I don’t love the Avatar films as much as I should, and that might be directly correlated to the number of movies I’ve seen across the years of my life. I’m fully aware that James Cameron and his team of technical geniuses have, with Pandora, built a world that is gorgeous in which to get lost, like a black light poster in a dorm room, but the scripts, going back to the original, feel like an amalgamation of other better movies.
Visually, the Avatars are works of limitless originality, but those plots not only cannibalize dozens of classic movies from across the decades, but also the Avatar movies themselves.
Back in 2009, Avatar took the white savior narrative of Dances with Wolves and smashed it together with the world-building and environmental messaging of FernGully: The Last Rainforest with astonishingly popular results. If the technical aspects of Avatar weren’t so groundbreaking (with still unmatched motion capture, 3D, and CGI), then I’m not sure these movies would have grossed billions in the box office, making Avatar the highest grossing film of all time and 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water the third highest-grossing. They’re not necessarily bad movies; they just don’t say anything we haven’t seen a million times. Or at least I haven’t.
Will the new Avatar: Fire and Ash make billions like its older siblings? Time will tell, but as a film, I think it’s probably the strongest of the three, with the same amount of derivative storytelling, but improved in its character work and arcs, with more exciting action and interesting plot directions for future installments. I still don’t necessarily care about what I’m looking at, but I’m at least entertained by what is onscreen.
Sam Worthington is still mostly stoic and wooden as Jake Sully, once a marine and now fully entrenched in his life as a Na’vi: ten-foot-tall, blue, indigenously coded space kitties. Along with his racist and nearly feral wife and baby momma, Neytiri (the always mesmerizing to watch Zoe Saldaña) and their four children of equal or lesser interest (including a pre-teen Sigourney Weaver and a white kid with dreads who says “bro” a lot), the Sully clan must band together to fight evil corporate and military colonizers, a psychotic, volcano-dwelling tribe of Na’vi called the Mangkwan and Colonel Quaritch, a Colonel Kurtz-esque marine who is torn between his dedication to the military and his desire to be a ten-foot-tall kitty cat.
We’re probably going to be watching Avatar movies for the rest of our lives as Cameron has a chunk of Avatar 4 already filmed (so that the kids don’t age too much) and Avatar 5 is planned, plotted and mostly scripted. There’s a lot of room for stories to be told in the world of Pandora, and the Sully family is just the tip of the iceberg (or at least it should be). It makes sense that Jake was the main character of the original because he served as an audience surrogate, exploring Pandora at the same time as we did. But now he feels like an impediment to more complex stories told in this universe. I’m pretty over the Sully family now. Or at least Jake.
Most of Avatar: Fire and Ash feels like Way of Water 2.0 with several of the same story beats and character arcs recycled once more. Again, all of it is very pretty to look at and I was never bored for any of its 200-plus minutes, but I’ll forget most of it within days, just as I did the previous ones. I think the Avatar movies might be the only ones in history that make as much money as they do, but leave no real cultural footprint. Yes, the Na’vi are iconic as a design, but ask the average viewer to name one of the Sully kids or how/why Sigourney Weaver was cloned and they won’t have a clue. Cameron and his team of writers seem more interested in playing around with their own Campbell-esque, archetypal hero monomyth tropes than actually telling a captivating story.
Cameron has made some of my favorite movies of all time with Terminator 2, The Abyss, and Aliens, but I wish I understood why he has spent so much time in the twilight of his career on these movies when I know he has better work in him. So far, the high water mark of the Avatar trilogy for me is the second hour of The Way of Water, which just sees the Sully kids swimming around and exploring the oceans of Pandora. No story, no cringey dialogue, just a mesmerizing tech demo in which to get lost. Cameron is still a visual master, regardless of the goofiness of these movies, I just hope we get another masterpiece before he retires.
Still, the villains are great (including a scene-stealing Oona Chaplin as a psychedelic space witch), the 3D and IMAX projection is breathtaking, and the messages involving conservation, anti-colonization, and pro-indigenous protection are important.
I respect what Cameron is doing with these movies more than I actually like them, but as long as he is behind the camera, he has earned my three hours of attention. Even as the realization slowly dawns that these movies just might not be my thing, I’m ultimately resigned to the fact that I’m probably not done with Pandora yet and it’s certainly not done with me.
Avatar: Fire and Ash
Grade: C
