AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH
2025
Directed by James Cameron
Written by Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, and James Cameron
I've been shutting my ears to it, because it's the last thing I want to hear—cinema is in a horrible enough state to want to contemplate what it'd look like without these films—but I've gotten a sense that Avatar: Fire and Ash is perceived to be a disappointment. I frankly want to take anybody who could be fucking disappointed by something this objectively grand and shake them till they get bruises on their brains, but that's not very constructive; and it would get in the way of admitting that this movie, which turned me into a puddle of sensory experience, disappointed me a little too, even though at the same time I've entertained the possibility it's my favorite of Avatar's two sequels (ultimately, Avatar: The Way of Water maintains the slimmest advantage), with potentially the best and most fascinating individual elements in the whole franchise (so there were moments where I was seriously wondering if even the shocking novelty and fantastical wish-fulfilling purity of the original film, which I've always thought meant sequels shouldn't have happened at all, no longer necessarily meant it was the best Avatar).
Then again, the desire to pit Fire and Ash against The Way of Water—no matter how their respective titles negligently goad you into doing exactly that—is more like an artifact of how they've been released, and shouldn't make sense, and that it still kind of does make sense is one of its little problems. For Fire and Ash is, as Cameron told us ages ago, basically The Way of Water Part 2. Sometimes it does feel like an actual sequel that simply picks up exactly where the last film let off, but remains concerned with telling its own story; much more often, it feels like the second half of a movie that already ended, and which maybe wouldn't have had its particular ending if it weren't going to be split into two thanks to a maniac at the helm having made a six and a half hour super-epic about space whales because he was disinterested in focusing his narrative on any particular set of ideas rather than allowing the bloat and bombast (Way of Water ran 192 minutes, Fire and Ash 197, so fine, math cop, one minute less) to soak up more ideas and plots and subplots than even two movies might ought to have. Of course, if we can agree that Cameron and his collaborators' crazed imaginarium of their fictional moon, Pandora, and the mystical relationships its characters have forged with that moon, constitute the reason these movies exist, and (along with Cameronian badass action) are the things that make them so transportive and meaningful, then, well, "the maniac is getting ridiculously indulgent now" is the opposite of a problem, plus we already dove off that cliff three years ago. But for all that, whether that would be a "problem" or not for any individual Avatar, it does pose some obstacles to telling Avatar stories inside the medium of a film franchise that I don't think Cameron and co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver have altogether overcome, even if I tend to think the most significant obstacle is actually just its viewers, including me, not watching the damn thing correctly.
Either way, we open hot upon the heels of Way of Water: Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), eldest son of ex-space marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his alien bride Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña)—hey, let's pretend you already know what Avatar is so I don't have to redundantly exposit a film franchise that's made nearly six billion dollars—has just died, a casualty of their victory over human space whalers and especially the Na'vi avatar of the reborn Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang). This has left a hole in the family and been especially hard on the new eldest son, Lo'ak (Britain Dalton), who bears some blame for his brother's death, though Neytiri is the one who winds up nearly disintegrating because of it. Meanwhile, there are the other two Sully children (besides Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), the actual little one), each more nominally a Sully, firstly the offspring of the avatar form of Dr. Grace Augustine, Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), thrown into confusion over her increasingly obvious status as a messiah sent by Pandora's slow-on-the-uptake world-goddess Eywa (possibly played by a human in mo-cap drag, glimpsed during a vision quest, and I almost wish it'd been James Cameron, fuck it, like these aren't dementedly egomaniacal already); and secondly Spider (Jack Champion), the adopted human orphan whom Neytiri has come to truly irrationally despise though Kiri, with her intermittent dominion over the biota of Pandora, will, in her affection, give all Na'vi a reason to wish him dead at the same time she gives the human colonists (notably Giovanni Ribisi, who still has his job despite the first Avatar) a reason to expend whatever resources necessary to obtain Spider, when she accesses Eywa's power and conjures a solution to Spider's inability to breathe Pandora's air. The peril there is that this could be reverse-engineered by the humans to serve as a fix for their inability to breathe Pandora's air, thereby opening up the moon to full-scale human colonization. (Which the avatars already do, and it's obviously way cooler being a Na'vi than being a human—they are also demonstrably self-replicating, so any two avatars could produce as many culturally-human offspring as you want—but the fanwank, I guess, is that avatars cost a bazillion space bucks, and an endosymbiont that lets your lungs work would be a more financially-feasible option in the short term.)
