THE STORY – A year after settling in with the Metkayina clan, Jake and Neytiri’s family grapples with grief after Neteyam’s death. They encounter a new, aggressive Na’vi tribe, the Mangkwan clan, also called the Ash People, led by the fiery tribe leader, Varang, who has allied with Jake’s enemy, Quaritch, as the conflict on Pandora escalates to devastating consequences.
THE CAST – Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Oona Chaplin, Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Winslet, Jack Chapmion & Britain Dalton
THE TEAM – James Cameron (Director/Writer), Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver (Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 197 Minutes
Let the record show that James Cameron’s “Avatar“ films are technical marvels of such effective immersive beauty that, while watching them, one almost forgets they consist primarily of computer-generated images (even if aided by performance capture). More than any other films in recent memory, “Avatar“ and its sequel, “The Way of Water,“ make you believe in movie magic as they transport you to the lush alien world of Pandora, inhabited by the tall, blue, cat-like Na’vi. The technological advances required to tell the story the way Cameron intended resulted in visual effects that have always felt light-years ahead of most other big-screen spectacles. So it comes as no surprise that the series’s third entry, “Fire and Ash,“ continues in this vein.
Based on the available evidence, the record can also show that Cameron knows story structure like the back of his hand, unfailingly writing films that may have some dopey dialogue but always land the emotional beats because of how thoroughly they’re set up and executed. What Cameron does in the sprawling “Fire and Ash,“ though, is level up his character writing, using the film’s epic length to spend more time with the characters, digging deep into their relationships with each other and the world around them to create a film as emotionally engaging as it is viscerally thrilling.
In the wake of the events of “The Way of Water,“ the Sully family is mourning the loss of eldest son Neteyam (Jamie Flatters). Father Jake (Sam Worthington) and mother Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), fearful for the safety of their family and the Metkayina clan, decide to send human teen Spider (Jack Champion) back to the friendly human base near their clan’s home. At the insistence of son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), young daughter Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), and Dr. Grace Augustine’s avatar-born spawn Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), the whole family joins the wind traders of the Tlalim clan on the journey. When their party is raided by the Ash People of the Mangkwan Clan, though, their fire catches the attention of Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who soon meets with the Mangkwan leader Varang (Oona Chaplin) as a potential new ally in his RDA-approved quest to take down Jake Sully once and for all and complete humanity’s conquest of Pandora. Can the strength of the Sully family survive against the fire of the Ash People and the firepower of the RDA?
The first thing you may notice about “Avatar: Fire and Ash“ is how similar its plot is to that of the previous two films, particularly “The Way of Water.“ While that film benefitted from the thirteen years separating it from its predecessor, “Fire and Ash“ has no such distance, making even the slightest similarity stand out immediately. That can make this third installment feel less exciting by comparison, especially since the Mangkwan aren’t as large a part of the story as the Metkayina were in the second, which robs the film of much of its discovery thrill. While nothing here has the magic of that second hour of “The Way of Water,“ in which the Sullys embed themselves with the Metkayina and learn their ways, Cameron’s immersive storytelling gets applied to character instead of setting this time around, focusing on how the characters respond to the world around them and how it shapes their belief systems. That’s always been a part of the “Avatar“ films, of course. Still, it comes into sharper focus here, thanks to the fascinating Varang, the arcs for Jake and Neytiri reaching peak intensity, and the presence of actual arcs for the previously underwritten Lo’ak and Spider.
With three hours and fifteen (extremely well-paced) minutes to tell this film’s story, Cameron can take his time to let the character moments breathe, which he does to significant effect. When combined with his unmatched grasp of popular storytelling structure, the deeper character focus makes this film more emotionally immersive than ever before, letting us spend more time with the younger characters as they mature and take on greater importance in the series’s narrative.
Thankfully, the young cast members really rise to the occasion, turning in performances of surprising depth. They’ve all clearly learned from castmate Sigourney Weaver, giving a spirited performance as the mystic Kiri. While her voice doesn’t always sound like a teenager’s, she does tap into her emotions effectively, imbuing them with a deeply felt purity that is distinctly teen-like. Dalton achieves a similar purity of emotion, which considerably aids Lo’ak’s emo-teen arc as he helps his friend, Payakan, the Tulkun (the true breakout star of “The Way of Water“), try to convince the pacifist Tulkun elders of the need to fight back against the RDA. This leads to lots of yelling that could easily veer into cringeworthy territory, but with Cameron’s rock-solid structure and Simon Franglen’s sweeping score behind him, Dalton achieves just the right tone to make those moments sing.
