I’m on vacation until 2026 from my paying job, so more of a chance to hit the movies. First up: Avatar: Fire and Ash, the latest in the sci-fi franchise that James Cameron keeps making more of and people keep buying tickets to. Why? Well, they’re pretty to look at if nothing else, but I would like to point out that it can be confusing to people who prefer the other pop culture Avatar, but these movies are not about the Last Airbender. Too bad: I rather like that universe more than this one.
Though in this latest sequel, everything does change when the Fire Nation attacks…
Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his Na’vi wife Neytiri are in mourning for their oldest son Neteyam, who died in the second movie. For Jake, that means finding guns at the bottom of the lagoon to use in defense of his current clan. For Neytiri, that means moping around and wanting adopted human son Spider (Jack Champion) to go back to his own kind, something that might be a good idea since he can’t breathe the air on Pandora anyway. That doesn’t sit well with Jake or their surviving kids, particularly daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver). Jake and Neytiri finally agree to send Spider back to the humans, but they also agree to take the whole family along as escorts and guardians for some sky traders in the event of an attack by the Ash Clan. Naturally, that is what happens when the Ash Clan, led by the vicious Varang (Oona Chaplin), attacks the caravan and gets the Sully family separated.
However, something strange happens: Kiri somehow gets the planet to alter Spider’s body so that the human can breathe Pandora’s otherwise toxic-to-humans air. That is of great interest to the higher-ups in the human settlement city as a human who can breathe the air might have something that can be replicated enough to bring in even larger numbers of humans. The dead-man-in-a-cloned Na’vi body Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) now has reason to bring back his son Spider and to arrest Jake, but he’ll also, let’s say, befriend Varang along the way. Can Jake keep his family together and save more Pandoran whales because that’s still a thing?
I went into this movie with so-so expectations. I’m not really a huge fan of this franchise, but director James Cameron does know how to work with cutting edge special effects and action scenes. I saw the movie in an IMAX screening room with the 3-D, and once my eyes adjusted to the 3-D, it looked pretty good. Arguably, these movies are the ones best suited for both IMAX and 3-D. There’s so much detail in the look and feel for Pandora as a world that, if nothing else, you will get a visual treat over the movie’s three hour+ running time.
What you also won’t get are interesting characters. Aside from Lang and maybe Chaplin as the sort of villain you’ll just love to hate, the characters here feel stock, and not even particularly interesting stock. It seems like just about everybody literally hisses at each other, and the long stretch in the middle of the movie where what passes for a plot is laid out, and I was, if not exactly bored, then at least disengaged. I think it is telling that, three movies in, and I only can name two characters off the top of my head. Cameron has been using these movies for heavy-handed political commentary, but he’s not a subtle filmmaker, so even that didn’t really grab my attention. To be sure, it is still visually great to look at, but that seems to be all it is at this point.
Grade: C+
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