Spider, anyway, is being hunted by Quaritch, partly for his colonial paymasters, mostly for his own purposes, for he is, emotionally-speaking, still Spider's biological father, a relationship acknowledged by Spider to the extent he saved Quaritch from certain death last time, something that Jake and company never find out in all 197 minutes of this, in what, I suppose, could be considered an actual screenwriting oversight rather than a manifestation of making two movies out of what feels like three or four movies' worth of material but were nevertheless conceived as only one. Well, still, other factions within the company (principally Edie Falco) are more concerned with getting that space whaling operation back on track, and especially reaping the rich harvest of a giant space whale communion; this means that the humans are operating a little bit at cross-purposes, as Quaritch instead makes an ally out of the Sullys' new enemy, Varang of the Mangkwan (Oona Chaplin), technically a group of Na'vi who have simply adopted a new ideological basis for their society, and in practice a band of demons who live inside the volcano that killed most of them and turned the rest of them into a nihilistic sex/death cult run by a psychopath in a cool headdresss that makes her look like an anthropomorphic frilled lizard.
Okay: so that last part is, no two ways about it, "Fire and Ash is an actual sequel and hence a third proper installment in the Avatar series," with a new villain representing several new ideas for the franchise to explore; whereas the preceding two paragraphs are "Fire and Ash is Way of Water Part 2, and what happens when industrial realities mean they don't let you make movies that take literally all day to watch but James Cameron won't let that stop him," while the next-to-last part in particular makes it hard not to suspect that Way of Water Part 1 wasn't supposed to conclude with that giant maritime battle until the movies got separated, insofar as this movie, called Fire and Ash, concludes with a second giant maritime battle fought mostly the same way (though it is objectively gianter).
So if we're going to criticize, and I guess we're obliged to, we might as well start at the end, which is sort of like if Star Wars were followed-up immediately by Return of the Jedi, without The Empire Strikes Back, which gave things a buffer, and permitted the sense of repetition inherent to "the Death Star was such a success previously that we built another one" to land instead as a doom-filled escalation and with the promise that, this time, the villains were going to get it right; it's also the Star Wars trilogy without the visual distinctions between the respective anti-Death Star missions that, at least for me, have meant that I've never once perceived its third film to be a repeat of the first one's ideas. Cameron's second sea battle is banking, instead, on conceptual distinctions—like, strategic distinctions, not even tactical or operational ones—and it's kind of bizarre even on this count, embiggening the action of Way of Water mostly by making this second confrontation with the whalers into a marine version of the Little Big Horn, that is, an idiotic accidental death ride against overwhelming opposition, which certainly happens sometimes in history but is strange to find in a fictional space opera. You can kind of see this curious state of affairs get noticed by the screenplay in realtime, when it reorients itself, well, back towards Way of Water: bringing Quaritch back and narrowing the conflict down to another struggle between Jake and his old commander, while Kiri fulfills her destiny as an ava—uh, manifestation of Eywa, but moreso this time. (Collateral little problem: Weaver's age of 72-or-so when this was filmed is more obvious, albeit only in her voice, than in her extraordinary performance as an alien teen last time.) I'm sure I'm making it sound too much like a clone of Way of Water's finale. Between Jake's resurgent alliance of clans and Eywa belatedly bitchslapping the human plague again after being re-reminded that they exist, it likewise bears the recombinant DNA of the original Avatar's finale. But I kid: the staging is different (thanks to the addition of an airborne component from Jake and Quaritch alike, and the big geomagnetic spout around which the targeted whales have congregated, it's much more vertical than before; and hey, when that spout becomes a funnel for a perpetually-exploding giant hydrofoil we even get an acceptable substitute for the volcano setpiece Fire and Ash implicitly promises but doesn't deliver). Furthermore, Spider is more directly involved this time, so the Spider question gets a much more conclusive answer, by way of this climactic setpiece, than it did before.
