Del and Mladen review ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’
All images courtesy of 20th Century Fox.
“Avatar: Fire and Ash” Starring Sam Worthington as Jake, Zoe Saldaña as Neytiri, Sigourney Weaver as Kiri, Stephen Lang as Quaritch, Oona Chaplain as Varang and others. Directed by James Cameron. Rated PG-13. 3 hours, 17 minutes. Theatrical release.
Plot summary: Jake, Neytiri and the kids – Tuktirey, Lo’ak, Kiri, and Spider – depart the Metkayina clan to return Spider to humanity, as he cannot breathe Pandoran air. Along the way they are ambushed by the Mangkwan clan, who eventually throw in with the RDA to slaughter the whale-like Tulkuns and claim dominion over the moon and its resources. Jake and the allied clans must rally to defeat the Mangkwans and humans, or Pandora will be plundered and looted for its riches.
Spoilers: Yes.
Del’s take
Dear James Cameron,
It’s beautiful but … enough.
Nobody denies your spectacular vision, the unparalleled special effects and stunning complexity of the world you’ve created in Pandora, but …
Enough.
“Avatar: Fire and Ash” is an excellent movie … but. …
I’m tired.
This is the third time you’ve told this story: Noble savages frolic amid the idyll. Evil outsiders invade. Noble savages and outsiders skirmish. Then, in a final showdown, noble savages and outsiders wage all-out war. Somehow, noble savages prevail. Idyll restored. Frolicking resumes.
“Avatar,” “Avatar: The Way of Water” and now “Avatar: Fire and Ash” are essentially pastoral myths, which extol the purity and virtue of a life allied with nature, devoid of the corrupting influences of urbanization, pollution, and the refined moral essence of mankind, which is something selfish and destructive. And for the most part I agree with those tenets – until I need a dentist or want my garbage picked up. Then I’m full Team Civilization.
I want to repeat what I said earlier: “Avatar: Fire and Ash” is an excellent movie. People should see it in a theater, preferably one equipped with an IMAX screen and Dolby Atmos, not their (likely) crappy home monitor (unless you’re my friends Jim and Karen, who have a 98-inch OLED TV that looks more like a picture window than a monitor … that thing blows me away). The special effects are groundbreaking and the world-building is the most intricate I’ve seen in a film, EVER, and that includes “Dune” and “Blade Runner.”
But please – and I say this not as a person who could do what you’ve done, but as a member of your audience, just some schmoe from the panhandle of Florida – now that you’ve conquered those other aspects of moviemaking, concentrate on improving your stories, because they’re all the same. “Fire and Ash” is essentially “The Way of Water,” which was a retelling of “Avatar.” We get it. Natives = good. Humans = bad. There’s got to be a new wrinkle to this epic, one that’s worth all the visual firepower you bring to the table.
And please, work on the dialogue. Apart from Stephen Lang’s Quaritch, who gets the best lines of the movie, your characters speak dialogue so cringeworthy it makes the fillings in my teeth ache. It comes across like middle-school moralizing. That scene with Jake and Spider, which by the way was the most emotionally fraught of the entire film, was nearly ruined by Spider’s corny acceptance-of-his-fate speech. Thank God it lasted only a few seconds.
I’m dismayed to hear this is not the end of “Avatar,” that there’s a fourth installment in the works for 2029, and a fifth for sometime in the 2030s. In fact, it’s distinctly possible this could become a continuing series of film and streaming series. IF that’s the case, then you’ve got to bring more to these films than just clashes between city people and country folks, because that conflict is getting old.
I’m giving your film an A-. Its technical achievements and the sweeping vision of the story are undeniable. But the quality of the plot doesn’t match the epic sweep of the storytelling. In that regard you could take pointers from the extended versions of Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. “Avatar: Fire and Ash” is an excellent movie, yes. But I guess what I’m trying to say is: You can do better.
That’s it. I’m done. I hope you’re not mad at me.
Please tell Sigourney hi for me. I’ve always been a fan.
Del
Mladen’s take
I learned a couple of, ah, truths, about myself watching “Avatar: Fire and Ash.”
The first realization? I’d have no trouble sharing a bed with an alien if the entity is as soulless, ambitious, take-no-prisoners, and sultry as Varang. She is the evil asshole boss of a clan of very human Pandora natives portrayed in the recently released Avatar III.
Second, I’m unable to cope anymore with stories that extend the myth of other‑than‑earthly hopefulness conveyed in earlier sci-fi movies such as “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “2010: The Year We Make Contact,” or any such movie that argues there’s a heaven waiting for us when we die. There’s no supernatural something that’ll save us mortals from mortality. Yours truly agrees completely and without a shred of doubt with Bob Marley and The Wailers – “If you know what life is worth, you would look for yours on earth.” Or Pandora. God almighty, wait until you see how Pandora’s planet god Eywa manifests as a physical being. My head almost exploded it was so derivative and blatantly Space Odyssey.
Yes, the good Na’vi fight the bad Na’vi and the human colonialists still digging for Unobtainium and killing Pandora’s whale equivalents for the secret sauce contained in their bodies. But, that’s insufficient because the good Na’vi almost get their butts kicked and sustain terrible loss of life across species in the process. I offer this. Had the good Na’vi assumed that Eywa was, at least, indifferent to their lives, they would have fought harder earlier, kicking the crap out of the bad Na’vi and squalid humans while sustaining fewer fatalities by going on the offensive. Rely on a god, and all gods are unreliable, and it might be too late to save your only life when the shit hits the fan.
