Avatar: Fire and Ash review: You may feel a sense of déjà vu
Fans had to wait 13 years to return to Pandora after 2009’s Avatar, so director James Cameron fixed that issue by filming Avatar: Fire and Ash at the same time as The Way of the Water, bringing the wait time down to just three years.
When the story opens, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington, via performance capture), Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), their children Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) and Tuk (Trinity Bliss) and surrogate kids Spider (Jack Champion, live-action) and Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) are still living with the Metkayina water clan, mourning the loss of son/brother Meteyam. The story truly kicks off when the family comes under attack from the Ash people, on top of their usual threat from longtime nemesis Miles Quadritch (Stephen Lang).
The first two films worked on the binary notion that all Na’vi were good and all humans were bad, but it’s not so black and white anymore. There are some bad Na’vi – the Ash people – and they are pretty menacing and threatening. It felt refreshing having a new antagonist in their leader, Varang (Oona Chaplin), so it was quite disappointing when they teamed up with the franchise’s big bad Quadritch. It makes sense for the two Sully enemies to align with each other, but the Ash people have less of a presence after that, as they just become Quadritch’s lackeys.
In The Way of the Water, Cameron spent time introducing us to the new clan, showing us their way of life, their beliefs and how they are different to Neytiri’s original Omatikaya clan. In this outing, we don’t really get to know the Ash people – the Mangkwan. We briefly see where they live, but we don’t learn much else or understand why they’re savages that want to kill other Na’vi. Varang is a fantastic new character and she has a formidable presence in the first half, but siding with Quadritch dulls her power. They are sidelined for another cycle of Jake vs Quadritch.
In fact, a lot of Fire and Ash feels like a repeat of The Way of Water. The first two-thirds hit a lot of the same beats as its predecessor, and I got a sense of deja vu on a couple of occasions. Besides the introduction of the Ash people and a really juicy moral dilemma involving the human kid Spider, this chapter doesn’t move the story on much from the previous outing. Cameron could have easily reduced the epic three-hour 17-minute runtime by cutting out some of the repetition. However, I have to say that it doesn’t feel quite that long thanks to the pacing. Cameron keeps it moving!
As has come to be expected, this film is another visually stunning technical achievement. You forget that you’re watching actors via performance capture and that everything you see is CGI. It took my brain a few minutes to get used to the 3D and the higher frame rate, but after that, I could really appreciate how beautiful it looks. There is a climactic battle in the final act that is absolutely spectacular. The action is terrific, but there is so much going on that I struggled to follow every beat.
Overall, Avatar: Fire and Ash is an action-packed cinematic spectacle that makes plenty of thought-provoking points about our treatment of our planet. It’s longer than it needs to be and a bit too repetitive, but there’s no denying that Cameron knows how to make an entertaining blockbuster on an epic scale.
In cinemas on Friday 19th December