While the youngest members of the Metkayina clan take even more of a back seat this time, Bailey Bass once again makes an impression with a couple of impassioned moments as the Metkayina chief’s daughter, Tsireya, a potential love interest for Lo’ak. Lo’ak also serves as the film’s narrator, and Dalton doesn’t let the dialogue get the better of him, bringing just enough age-appropriate weariness to lines like “the fire of hate leaves only the ash of grief,“ so they sound natural rather than writerly.
The film’s main arc centers on Spider. Everyone who found Champion an off-putting presence in “The Way of Water“ can breathe a sigh of relief; the young actor comes into his own right alongside his character. While he still gets some of the film’s cringiest dialogue, the screenplay deepens the character by highlighting just how untenable his life is: As a human, he relies on increasingly faulty oxygen masks to live on Pandora, and because he lives with the Na’vi, he has a lot of value to Quaritch and the RDA. A shocking plot development makes his value to the RDA even higher, though, which jeopardizes his place among the Na’vi even more, leading to some dark emotional moments that Champion sells with every fiber of his being, helped by a never-better Worthington.
As the mournful Jake, whom the screenplay sends on a journey to reclaim the warrior within, Worthington is given his darkest material yet in the series, and he turns in a performance of genuine moral conflict and deep emotional resonance. Once again, Jake and Neytiri’s different backgrounds cause them to take opposing sides about what to do if (and when) the RDA threatens their home again, but the personal stakes at play after the death of Neteyam make their conflict feel richer than ever before. Saldaña once again accesses such deep wells of emotional pain as Neytiri that there’s no way the visual effects artists could have created it. For the first time in the series, the performers around her rise to her level, creating an emotional tapestry as rich and engaging as the film’s stunning visuals.
While the boundary-pushing visual effects remain the main draw for the series, the film’s best visual effect is neither one of the cool new weapons of war the RDA deploys, nor the giddy shots from Payakan’s POV, nor the strikingly-colored, stripped-bare volcano-side home of the Ash clan; it’s Oona Chaplin’s all-in performance as Varang. A mystical cynic who lost faith in Eywa when her clan lost their home after the volcano near them exploded, Varang is in many ways as over-the-top in her villainy as Quaritch was in the first “Avatar“. While her backstory makes her far more sympathetic than Quaritch ever has been, Chaplin takes full advantage of the motion capture process to exaggerate her every movement in a way that heightens the character’s villainy. Her performance is just as much fun as Lang’s was as Quaritch in the first film, but she has more of a character to sink her teeth into, which makes her scenery chewing feel more purposeful and thus more successful. Whether engaging in a hissing match with Neytiri, seducing Quaritch with her mystical ways, or viciously using the neural bond the Na’vi make with each other through their tails to torture those who stand in her way, Chaplin’s Varang is impossible to look away from, a fascinating character who just so happens also to be an iconic popcorn-movie villain. Her scenes with Lang give “Fire and Ash“ a special spark all its own, a dark, twisted tryst that implies an even darker film than we end up getting.
This is the biggest problem with “Fire and Ash.“ For all the film’s impressive visual grandeur, strong focus on character, and sensitive performances, it almost feels as though it’s holding something back. Given the long, twisty development history of the “Avatar“ sequels, this film’s place in the overall arc is somewhat hard to pin down. It’s the final film of a trilogy that will eventually be a series with two more films. Still, it’s also the second half of what was supposed to be the middle entry of a trilogy, before the second and third installments got expanded into two films each. We may not know the full extent of this story’s success until we get those next installments, but for now, it’s a bit of a mixed bag, even if it mostly works.
The structure’s similarity to “The Way of Water“ will surely rub many audience members the wrong way. Still, Cameron’s experience with this sort of pop-art storytelling ensures that all the emotional beats land with maximum impact. While the film’s extended climax is so successful at bringing the film’s many story threads together that your heart will be in your throat, Cameron lets his optimism and love for these characters get the better of him. The dark, mature content of “Fire and Ash“ creates a compelling atmosphere and leads to some fascinatingly knotty moral quandaries that feel sufficiently heightened from the previous films. Its finale, satisfying though it may be in its many cheer-worthy payoffs, goes against that somewhat, bringing the film back to the original’s more simplistic good/evil binary.
While Cameron leaves some plot and character developments open for further exploration in subsequent films, it can feel like a bit of a letdown that this entry ends up being more toothless than it seemed in the early going. However, it’s all done in the name of bringing everything full circle with the original film, and the ending of “Fire and Ash“ still elicits both tears and cheers. Perhaps Cameron will let the darkness take even more prominence down the road, and that will result in an “Avatar“ that finally feels as though it’s breaking new story and technological ground. For now, though, “Fire and Ash“reaffirms Cameron as one of our greatest storytellers and the “Avatar“ series as the pinnacle of Hollywood blockbuster entertainment.
