While grieving the loss of their child, Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) must defend themselves and their family against another onslaught from the ‘Sky People’.
Three years ago, I found myself sitting in my local IMAX, ready for the long-awaited follow up to 2009’s Avatar… with Avatar: The Way of Water. It had been thirteen years in the making, and I was intrigued to find out if it would live up to the hype. I’ve always loved and grown up with the films of James Cameron and I enjoyed the first Avatar. It was still engaging enough visually and emotionally to have a good time watching it, and back in 2009 it really did feel like a big, bold step had been taken into a new world of visual effects. In fact, just one month before the sequel, they re-released the original in IMAX 3D, and I honestly enjoyed the heck out of re-watching it. So, when The Way of Water finally landed, I was disappointed to find it was lacking in many… many ways (You can read my review of Avatar 2 here).
Cut to three years later, IMAX 3D glasses in hand, popcorn at the ready and from the moment Fire & Ash started I felt the same uneasy sense of Déjà vu I’d felt with The Way of Water. And that’s because watching this new film feels exactly like you’re watching a ‘remix’ of previous one. Almost as if Cameron looked at The Way of Water film and said, “Hold up… Let me have another go at that”.
All the same emotional and story beats are here again. Quaritch (Stephen Lang) in his new Na’vi body is STILL hunting the Sully family down. The humans are STILL trying to colonise the planet, while also hunting the whale-like Tulkun creatures for profit. Jake and Neytiri are STILL at constant odds with their children (minus one, who heroically died in A2). Young Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) is STILL trying to discover her origin and why their deity Eywa has supposedly ‘forsaken’ her and blah… blah… freakin’ blah!
Okay… so I may be taking a somewhat reductionist attitude toward some of the film’s lazier aspects here. Of course there are new story threads to everything I’ve mentioned above, but it’s just not enough to make this a satisfying or worthwhile new chapter to the saga. Yes, the visuals have taken another huge leap up from The Way of Water, and in IMAX 3D this film is for a lack of a better word, breathtaking. The technical artistry on display here cannot be disputed, Cameron is a master filmmaker, surrounded by a crew who are doing things that have literally never seen on screen before. And from a visual effects, sound design, production design standpoint, Fire & Ash is nothing short of a masterpiece. It’s just a shame that the further James Cameron has ventured into pushing VFX over the years, the more his budget has increased along with his story-telling scope, the more I feel detached from any real emotional connection to what he’s making.
The most promising new antagonist that provides a little momentum is Varang (Oona Chaplin) the leader of the Mangkwan tribe, who wants to strike fear into all other Na’vi on Pandora. And she sets out to do so with the help of Quaritch plus some human weapons and supplies. For a small, promising chunk of the film her character really feels dangerous, cold and calculating. Her chemistry with Quaritch is fun and kinetic, lending his character a new angle on what’s unfolding and his own motivations. But then it just kinda… disappears. Varang seems to become a mindless sidekick to Quaritch as he uses her for his own means.
And at 197 minutes, it’s also just INSANELY long to sit through, even in the most comfortable of cinemas. It really does feel like the few elements of Fire & Ash that worked well should’ve been folded into The Way of Water and we could’ve been presented with a better sequel three years ago. Maybe instead of the humans being the main antagonist in The Way of Water, we could’ve had Varang’s tribe posing the main threat to both humans and the rest of the Na’vi tribes? Maybe that would’ve made for some interesting drama in the form of an uneasy truce between the humans and Sully/Na’vi family as they dealt with a new, unfamiliar problem? I’d even bet that one savvy fan with some degree of editing skill, could even combine these two films into one and cut out about 60% of the flab holding them both back. But don’t look at me, I’m busy making videos for Richer Sounds, lol.
Fire & Ash cost an eye-watering 400 MILLION dollars to make. By comparison, 1984’s The Terminator cost only 6 million dollars (around 18 million in today’s money) and has far more drama, depth, emotion, pacing and originality than his latest offering. You could also argue that a film like The Terminator added to the cultural zeitgeist in a way that the Avatar films never have. The Terminator films were iconic, have been endlessly analysed and lovingly parodied and are as entertaining to watch now as they were then.
Fire & Ash will go on to make a ton of money I’m sure, but then it’ll be plopped onto Disney+ and forgotten about. I was going to go into so much more depth with this review, but I just don’t feel there’s enough to explore here that wouldn’t have me repeating my review for The Way of Water.
Cameron has stated in interviews that we’ll only see an Avatar 4 and 5 if this new film performs well. And that in the meantime he may go off to do some smaller, simpler projects, which I for one would welcome. I’d love to see Cameron return to some lower/modest budget filmmaking, that aims for real, meaningful storytelling over flashy visuals. But for now if I want to watch another James Cameron film about aliens… I’d rather watch Aliens (for the 100th time).
Author: Arron, Marketing Department
