Spoiler-free free but I talk about the inciting incidents and allude to other events in the movie.
At least we didn’t have to wait over a decade for this sequel. Avatar: Fire and Ash is the third film in the franchise and the second this decade. Does James Cameron deliver another hit, or is the franchise in hot water? Let’s find out.
Fire and Ash picks up pretty much right after the events of The Way of Water, with the Sully family grieving the loss of Neteyam while trying to get on with their day-to-day lives and stay under the RDF radar. But Spider’s mask that allows him to breathe on Pandora is becoming a liability, emptying out at very inconvenient moments, causing some safety concerns for the family. Jake decides that for everyone’s safety, Spider needs to leave. Of course, leaving the sanctuary of the Reef clan leaves them exposed, not only to the RDF but to the Ash clan, a group of savage Na’vi who have abandoned the ways of Eywa. And so we have the inciting incident for this over three-hour movie.
As always, when it comes to these movies, Avatar: Fire and Ash is a stunning movie. Quite often, I would forget that everything I was looking at was rendered in a computer. The world feels alive and rich, with so many details that bring the characters and the moon to life. The score this time around, relative to Way of Water, is better, tapping more into James Horner’s original themes and motifs. The motion capture continues to be great, with the actors doing the best they can with the often clunky dialogue. But Zoe Saldaña actually does a great job in the movie as a grieving mother with ample resentment for Spider, a “pink skin” who she sees as an outsider in her family, and for her husband’s way of conducting war against the Sky People, using weapons that aren’t the Na’vi way.
The third Avatar movie does do a lot of new things, both with its world and its storytelling. It takes some big swings, some of which challenge our level of disbelief, but it is still trying new things, especially in the first half. Spider and Kiri are extremely integral to the plot this time around, and their journey does take us to some trippy locations. But for every time Fire and Ash does something new, it also retreads plot points and scenes from Way of Water.
That’s because Fire and Ash is really The Way of Water Part II. It continues a lot of the plot points and narrative beats set up from that movie. But rather than taking those moments and doing something new, Cameron and his team often elected to repeat those points instead. And I don’t mean in some vague or implied way. I mean, literally doing certain scenes and narrative beats again. This is most egregious in the final act, which is just a remixed version of the final act of Way of Water.
Considering the film was marketed around fire, it may be surprising how much water is in this one and how little fire there actually is. The Ash clan are there, but we don’t really get to know them that much and feel more like madness for the sake of having a wildcard element to counterbalance the RDF. Quaritch at least gets a bit more to chew on this time, but only a bit. He’s the same old for just about the whole movie, and whenever things look like they’re going to get interesting with him, they don’t.
With so many repeating threads, the over three-hour movie does start to feel longer than its predecessors. I could see a version of this movie that trims out 45 minutes easily. To be honest, the end of act two felt like a natural conclusion for the film, and then a character mentions that something is still scheduled to happen in a day, and I groaned to myself as I reminded myself we still have to do that. Again.
Avatar: Fire and Ash continues to franchise’s legacy of being a technical marvel, but suffers the most in the story department. Of the three, I’d say it’s my least favourite, thanks largely to the sense of déjà vu. Time will tell if we get another one of these films, as James Cameron has already shot portions of the fourth film. But the rest of that footage would be dependent on the success of this film. At least the narrative doesn’t end on a crazy cliffhanger, should this be the end of our time in Pandora. For now, I’d say if you’re a die-hard fan of the franchise or of spectacle, check it out, but maybe at matinee. Otherwise, no real rush.