Feeling a Bit Blue
First came wonder, then came disbelief, and now James Cameron has leapt to unremarkable. That’s just wrong.
Avatar: fire and Ash
Directors: James Cameron • Writers: James Cameron, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver
Starring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Oona Chaplin
Hong Kong • 3hrs 17mins
Opens Hong Kong January 8 • IIA
Grade: B
I for one would love to meet (have met?) James Cameron’s mother. Chances that she was a formidable woman are high given Cameron’s string of formidable ex-wives (The Terminator, Aliens and The Walking Dead producer Gale Anne Hurd, The Hurt Locker Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow, fucking Sarah Connor herself, Linda Hamilton) and his consistent un-fear of women. Connor, the second iteration of Ellen Ripley, deep sea rig engineer Lindsey Brigman (the underrated The Abyss), Private Vasquez… Is he perfect? No, but Cameron has done a better job with women than many filmmakers in his class. Which is why on this return to Pandora and the cult of the Na’vi, the familiar story of Avatar: Fire and Ash is lifted way above its potentially rote station by Zoe Saldaña’s Neytiri, Kate Winslet’s Ronal and newcomer Oona Chaplin’s Varang, the leader of the newest Na’vi clan, the Mangkwan.
No matter what you may think of James Cameron personally (I’m assuming you know him) he’s proven he’s able to talk the talk and then walk the damn walk. There was no way to make a sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien, everyone said. “Hold my beer,” said Cameron, who threatened to dump Aliens if producer Fox (at the time) dumped Sigourney Weaver (!) like they wanted to. The Terminator is almost perfect. “Hold this one too,” said. Cameron, and delivered 1) next gen VFX and 2) one of the GOAT sequels. Sure, he looked kind of weird at the Oscars saying he was king of the world after winning best director for Titanic – but he kind of was, having delivered the world’s first billion-dollar grosser and, good or bad, setting a new benchmark for film success. Rumour has it when a studio executive told him to take the first Avatar (2009) elsewhere his response was to tell the dude he’d be sorry when it made ALL the money. There was a “Can lightning strike twice?” feeling around Avatar: The Way of Water a decade later (2022), until it clocked nearly US$2.5 billion thanks to its technological leaps from the first boggling film. We don’t need to interrogate Cameron’s career. He’s earned the right to be a dick.
More of this, please
And that’s the sticking point with Fire and Ash. Optimally seen in its 3D, IMAX, 48fps high rate – which your eyes (brain?) get used to really, really fast – the concurrent production schedule and “just” three-year release gap between the second and third instalments render the whole thing… unremarkable. It’s not breathtaking in its tech. Cameron isn’t full of surprises this time. It’s just more Avatar. With the exception of Varang and a bit more worldbuilding, Fire and Ash is a tonal, narrative and aesthetic carbon copy of part two, and that’s anti-Cameron. If you missed The Way of Water, read the Wiki summary and see this instead.
Fire and Ash picks up almost immediately after the massive and brutal fight between the Metkayina clan and the planet-raping scum of the Earth-based megacorporation RDA. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) rallied the troops to defend both Pandora and the Tulkun space whales whose… blood or plasma or bile or something is worth a lot of cash to the RDA. Like, more than Avatar cash! They fended them off but at a high cost. The Sullys, Jake, his wife Neytiri, holy clone Kiri (Weaver), the guilt-ridden son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), adopted pinkskin Spider (discount Evan Peters, Jack Champion) and Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), whose sole purpose is being repeatedly kidnapped, are grieving the death of eldest son Neteyam and fracturing at the seams. Neytiri is raging at all humans, including Spider, who she alternatively wants gone or dead, and Jake is turning up the hard core marine dial to 11 and doing a bang up job alienating Lo’ak.
While the Sullys are dealing with family issues, the RDA, shepherded by General Ardmore (Edie Falco) and Spider’s dad, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang, still great fun), are planning a second run at the Tulkun and the arrest of Jake as a traitor and terrorist. Into this mix comes the glorious Varang, the bitter and aggressive volcano-dwelling Mangkwan clan chief. Sultry, slinky, atheistic and totally power made, she hooks up with Quaritch literally and militarily in an effort to dominate Pandora and the nature she thinks murdered many of her people. Of course there’s more, it’s over three hours long, but that’s the gist.
While Fire and Ash is burdened with the same beats and flaws as the last film – you bet your ass there’s more chunky, overwhelming RDA hardware, more aerial fights on pterodactyls (okay, they’re Toruks), more luminescent tail bonding with the Great Mother, obnoxious Australian whalers getting eaten, White Saviourism and unsubtle environmental messaging (which I’m actually okay with) – but what lifts #3 over #2 is the inward turn towards more intimate drama, and the signifcantly juiced characters of Neytiri and the pregnant wife of Metkayina clan boss Ronal, and newcomer Varang – and the actors’ legit ace performance capture, erm, performances. Neytiri and Ronal have a nicely nuanced connection that’s evolved from distrust and suspicion to familiar but individualised sisterhood. Ronal is a clan chief’s wife; Neytiri sort of is, and is having a hard time putting down her warrior’s bow. They have children to care for without coddling and they “get” each other on a fundamental level that Cameron and co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver let Saldaña and Winslet flesh out. They pass the Bechdel Test to be all 2000s about it. But it’s Chaplin’s Varang that brings the wildest energy to a familiar property. Varang adds a welcome jolt of sexiness to a pretty sexless world. She doesn’t walk; she slithers. She happily indulges in vice (she and Quaritch get blasted and get it on) and has no qualms about using violence to get her way. She’s awesome, and Chaplin gives her a vivid sense of three-dimensional (no pun intended) menace that gives the film some much-need personality. A lot of Jake sulking and the RDA’s whale hunt could have been excised to make more space for Varang.
Avatar: Fire and Ash has already hit over a billion dollars in ticket sales where it’s opened, which is most places now. It will creep to US$1.3 or $1.5 and probably stall out. That’s still a shit ton of money – but it’s half (half!) of the first film’s haul. So the question will become one of whether or not anyone (as in Disney shareholders) needs more Avatar, including Cameron, particularly when this could be a finale. He’s 71 (25 years younger than Clint Eastwood, so lots of time) and has his eyes on his own personal Oppenheimer in Ghosts of Hiroshima. If he can make it happen Cameron himself has said it will be his most ambitious film ever. Until then because no shit, it is immersive, it is epic, it is a wholly (mostly) original work, Avatar: Fire and Ash is likely to remain the single big screen must-see of the foreseeable future. At least until The Odyssey and its brand new IMAX tech lands. Ball’s in your court, Nolan.