“Avatar: Fire and Ash” feels like a tricked-out station wagon with James Cameron at the wheel speeding us to his favorite spot in the galaxy. The trail-blazing 71-year-old director has himself been visiting Pandora for over half a century, ever since he first dreamed of it at the age of 19. As 26-trillion-mile destination cinema goes, this third update of the adventures of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a former United States Marine turned big blue Na’vi daddy, his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and their blended brood of biological and adopted kids, is essentially an overlong home movie. There are spats and hugs, frolics and bonding, and not much thrust to the tale. These characters have simply become so real to Cameron that they’re family.
Cameron’s affection for the place is still a convincing reason to hang out in outer space until the popcorn visionary finally returns to our planet. But plot-wise, the story is the same as ever. Earthlings, also known as “pink skins” and “sky people,” want to pillage Pandora’s natural resources. The Na’vi, eco-warriors with hardbodied girlfriends, fight back along with assorted alien dinosaurs, whales, squids, plants and blobs.
Jake and Neytiri’s relationship has strained since their oldest son, Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), was murdered by soldiers in 2022’s “Avatar: The Way of Water.” Neytiri, her face smudged with black mourning makeup, has turned toward prayer. She’s never liked humankind. Now, she loathes “their pink little hands and the way they think.”
Her husband Jake, however, can’t help thinking like the human he once was. Having gone native and been persecuted for it, he deals with his grief by dredging up guns from the last film’s ocean fracas, even though metal weaponry goes against the rules of the aquatic community that’s taken him in, led by chieftain Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and his pregnant wife Ronal (Kate Winslet).
Their surviving children are a mix of Na’vi — Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) and Tuk (Trinity Bliss) — and a foster human named Spider (Jack Champion), the estranged son of Stephen Lang’s longtime heavy Colonel Miles Quaritch. There’s a glint of drama in that Neytiri doesn’t want to risk a custody skirmish with Spider’s biological father. She’d rather exile, perhaps even kill, the kid. But you never believe for a minute that Cameron would make his heroine do anything that awful.
So instead of getting swept away by the narrative, I just settled in to enjoy the details: hammerhead sharks twisted into pickaxes, ships that scuttle like crabs, the drama of an underwater scream: “Guh-glurrgggh!” I’m particularly fond of how the Na’vi express themselves in hisses and coyote yips and exhale the foreign name Jake Sully like a sneeze.
To be fair, Cameron’s conservationist message is evergreen and his passion for nature so sincere that he went vegan — or, as he prefers to call it, “futurevore” — between the first two movies. Despite “Avatar” and its sequel earning over $5 billion dollars worldwide, it’s not like we pink skins have bought in to respecting our own globe.
As a fresh twist, this time there are some nasty Na’vi too: the rebellious Ash Clan — spearheaded by the vicious Varang (Oona Chaplin) — which sides with Lang’s macho and hilarious Quaritch as a way of sticking it to the planet’s spiritual mother goddess. Quaritch is besotted by this new villainess and we’re pretty into Varang ourselves. “We do not suck on the breast of weakness,” Chaplin says with a snarl, her volcano-raised vengeful killer making a heck of an entrance in a shirt that’s nothing more than a strap. Underneath the digital artifice, Chaplin’s eyes flash with hot conviction and palpable presence. Her grandfather Charlie, an actor who embraced visual effects a century ago with “The Gold Rush,” would have been impressed by how his bloodline has kept pace with cinema’s evolution.
Quaritch, who now resembles a Na’vi himself with a flat top over his whipping rattail, still remains the series’ most entertaining character by far. The infatuated redneck even paints himself with one of the Ash Clan’s tribal patterns: an actual red neck. At one point, his boss, Edie Falco’s General Frances Ardmore, accuses Quaritch of transforming into “Colonel Cochise,” drawing a line between her species and Pandora’s “savages” that makes her sound like a parody of John Wayne.
“It don’t matter what color I am — I still remember what team I’m playing for,” Quaritch lectures Jake. While the boundaries of black-versus-white, or rather pink-versus-blue, are painted pretty thick, Neytiri’s own anti-human bigotry adds some welcome moral smudging.
A postcard from Pandora would showcase its floating mountains, bioluminescent forests and sentient hot-air balloons. These achievements are flashy. But what’s become more interesting — and what really feels like Cameron’s daredevil creative risk — is his insistence on treating the impossible like it’s mundane, like the sight of all 9-foot-5 inches of Quaritch casually chilling out in a hoodie, or an opening sequence of Na’vi teenagers zipping around on flying dino-dragons that the cinematographer Russell Carpenter shoots to look raw and sloppy as though the footage was filmed on a Go-Pro camera.
Viewed in ultra-crisp high frame rate, “Fire and Ash” feels so overwhelmingly real that it circles back around to surreal. The smash-up of the fantastical and the familiar is disorienting and gets even stranger when the reckless kids start to whoop like they’re on Muscle Beach. “Cool, bro!” one hoots. “High four!” (You may remember that the native-born Na’vi have only four fingers on each hand.)
Cameron has always been derided for his dialogue, but there’s no denying that he writes lines that stick. Nearly three decades ago, he had “Titanic’s” Jack woo Rose by saying, “I see you” — a line he’d go on to repeat ad nauseam in “Avatar” — and now the phrase is affixed in ordinary conversation. So as silly as it sounds when Spider yells “This is sick!” as he flips somersaults off a seal fin like he’s in an intergalactic Sea World show, or when Weaver’s sprightly Kiri learns that she was born parthenogenetically and whines, “That really sucks,” Cameron is prioritizing the authentic choice over the stilted sci-fi choice. Fine, I’ll accept an argument that Sully’s offspring would inherit his jarhead dialect. Given how realistic they look and act, eventually we’re going to start wondering how they smell.
In shades of today’s generational divide on college campuses, the younger Na’vi have an ethical disagreement with their elders about their rejection of an outcast whale, Payakan, who speaks in comically solemn subtitles. “You will never hear my song again,” Payakan intones. The whale’s brethren have facial piercings and tattoos, leading to a whole kettle (of fish) of questions. How do they tattoo each other with fins?
These are the thoughts you mull over as “Fire and Ash” re-asks the same questions as before: Where does Spider belong? When is violence justified? What’s it going to take for these militarized Earthlings to realize they’re the baddies? He’s already answered them — philosophically, the franchise doesn’t seem to be driven by saying new things as much as asking its leads to say them again with a little more nuance. With Cameron suggesting he wants to keep these characters going for at least five films, the overarching storyline of the struggle for planetary dominance never packs any tension other than the suspense of wondering whether someday Lang’s Quaritch might be redeemed.
If we must have a fourth and fifth “Avatar,” Cameron should ditch these increasingly prosaic battlefield thrills for something really bold: Follow the kids to alien college for a mumblecore movie. Now that would be cool, bro.
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