And it is, because it's a James Cameron film and because it cost $400 million, completely fucking awesome, so I wonder if the "problems" this repetitiveness entails—in the specifics, it isn't even that repetitive—are only cosmetic anyway. The real issue with Fire and Ash is that it hasn't entirely figured out what function it's serving inside the grander "Avatar story," or, alternatively, Cameron's vision for that grander story isn't as solid as he's intimated. However we frame it, Fire and Ash is doing "franchise filmmaking" wrong, even if, as I supposed above, it's also us watching it wrong, to some extent treating it like the "conclusion of a trilogy" because that's how we've been trained by other fantasy series, even when it's explicitly only the conclusion to a movie that started in 2022, and occupies the middle chapters of a film series that Cameron has told us, repeatedly, is intended to go up to five. The sin the movie's committing itself, then, is that it concludes so many character and thematic arcs it kind of feels finished, while offering the opposite of closure for its overarching story of human and Na'vi conflict and no clue whatsoever what form that conflict is going to take next, or where the character and thematic arcs it has virtually forgotten about might go.
Way of Water was like this already (the earlier movie, that was the first half of this movie, was still like this less; Fire and Ash has a pleasant but recklessly-misjudged closing credits montage for an Avatar 3/5), but you could trust whatever was neglected would be dealt with next time, and I imagine I'll just have to have faith again, since, hey, by no means did my faith go unrewarded here, no matter how long I've spent moaning about it. But what I hadn't previously realized is that, as unbound from any apparent restraints as they are—being manufactured by a billionaire obsessed with CGI, water, and the color blue to service every last unreconstructed hippie whim he's ever had (indeed, Fire and Ash even doubles down on the politics of the pacifist space whales, mediated by vocalizations so enormous they shake the sea itself, in addition to its own equally-weird moves)—the Avatars actually do embody some regular human anxieties. It is, after all, one thing to hear Cameron say that the Avatars are such pricey propositions and their place in the cultural landscape so unsure (a sentiment reaching memetic status in the lead-up to this film, thanks to assholes building parasitic careers on media commentary of that general type) that Avatar 4 and Avatar 5 can't be treated as inevitabilities. But it's another thing to recognize that this anxiety has manifested in both of Avatar's two extant sequels as a theoretically-admirable desperation to make them self-contained stories that don't need continuations, since there might not be continuations, because that recognition can only mean that this approach has backfired a little.
So that gets the negative all out of the way, or at least the majority of it (even most of my stupid nitpicks wound up in my plot summary), and if it's not optimal that most of a movie's problems are concentrated in its last hour, like I said, it's more like they're buried within the structure of the franchise as a whole, dissatisfying enough to think about afterwards (or, to be honest, I might have thought about them during the rare and brief periods during Fire and Ash where I was allowed to think about anything but what it was showing me), but they're not problems that actually bother me much. In some respects, being Way of Water Part 2 redounds in Fire and Ash's favor, on top of how one retroactively realizes that Fire and Ash, being what Fire and Ash is, allowed Way of Water (Part 1) to be its best self. There's a spell of about twenty minutes in the beginning here, where it's doing a nominal "first act," not exactly "reintroducing" the characters but still allowing them to have some downtime where they take stock and make decisions, which leads to the choice that sends the Sullys on (if we're somehow still being negative) their extremely circular path back to Metkayina territory and that great big second sea battle, namely deciding to escort Spider back to the rebel science base established by Dr. Augustine's colleagues, where he is less likely to die of asphyxiation due to low batteries. The Sullys embark on what you could readily believe is a melancholy family vacation, hitching a ride with the Wind Traders (fronted by David Thewliss, the first Na'vi to wear what you'd describe as "clothes," and a nitpick I didn't get to is "trading what? since when are the Na'vi are even Mesolithic?"). Their majestic bio-airships—and in case I worried you that Fire and Ash shows you nothing new about Pandora, consider these things, which are a lashed-together combination of a flying manta providing motive power and an even weirder giant jellyfish-like creature that produces a closed bell of hydrogen providing lift—make an implicit visual promise of a film willing to idle for a while and take in the sights, not unlike its predecessor's middle third. It breaks this promise instantly, flinging us right into colossal action (did I mention hydrogen?), in the same moment it's introducing its major co-antagonist in the form of Varang and her war boys (Fury Road being given an explicit hat-tip). And then this action scene basically does not end, though it transforms into several different things, for, I don't know, an hour?