Third, what do you do when the bad guys are more charismatic than the good guys in a movie? I ask this because, more and more these days, people apply the fiction of moviemaking to their beliefs in actual life. Beautiful feline Varang and steadfast Quaritch, both very bad folk, are more entertaining than Jake and Neytiri, who are unentertaining and conscientious good folk. Entertainment is what ordinary Americans, and the rest of the peasants on this planet, want. What’s the result? A deranged orange blob at the head of the U.S. Senate‑sanctioned and Supreme Court‑unleashed Executive branch. Fascists running Argentina, El Salvador, Hungary, Israel, and Russia, to name just a few countries.
Fourth, I was forewarned. After we saw “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” Del said that he’d write a thoughtful and fair review. He did, unfortunately. I’m unable to disagree with what he put to e‑paper. Expect the movie’s grade. The third Avatar is way too first and second Avatar. It’s as bad as “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” which mimics its excellent and ancient predecessor “Star Wars” or, as it later came to be known, “Episode IV – A New Hope.” I hope there’s no Avatar IV but there will be. Varang and Quaritch, thankfully, survive in Avatar III. They’re the couple who is most likely to make the next Avatar slightly better than unpalatable.
“Avatar: Fire and Ash” gets a B-, eh, a C+ from me and that’s generous. The movie delivers fabulous sight and sound. Del and I should’ve seen it in a Dolby theater because that might have distracted me from noticing the film’s irredeemable wankiness.
Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and writer.
Image courtesy of 20th Century Studios.
“Avatar: The Way of Water” Starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang. Directed by James Cameron. 3 hours, 12 minutes. Rated PG-13. Disney.
Del’s take
You will emerge from “Avatar: The Way of Water,” a changed person – a senior citizen, to be exact. It’s that long. It would take less time to read the U.S. tax code, and who’s to say which is more fun – those amortization tables can be very sexy.
If only the rest of the world loved Pandora as much as James Cameron.
“The Way of Water” is as beautiful as it is tedious, which is to say it resembles a Nat Geo documentary about the Great Barrier Reef, cleaned up and made pretty by Disney Studios. The sights are breathtaking – water with the clarity and color envied by chambers of commerce the world over, teeming with alien life. Too bad the story is the aquatic equivalent of a swimming pool at Motel 6.
These are the broadstrokes:
When we last saw Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) in “Avatar,” he had joined the Na’vi, the native race of the moon Pandora, in expelling the evil earthmen who had come to wreck their Gaia-like ecosystem in a greedy quest for unobtanium.
Now, Sully is living the life of the noble savage with his Na’vi wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and a passel of kids, until one day the evil earthmen return, this time in force. They want to claim Pandora as their own because mankind has made a mess of things on Earth. It only makes sense to relocate to a planet with a poisonous atmosphere and hostile natives.
Sully leads the Na’vi in a guerrilla campaign of harassment until the earthmen introduce a new weapon – a squad of Na’vi-adapted commando soldiers led by Quaritch, the Type A head of security who was killed by Neytiri in the first “Avatar.” His consciousness has been downloaded to a Na’vi body so that he may accomplish a specific mission – kill Jake Sully.
The commandos target Sully’s family. After a harrowing close call, Sully relinquishes his forest-dwelling tribe and takes Neytiri and clan to the land of the water people, Na’vi adapted to live in Pandora’s lush tropical ocean. There, they must learn the water people’s ways and fit in – until the earthmen come calling.
“The Way of Water” is a towering achievement in both concept and special effects. Cameron has created an entire biosphere with breathtaking attention to detail, and the FX are simply the best of any movie ever made. It must be seen in a widescreen theater, although some of the bigger 4K OLED TVs may do it justice.
The story, however, is less ambitious. It is a metaphor for Europe’s arrival in the New World, told from a Native American’s viewpoint, and while it shifts in focus from act to act – at first centering on Sully himself, then enlarging to include his children and how they mesh with the water people culture, then shifting back to Sully and his antagonist, Quaritch – the overall theme remains the same: good vs. evil, and the sacrifices that must be made to serve the greater imperative. At times the Sully character deviates from the archetype established in the first film, but never fear: Events will set the character arc back on track.
Overlooking the plot, “The Way of Water’s” most mention-worthy negative quality is its length. Three hours-plus is a long time to ask an audience to sit in a theater, especially when they’ve seen so much of it before. Expect multiple bathroom trips, dozing, sneaked looks at mobile phones, and maybe a pricey box of buttered popcorn to fend off starvation pains as dinnertime approaches.
Cameron belongs to a special cadre of directors – George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg, Ridley Scott, Stanley Kubrick, John Ford, Robert Wise – who tell the big stories, and tell them in big ways. Three of the top 10 highest grossing movies of all time are James Cameron films. Undeniably he is one of the best, if not THE best, director working today. “The Way of Water” is an excellent movie, despite its shopworn plot and excessive length.
I grade it an A-, and I award the minus only because I found it to be oddly unsatisfying. Perhaps you will feel differently.
Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and author.