Avatar: Fire and Ash review: 'tedious'
Never mind the ill-defined characters and cringey dream sequences, this latest Avatar film will still clean up at the box office, writes Alistair Harkness
Avatar: Fire and Ash (12A) ★★
For an original franchise that seems to have no cultural resonance beyond its own gargantuan box-office haul (and one viral SNL sketch featuring Ryan Gosling), James Cameron’s Avatar saga is curiously resilient. Just look at the success of the second film, 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water, which came out 13 years on the first film’s inauguration as the highest-grossing movie of all time. In the intervening years Marvel became cinema’s dominant blockbuster force, a new generation of Star Wars films came and went, and the much-hyped immersive 3D technology Avatar ushered in revealed itself to be a short-lived fad, with the film industry mercifully following Christopher Nolan’s lead and focussing on IMAX as the favoured format for large scale event cinema. And yet, The Way of Water still became the third most successful film in history, even though no one beyond James Cameron seemed all that invested in the story or its hodgepodge eco-themed mythology.
Avatar: Fire and Ash is unlikely to change that narrative. Cameron’s inarguable reign as the king of the box-office world might be good news for beleaguered multiplexes, but as a storyteller he’s so in love with the hermetically sealed world he’s created he seems intent on trapping us there beyond what his hokey plot will support. Bombarding us with one meticulously detailed digital landscape after another, it’s like being taken on a 195-minute tour of an open-world video-game by someone who wants to spend a lot of time gawping at the bioluminescent scenery or observing those weird feline Na’vi characters whale riding or plugging their dreadlocks into the nearest tree so they can indulge in yet more ritualistic New Age nonsense.
Picking up the story where the previous one left off, it largely focusses on the younger characters introduced in that second film, especially Spider (Jack Champion), a sort of Tarzan/Mowgli-esque wild child, borne of the “Sky People” (the Na’vi name for humans), but adopted by the family of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), the Na’vi/human hybrid who fused permanently with his avatar so he could live and procreate on the toxic-to-humans planet of Pandora. Alas, because the characters are so ill-defined and unmemorable, the film has to remind us of a lot of what’s happened through risible voice-over or cringey dream sequences, the gist of it being that Jake’s mourning the son he lost last time out and Spider’s status as the human offspring of Jake’s sworn enemy, Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), is making his relationship with Jake’s family more complicated .
Speaking of Quaritch, you may or may not recall that he was killed at the end of the first film and brought back to life in the second by implanting his memories in a Na’vi avatar. That could have made for a fascinating character this time out had Cameron made him a more existentially troubled soul, especially when he takes up with this film’s villain, Varad (Oona Chaplin), the alluring leader of an aggressive tribe of volcano-dwelling warriors whose slash-and-burn proclivities echo Quaritch’s militaristic ones.
But the character takes a quippy approach to his new form and Cameron seems happy enough to use him as a kind of Na’vi Darth Vader, content to do the bidding of his imperial overlords (in this instance the US military), but also willing to let his feelings for his son compromise his mission whenever the plot needs to get itself out of a jam.
As with the second film, Quaritch’s mission is to capture Jake, who’s been branded a terrorist. Once again, though, Cameron has done none of the hard work of setting up why Jake is a useful propaganda tool, so the scenes where he’s used as such fall flat, lost in a digital swirl of decorative nature-doc imagery or first-person video-game visuals, the latter punctuating the film with bloodless, boring carnage.
It’s pretty tedious and all very synthetic looking. The high-definition, pin-sharp 3D may give it an aesthetic all its own, but it’s hard to engage with the performances of Kate Winslet, Sigourney Weaver and Zoe Saldaña when their anonymous, goofy looking characters are mostly called upon to hiss at their enemies like disgruntled Thundercats. Start counting those billions.
Avatar is on general release from 19 December
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