With “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” James Cameron has again returned to his far-out nirvana Pandora, a mystical, marvelous planet abounding with rainbows of flora and fauna, and inhabited by the Na’vi, blue, long-waisted humanoids with tails and mesmerizing cat eyes. Here, majestic whalelike creatures known as tulkun don’t simply sing, they have serious chats with other species; one also wears groovy jewelry. There are all sorts of marvels in Cameron’s lovingly imagined world, which remains an often pleasurable place to visit even if, 16 years after the first “Avatar” opened, the bloom has faded from this kaleidoscopic rose.
“Fire and Ash” is the third movie in the “Avatar” series, and while three years have passed in real life, it picks up just weeks after the second one — “The Way of Water” (2022) — left off, with its characters in a world of pain. The story again centers on a family led by Jake (Sam Worthington), a disabled U.S. Marine turned rousing Na’vi leader (it’s a long story), and his ferocious Na’vi mate, Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña). They’re deep in mourning, having lost a son during a battle with human invaders, violent plunderers whom the Na’vi call the sky people. Forced to flee their forest home, the family has settled uneasily onto a shoreline community inhabited by other Na’vi, a water-loving clan with finlike appendages.
If you fell for the earlier two movies, you will likely succumb to this one’s visual charms as well. One of the few moviemakers who merits being called a world builder, Cameron has a filmography jammed with intricate, immersive imaginative realms, from the freaky, deep-space hellscape in “Aliens” to the scrupulous realism of “Titanic.” Part of the delight of the first “Avatar” was the panchromatic Utopia that he created for the movie, a lush, meticulous wonderland which Jake entered like a latter-day Dorothy in a digitally souped-up take on “The Wizard of Oz.” You could feel Cameron’s joy in his creation when watching that inaugural outing; he was pumped to show you something that you’d never seen, and so were you.
It’s tough to keep the thrills stoked and fired up in franchises, even for Cameron. As usual, he throws a lot into the mix here, including new characters, creatures, landscapes, melodramatic complications and large-scale battle sequences. Soon after the story opens, Jake and Neytiri decide to leave the reef for everyone’s safety. With their small brood and Spider (Jack Champion), a bouncy young human with blond dreads whom they’ve taken under protective wing, the family takes off with an airborne clan. These Na’vi sail among clouds and mountains on whimsical ships that are drawn by plump, content-looking manatee-ish animals and crowned by billowing sails that suggest a pirate schooner with super-big dragonfly wings.
It’s dreamily pacific to drift with the fam, but this being a Cameron Experience, things soon take a turn for the violent and thornily complicated. A new, scene-stealing villain, Varang (Oona Chaplin), swoops in on her dragon-style ride like a Valkyrie. Backed by a frenzied horde, Varang has murder in her heart, a scowl on her face and a blood-red diadem on her head. She’s a witchy woman and a crack villain with dark charisma as well as a story to tell, which emerges among battles, strange alliances, knotty plotting and the return of the sky people, including the series’ rampaging villain and its MVP, Quaritch (Stephen Lang).
Written by Cameron, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, “Fire and Ash” combines several different narrative threads in a story that, as in the earlier movies, play out like an elaborate, juiced-up and angrily righteous inversion of an old-fashioned racist Cowboys and Indians story. There are some startling additions to this template, including a jolting invocation of some Old Testament-style paternalism that threatens to take the series someplace it could never recover from. One of the hallmarks of these movies is how quickly paradise turns into hell, and how often rage burbles up amid all this loveliness. There’s deep, unsettling fury both in Neytiri and in Varang’s characters, which comes through even in performance capture.
Like its predecessors, “Fire and Ash” predictably overstays its welcome; it’s over three hours, a narratively unsupportable running time despite its buzzing, undulating, whirring phantasmagoric attractions and epically scaled skirmishes. When Cameron is on — especially when the Na’vis are racing and vaulting, swooping and whooping in furious battle against their assorted foes — the movie holds you rapt. He’s a genius of cinematic spectacle, but he doesn’t just sit back and ask you to admire his handiwork; he knows how to sweep you up, much like the Na’vis’ airborne steeds do. The fight sequences are models of spatial coherency and escalating tension, and they grab you wholly, turning a movie into a full-body workout.
That feeling dissipates whenever the fighting stops, the story cranks back up and somebody calls someone else “bro,” which happens too often. The writing, and especially the dialogue, can be wincingly bad, as can be the case with Cameron. The larger issue, though, is that for all their visual pow — and despite their impressive bleeding-edge technological wizardry — the movies have remarkably little staying power. They don’t have the deep, mythic appeal of the “Star Wars” series (or the original “The Wizard of Oz”). And while Cameron’s commitment to the environment is evident in every flower and creature, the results never speak to our time the way, say, “The Dark Knight” and its nihilistic threat did. Cameron’s signature mix of pulp and poetry can be transporting, but here it just gave me whiplash.
Avatar: Fire and Ash Rated PG-13 for fantasy peril. Running time: 3 hours 15 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
The post ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ Review: By Land, by Water, by Air! appeared first on New York Times.
