As I sat to watch “Avatar: Fire and Ash”, I kept thinking about how we, as a culture, always dismiss the “Avatar” films until there’s a new one gracing theater screens. I suppose it’s the scintillating siren song of James Cameron that brings us back for more, and considering the man has never made a bad movie, it’s hard to argue with our instincts, especially since “Avatar” and “Avatar: The Way of Water” are two of the highest-grossing films of all time. Now, with the release of “Fire and Ash”, the third in the series, it might be about time to simply admit that even though almost none of you reading this can name more than two of their characters, the experience of watching them is seismic entertainment on the grandest cinematic scale. “Avatar: Fire and Ash” isn’t just Cameron firing on all cylinders, a technical marvel enriched by cavernous emotional depth and stunningly staged action, all set amidst a technicolor fantasy world as sumptuous and rich as any imagined. I may have never been fully aboard the “Avatar” train before, but I believe I am now.
For those who might not remember, “Avatar” follows Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a man brought to a new world by an army of colonizing industrialists as part of a program that subplants his brain into the artificially designed body of the indigenous population, the eight-foot-tall blue humanoids called “The Na’vi”. Soon, though, Jake falls in love with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), the daughter of the tribal leader, and ultimately takes up arms with their cause to repel the invaders. For all the ways “Avatar” is “Dances With Wolves” with blue aliens, its charm is in the expansive wonder of the planet Pandora and its inhabitants. And, admittedly, it’s hard not to get caught up in the blood-boiling passion of an insurgent nation battling back capitalistic parasites; icky white savior tropes notwithstanding. “Avatar” harkens back to mythic storytelling told in broad, simplistic strokes, which in this case includes the often clumsy coopting of traditions from real-world native peoples and nations onto these make-believe ones. “The Way of Water” expanded the world of Pandora even further, introducing Jake and Neytiri’s children, new water-bound tribes of Na’vi, and whole civilizations of intelligent whale-like creatures. The sequel was admittedly expansive but always felt lacking to me. Despite the film doubling the success of the original, “The Way of Water” felt trapped beneath the weight of its own world-building, so focused on broadening the scope of its story that its three-hour run time felt flavorless, leaving little to no aftertaste. I exited impressed by its boldness, yet lukewarm to its charms. So, as I sat down for “Fire and Ash,” I expected more of the same: an expensive kaleidoscopic vision that would fade as soon as the credits rolled. Oh, how foolish I was to doubt James Cameron.
“Fire and Ash” expands on and deepens the themes of both the first two “Avatar” films so effortlessly that I was taken aback. From the opening frames, where two of Jake and Neytiri’s sons fly their winged Banshee dragons through the floating mountains of Pandora, I was hooked by the grandeur, the ambition, the fun of it all. The sequence quickly reveals itself to be a guilt-choked vision of one of the boys, Lo’ak, speaking with his dead brother, who was killed in “The Way of Water”. Watching this, I realized, impossibly, that I was near to crying five minutes in. “Fire and Ash” soon reveals itself to be an ever-escalating harmony of sorrow and exhilaration rhyming in tandem with one another. As we find them in the aftermath of “Way of Water”, the Sully family is drowning in grief over the death of their son. Jake has grown militant, Neytiri has grown distant, and their three remaining children, including adopted human son Spider, work to bridge the chasms left in the tragedy’s wake. To better protect the family, Jake decides that Spider should return to their human allies, where he can be safest. Unfortunately, while the family is en route to their destination, they are intercepted by a band of renegade Na’vi known as “The Ash People”, kamikaze-prone zealots who fly smoke-spewing predators and are led by the lithe and witchy Varang (Oona Chaplin). Meanwhile, the villainous colonial efforts of the RDA, led by former Marine Colonel, now turned crew-cutted Avatar, Quaritch (Stephen Lang), are doubling down on efforts to recapture Jake and sacrifice every living thing on Pandora upon the ever-ravenous altar of unfettered capitalism.
Here’s the thing, folks, that’s just the first hour. Long gone are the halcyon days of the original’s simple “strange man in a strange land” story. Cameron, wisely, takes the expository foundation that he laboriously built with “Way of Water” and uses it as a jumping-off point for uninhibited empathy, charm, and horror. The Ash People make for fascinating counterpart villains, even though their penchant for “scalping” their fellow Na’vi makes them fairly unrepentant monsters and harkens back to the nastier days of Native American portrayals in American cinema. Varang is an enchanting and vicious villain, and their ultimate alliance with Quaritch and RDA makes for the most formidable opponent Jake and Co. have yet faced. The film’s many set pieces: an aerial dog fight in and around a Na’vi blimp vessel, a jail break from the RDA’s hellish oil refinery city, and the sprawling final showdown that stretches across land, water, and air, are peak Cameron, with their own full story arcs that kept me leaning forward one moment and gasping at others. This movie had me in the palm of its hand. But while the action had me rapt, I can’t overstate the power of the emotions at the core of the story; of a family’s reconstruction after being cracked open by senseless death. “Our family is our fortress”, says Jake Sully in “The Way of Water”, but how do you rebuild when part of that fortress has been taken from you? Do you blame your children for tragedies outside their control? Do you implode and grow spiteful? Or, do you come together and find reconciliation in the crevices grief carves? It is the exploration of those questions, the internal, inherently human struggles of our central Na’vi family, and the crucible forced upon them by their enemies, both alien and homegrown, that make “Fire and Ash”, in my opinion, the most accomplished and effective of the “Avatar” entries. More than a few sequences left me weeping, cheering, and all around enraptured. James Cameron, you madman, you’ve done it again.
“Avatar: Fire and Ash” is the best argument for the value of these films, a bold and expensive vision of what the movies can offer, spearheaded by a lunatic savant who repeatedly cashes his chips in again and again on the stories he wants to tell. Across its three hours, “Fire and Ash” is thunderous, staggering cinema; bold, devastating, and LOUD, and left me eager to visit Pandora again.
Heed the siren song.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Avatar: Fire and Ash” is playing at Prytania Theatres at Canal Place and The Broad Theater.