Probably not that long, but that's how Fire and Ash functions in comparison to Way of Water: in terms of sensation, this is the traditional Big Jim third act action, but now three Goddamn hours of it. (It's disorienting to consider, but the unconventionality of Way of Water suddenly comes into perspective: that unprecedented hour in the middle where it was nothing besides exploring the way of water, and hence the most unique reason it was such an amazing cinematic experience? If these are, in fact, "one movie split into two," then, proportionally, it was actually just a totally normal amount of time spent on sci-fi world-building—not even especially generous.) So this phase mutates into various strands of action, and indeed some of the most harrowing-feeling action of this franchise; I don't believe Neytiri's indomitability has ever been as thoroughly showcased or so thoroughly tested (likewise Neytiri's character and Saldaña's performance thereof). Likewise, Varang and her Ash People are Avatar tilted further towards horror than even this franchise all about insane alien monsters has heretofore gone—though let's save the best for last, shall we? (Now, it's wild that what Avatar Discourse I have accidentally stumbled across is still hanging itself up on the white boy with dreads, in a movie that's ecstatically playing around with native terror tropes that haven't been current since, roughly, the 1930s, to the extent I'm frankly amazed they aren't cannibals; though for Varang, "yeah, it's basically rape" is standard operating procedure.)
Now, obviously, in this 197 minute movie there are phases where our heroes are regrouping, though even these are pitched as either action-by-other-means, like Lo'ak's seaquest to retrieve an exiled space whale to provide a vital voice at a legislative session of even bigger space whales, or as dramatic beats so keen and sharp it's unlikely you'll realize the movie has "slowed down," especially regarding Spider's fate, where the lack of any external restraints powers a scene that I don't suppose could dramatically work in any context besides this one, because since Cameron obviously doesn't have anybody to tell him "no, don't do that," you're terrified he actually might. (Your mileage may vary, I guess, but I personally think Spider grows on you; this isn't a humorless movie, either, and he has the franchise's funniest line, effectively weaponizing the surfer "bro/cuz" naturalism of these two sequels' dialogue as a deflating punchline about a literal god-given miracle. The rest of the best laugh-lines belong to his biological dad, so maybe Cameron conceives it as genetic.)
But it's an incredibly headlong brick of a movie, so much so that if I were being critical, I could call it a flaw—the movie's team of six editors clomps through its story so bluntly I don't know if you can call it "cross-cutting" sometimes, it's more like "YOU WONDERING ABOUT NEYTIRI? HERE'S A SCENE FRAGMENT FUCKER," tied together less by "artful montage" than by Simon Franglen's remake-unto-rearrangement of the Avatar score (James Horner would be so proud), and giving us some downright thudding transitions*—but the hell of it is, it works, and it's never less than pristine even if it can get primitive. The touchstone, in some respects, isn't even an Avatar, I think, but Terminator 2: it's getting close to a whole movie constructed out of the mental hospital escape from T2, with the tenfold scope of an Avatar meaning it can't be as beautiful in its design, but with the same underlying concept, with so many action scenes I could call it "a whole movie" generated out of the clearly-presented individual decisions of two, three, sometimes four or five different characters, each deciding on their trajectories completely independently, and nonetheless colliding in spectacularly readable chaos around some central objective. I'm thinking, obviously, of Fire and Ash's own world-class multi-faction rescue, Jake's prison break undertaken by three different heroes with wildly varying capabilities, including one that suddenly emerges, perfectly-formed, from out the tertiary cast. But I'm also thinking of that because it has as singular an image of human technology as has been presented in these movies yet, with one of those giant bulldozers that were always totes cool, but had never seemed so cyclopean and horrifying before. "Clockwork" implies more elegance than Fire and Ash has; but its bulk moves swiftly and precisely, and that's the Cameron touch.
