matter of fact my reaction whenever they cut back to them was "Holy crap, can we please be done with this shit already."
That aside though, there is some rather good stuff in this movie, make no mistake. For what it's worth, it did make me care about these characters. Everyone just felt really fleshed out. There wasn't any of that "We'll just establish that they exist now and flesh them out in the sequels or their own spinoff" that a lot of modern franchise movies have, almost everyone had an arc that went somewhere, went through some sort of emotional transformation. The closest it comes to sidelining a character for later was probably Varang, as I've pointed out before. But Particularly the character of Quaritch deserves po be singled out here, this movie really turns him from the stock macho military man villain he was in the first two movies into a character with a surprising amount of nuance.
That said, one does wonder. This is the third time we got to visit Pandora and while it's certainly setting up some things to pay off in the future, it's the one where the least is accomplished by either side of the conflict, giving Fire and Ash a somewhat aimless feeling. And it makes me question, does James Cameron view Pandora more than anything as a place to escape to? No to get too lost in the weeds, one does wonder if Avatar's main theme embodied by Sully and here reiterated in the character of Spider, of making amends for the cruelty and greed of humanity, matter of fact of shedding your own humanity to be embraced into something more pure, more innocent, more beautiful, something worth living and dying for is rooted in some personal longing on his part. If Cameron's meticulous obsession with bringing it to life with his, on occasion rather unreflected seeming, enthusiasm for state of the art technology, modeling and animating all these bioluminescent plants and turquoise seas and pretty, almost naked alien people (though, make no mistake, despite everything the CGI in this still is a long way from passing as photorealistic) isn't tinged by a certain desperation. Because Fire and Ash feels like an excuse to spend time in this world and with these characters more than an effort to advance some grand, epic five part narrative.
All things considered, make no mistake, I overall liked this. I personally wouldn't mind spending more time in this world and with these characters either, I enjoy them fine. I don't begrudge these movies their success, even if there is a small, resentful part inside of me that thinks it should be Rebel Moon in their place. This will probably make its 1 billion+ dollars at the box office and there've been worse things to do so. This movie has had character moments and action setpieces and visuals that will stick with me, I did find some parts emotionally affecting, it's a perfectly good movie. If you're at all interested in seeing this, by all means, go ahead and see it. The worst I could say about it is that it had some pacing issues. But I don't feel burned out on this series yet, I am perfectly willing to watch the next two movies.
Just, please, can we finally put that whole whale stuff behind us? Come on, Jim...
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