James Cameron’s eye-popping but exhausting Avatar: Fire and Ash is judgment day for Pandora

Avatar: Fire and Ash

Directed by James Cameron

Written by James Cameron, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver

Starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana and Stephen Lang

Classification PG; 197 minutes

Opens in theatres Dec. 19

There are enough sizable, non-essential stretches of drama in the new 197-minute Avatar movie to briefly remove your mind from the on-screen goings-on and ponder life’s big questions. Such as: Would you give up your human form to become a blue-skinned member of the Na’vi race, as the franchise’s soldier hero Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) did back at the end of the first movie? How well do you think you could position a flimsy loincloth, were you required to wear it for the duration of your Na’vi existence? And what do you think James Cameron might have done with his life if, post-Titanic, he did not dedicate his filmmaking career to exploring the wonders of Pandora?

It is hard to underestimate the impact that Cameron has had on the cinematic medium, from its economics to its technology. But no matter how tremendously entertaining and wildly successful the director’s Avatar films have been so far, the hardened and perhaps cynical moviegoer cannot help but plot post-1997 alternate histories. To imagine all the potentially wondrous movies that Cameron didn’t make as he sequestered himself inside of New Zealand soundstages, building an entire universe from scratch.

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Zoe Saldana in a scene from Avatar: Fire and Ash.20th Century Studios/Supplied

This game of “What if…?” wouldn’t be much of a thing if Avatar: Fire and Ash were as thoroughly compelling, so purely majestic, as its two predecessors. Whereas the first Avatar was if not mind-blowing fun than at least a mind-altering blast, and 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water a boundary-pushing spectacle par excellence, Fire and Ash cannot help but feel like a retread of what came before, diluted and distended. In interviews, cast members such as Worthington – who filmed The Way of Water and Fire and Ash concurrently – say that they felt no delineation in making one film or the other. Which sums up the dilemma of watching Fire and Ash three years after The Way of Water. The storytelling might have felt fresh and fastened together in the moment of creation, but separated by time and expectations, the two halves don’t boast the same intensity of connection. Audiences become as stuck in the weeds of Pandora as Cameron seems to be.

Not that the planet’s vegetation isn’t a pretty wondrous place to get mired in. Picking up without so much a brief recap of all the events that went down in The Way of Water, Fire and Ash opens with the Sully clan – dad Jake, mother Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), teenage son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), daughter Tuk (Trinity Bliss), and adoptive daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) – traipsing around lush, candy-coloured otherworldly landscapes, where they hunt, fish and generally try to stay ahead of the planet’s more dangerous elements (both its native inhabitants and the “sky people,” a.k.a. earthlings, who have come to mine the world’s natural resources).

The Sully family is also reckoning with the tragic events of the previous film, including the death of eldest son Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) and the bloodthirsty vendetta of their human nemesis Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who has been resurrected into his own Na’vi body. There are still water-based Na’vi clans hanging around, and soon we’re introduced to a “sky” Na’vi sect, too, who ride delightfully conceived ships that look like a cross between hot-air balloons and giant whale carcasses. They’re around because Jake and his family need safe passage as they seek a new home for the human teenage boy Spider (Jack Champion), who has been hanging around the Sullys since he was a baby but is no longer suited for a life reliant on an oxygen mask. (For those who forget: One big obstacle of life on Pandora for humans is that we can’t breathe the air. Which leads to a plot point late in Fire and Ash that should unintentionally make it the favourite movie of both the anti- and pro-mask COVID movements.)

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Sam Worthington in a scene from Avatar: Fire and Ash.20th Century Studios/Supplied

It isn’t too long before the Sullys find themselves facing one battle after another, each calamity crisscrossing over the other to create a cascading series of disastrous crises. Quaritch returns yet again, guns blazing, but this time in alliance with a Na’vi witch named Varang (Oona Chaplin), who leads the volcano-dwelling Mangkwan clan. Kiri, who is something of a messianic figure given that she sprang from the womb of her Na’vi avatar mother in a virgin birth (this is by no means the strangest element in the series, so just go with it), is struggling to communicate with the god of Pandora, whose mind seems to reside in the planet’s core (see, told you re: the strangeness). The sky people, meanwhile, are as hell-bent as ever on expanding their footprint (with expanded roles for original Avatar co-star Giovanni Ribisi, who basically sat The Way of Water out). And then there’s all the whale drama.

Yes, for audiences who could not get enough of Payakan, the exiled tulkun – essentially, an extraterrestrial whale – who befriended Lo’ak and speaks in Papyrus-stylized subtitles (guilty as charged), then Fire and Ash offers some delightfully surreal super-sized shenanigans. Without having timed the subplot to the minute, it feels as if a good fifth of this movie is devoted to what feels like a high-seas court martial in which Payakan is put on trial by Pandora’s elder tulkuns. It is basically The Caine Mutiny meets Free Willy, but set in outer space. And it is amazing.

Regrettably, though, the bulk of Fire and Ash feels distressingly derivative of what came before, down to ultra-specific plot beats. The Sullys once again face off against a new band of geographically diverse Na’vi. The sky people still foolishly think that they can go tulkun-hunting with little to no consequence. Quaritch keeps kidnapping the Sully children, only to find himself facing Jake and Neytiri’s wrath. Over and over again.

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Saldana and Worthington in a scene from Avatar: Fire and Ash.20th Century Studios/Supplied

Cameron has always been a better world-builder and set-piece stager than a screenwriter, but the circular nature of Fire and Ash’s narrative – co-written with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver – can be an intensely frustrating thing to endure. While The Way of Water’s 192 minutes didn’t so much breeze by as they gently floated, the crushing heft of Fire and Ash can be felt far too often, pushing the entire endeavour past the brink of exhaustion.

Not helping the fatigue is the inevitable eyeball strain that will come for audiences who watch the movie in 3-D, and even worse for those who experience it projected at 48 frames per second (almost every other movie runs at 24 fps). As ever, Cameron is a master at engineering and executing action sequences – he has the best internal clock in the business when it comes to pacing the cause and effect of large-scale violence – but his fetish for filming it all in an ostensibly photo-realistic fashion doesn’t heighten detail so much as it smooths the visuals into unsettling digital goop. In his bid to make the unreal elements of Pandora feel more lifelike than life itself, Cameron has overdosed the eye and overwhelmed the brain.

It is a little funny, then, that it is Fire and Ash’s flesh-and-blood players – whether they appear on-screen as earthlings or as digitally composed Na’vi – who make this Avatar adventure feel like something that you can wrap your arms around, something tangible.

Worthington, who has too rarely been singled out for giving the biggest franchise in cinematic history its necessary emotional anchor, is wonderful as the tired, frustrated Jake, even if his line delivery does start to slip into a Matthew McConaughey-like drawl. Lang chews his dialogue and spits it right back out with impressive gumption, giving fresh life to a not especially deep villain. And Weaver hits all the right, soulful notes as a character who must at once be a vulnerable child and a wise-beyond-her-years sage. (Cameron also allows her a great call-back moment to their work on Aliens.)

If all goes according to plan, Cameron is intent on making a fourth and fifth Avatar. All the more power to him – the box office will likely respond in kind. But at the end of Fire and Ash, it is hard to yearn for even more time on Pandora, and resist the urge to whisk Cameron off to any other world.