And then there's our villainy; it's barely hyperbole to say that every scene with Varang is better than any scene without Varang. Varang is just about incomparable, or at least I'm at a loss for a comparison; she feels, anyway, like a miraculous survival from an era of filmmaking that gave you villains that you don't even love to hate, you just love to watch be evil, despite their existence being basically an uninterrupted atrocity, and I'm not sure I know how she even exists. I'm solely familiar with Chaplin from Game of Thrones, where she played the most milksop-boring good guy imaginable—"war is unhealthy for flowers and other living things, Robb"/"oh I didn't know that"—and this is so far the opposite of that it might've been impossible to recognize the actor even if she weren't in blue CGI skin. (Or blue CGI skin partially-covered in white and red CGI powder; I spent an age taking about tech back on Way of Water, so let us only take one second to appreciate how jaw-droppingly good the texturing and rendering in Fire and Ash is, solving what very minimal problems I had with Way of Water's texturing and rendering, because I guess that's what happens when you have three more years of computer time to make the second half.) But now Chaplin has achieved this intoxicating malignity, a sex monster from the id at the behest of a filmmaker who's never been very shy about having his id hanging out on the screen. (I feel like I should take some notice of how Mr. Five Wives has never made a single film where a guy fucks where he doesn't immediately die, which technically would include Jake Sully.)
But even by those standards she's something gloriously other, and still freighted with legitimate themes besides, not to call it illegitimate, "James Cameron is a horny, weird man"; Varang is the Na'vi who not only rejects Eywa but embraces the most predatory, colonialist aspects of humankind, and, finding her counterpart in Quaritch, Chaplin gets to bring out the best in Lang's performance, too, the way his laconic meathead veneer slips over the flinty strategist and the latent sentimentalist that uneasily coexist beneath. There's something pretty profound, even psychologically complicated, about the Na'vi tempting him to be more human than human, while his ex-human archenemy's fallback tactic in physical defeat is to try to get him to see the truth of Pandora. The more-or-less explicit inversion of Jake and Neytiri's good romance back in Avatar is as perfect as concepts get (conscious "rhyming" like this has never been better in a 21st century movie**), and it made me feel earnestly light-headed, and not simply because it takes recourse to weird-as-fuck-in-3-D, psychedelic-boosted sexuality; I hope no one thought I was laughing at it, but I was giggling with delight at Varang the entire time, from her shock-and-awe introduction, to her orgasmic delight over Quaritch showing her how to use a flamethrower, to her chanting "FIRE! DEATH!" aboard a burning ship. She's an attack of pure "adult"-with-scare-quotes-the-size-of-a-mountain cartoon evil, on a series that's otherwise been pretty self-serious, and has now been unbalanced in the most exciting way. Ultimately, the actual problem with Fire and Ash is it doesn't have enough fire and ash, and the biggest disappointment is, paradoxically, that Varang does not get a true finale like everybody else does; presumably because, for obvious reasons, Cameron couldn't bear to part with her yet.
Score: 10/10
*And one, from the good humans' science trailer to the very similar-looking bad humans' science base, is, I'll concede, actively terrible.
**And it sort of does it twice, with another, arguably stranger pairing of characters, or at least stranger pairing of actors.
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