Two More? Really? A Review of Avatar: Fire and Ash

 directed by James Cameron

written by James Cameron, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Josh Friedman and Shane Salerno

This movie made me sad.

James Cameron's new sequel Avatar: Fire and Ash brings viewers back to the world of Pandora, which humans of Earth's Resources  Development Administration  are still trying to colonize, with the native Na'vi race still trying to resist them, with ex-marine-turned-Na'vi Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) leading the resistance. Leading the attack on the Na'vi's is the cloned Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), whose memories have been uploaded into a Na'vi hybrid as well.  Jake, his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and their family are in grieving following the events of the second film (The Way of Water) in which their son was killed, but things are about to get even more complicated for them. They realize that their adopted son Spider (Jack Champion) cannot live in the Na'vi water tribe in which they have settled because he needs a steady supply of oxygen to be able to breathe, but as they are making the trip back to colony of human settlers they can trust, they are attacked by a new tribe of Na'vi, the Mangkwan, led by the fierce Varang (Oona Chaplin).  Between this new menace and the determination of the RDA to plunder Pandora's resources and wipe out all resistance, Jake and his allies find their backs to the wall once again, unless they can get much needed help from Eywa, the planet's deity.

At first, I was encouraged by the fact that this sequel picked up where the last film left off, with the protagonists still reeling from the events of that film. I thought this meant that we would get a lot of new developments moving forward, and to be fair, we did get some pretty cool additional world-building, like the Wind Trader clan led by David Thewlis' Peylak, as well as the aforementioned Mangkwan tribe. Varang, thanks especially to Oona Chaplin's feral performance, is a promising bad guy at first, who looked like she could add some very interesting new dimensions to the thus-far limited storytelling.

But then, it all went downhill pretty quickly around the end of the middle of the second act, and by the third act, the film has decended into tropes that were not only familiar, but are ripped right out of the first Avatar movie, right down to the late James Horner's music score.  This was not only disappointing, but it was downright tedious, and because I had already been disappointed by The Way of Water, I didn't bother to shell out the premium for the IMAX experience.  I know this meant I didn't get the full sensory experience that the film had to offer, but with a script this limp, not even a feature length 3-D 60fps could have saved this viewing experience for me. Yeah, I know, beautiful visuals, blah blah blah...but adulting is hard, and movies are expensive, so when I shell out money for these movies, I want more than just eye candy. 

The sad part for me was that there was actually potential for things to get interesting, especially with the introduction of Varang. She's a bit of a first for Cameron; the big bad girl. The closest thing we got to a major female antagonist f rom Cameron was Tia Carrere's femme fatale in True Lies, but Varang had the potential to be so much more.  She certainly was a step up from Edie Falco's grossly underdeveloped RDA antagonist, whose fate was almost as laughable as her dialogue was cliche.

The worst part for me was how much of the narrative was anchored around Jack Champion's Spider, who is, hands-down, the worst actor in the whole franchise. His dialogue was rancid enough, despite having been written by three writers, including Cameron himself, but Champion simply cannot act to save his life. This was the kid whom Ant-Man spoke to in Avengers: Endgame, after he emerged from the Quantum Realm, and it's worth pointing out that in those few seconds of screentime Champion managed to act better than he has in two whole Avatar films.   

This film honestly feels like a wasted opportunity; this series--including this film--has had some incredible world-building moments, but for as long as Cameron and his co-writers continue to anchor the narrative on such emphatically uninteresting characters as Jake Sully and now Spider, they won't really amount to anything.

I honestly wonder if Cameron even has any narrative juice left to sustain this franchise over another two movies like he has said he plans to, because if this film is any indication, he doesn't.  

5/10