Happy Na’vi families are all alike; every unhappy Na’vi family is unhappy in its own way. Should you require proof, simply drain your bladder, don your 3-D glasses, and settle in for the very long haul of James Cameron’s new movie, “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” Here, once again, are Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his wife, Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), both looking bluer than usual. They are Na’vi—cerulean-skinned, feline-bodied humanoid giants, who dwell on a distant moon called Pandora, fly hither and yon on what appear to be tie-dyed pterodactyls, and possess long, braided ponytails that allow them to connect with nature and each other. But Jake and Neytiri are in no mood for hookups. They are grieving the loss of their eldest son, Neteyam, who was slain, at the end of “Avatar: The Way of Water” (2022), by mercenary human invaders, bent on seizing control of Pandora and its natural resources. Now, as “Fire and Ash” gets under way, Jake tries to move on, but Neytiri remains inconsolable, her grief hardening into rage. Their younger son, Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), shoulders a heavy burden of guilt over his brother’s death.
So far, so straightforward: it’s “Ordi’Na’vi People.” But complications loom, and really, they have loomed from the start. Back in the year 2154, Jake was still human himself—a U.S. marine, enlisted by scientists to infiltrate life in the Pandoran jungle, using an artificially engineered, human-piloted Na’vi body. So began “Avatar” (2009), a technologically newfangled but dramatically old-fashioned epic of going native, which ended with Jake fully radicalized, blissfully bonded to Neytiri, and granted the permanent gift of true-blue Na’vi form. “The Way of Water,” set roughly fifteen years later, whisked us from Pandora’s jungles to its ocean shores, and introduced us to Jake and Neytiri’s children. These include an adopted teen-age daughter, Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), who was born, under mysterious circumstances, to the Na’vi avatar of a now deceased human scientist, Dr. Grace Augustine (also Sigourney Weaver). This anomaly may explain why, in “Fire and Ash,” Kiri alone has trouble communicating with the spirit of the Great Mother, also known as Enya—sorry, Eywa—and cherished for the way she flows through and binds all Pandoran life, presumably in one great ponytail-palooza.
The family also has a foster ragamuffin, Spider (Jack Champion), who loves nothing more than to frolic through the wilderness with Lo’ak, Kiri, and their younger sister, Tuk (Trinity Bliss), but who, being human, cannot breathe the Pandoran atmosphere, and so must wear an oxygen mask that can be counted on to malfunction at the least convenient moments. More awkwardly still, he is the biological son of Jake’s slain adversary, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who died when the boy was still an itsy-bitsy Spider, but whose consciousness now lives on as a malevolent packet of memories implanted in a powerful Na’vi body. Pure gung-ho dickishness in any form, Quaritch 2.0 is determined to have his revenge on Jake and, perhaps, a belated shot at fatherhood. To that end, he teams up with a ferocious rebel clan of Na’vi known as the Mangkwan, or Ash People, who are bent on Eywa’s destruction; in keeping with their name and their blazing red plumage, they just want to burn everything down. Quaritch promises them access to firearms, in flagrant defiance of Pandora’s unwritten anti-gun laws.
Got all that? Good. “Avatar: Fire and Ash” is many things: a lengthy demo reel for the latest sophistications in performance-capture technology, for which we can credit the ever more lifelike quality of the Na’vi characters, and the third chapter in a blockbuster mega-franchise that—if Cameron had his way, an unlimited budget, and perhaps a packet of memories and a Na’vi body himself—would stretch on toward infinity. But the movie is also, perhaps first and foremost, a goofily complicated maelstrom of transmigratory souls, cross-species lineages, and unholy alliances. Gone are the simpler days of the first “Avatar,” an anti-imperialist war flick whose moral lines were as clean-cut as Jake’s marine ’do.
Now human conquest feels like a more insidious, more entangled thing. It goes beyond the hostile occupying presence of military forces, commanded by General Ardmore (Edie Falco), who are easily dispatched, in the film’s ocean-battle sequences, with a mighty wave of Cameron’s digital wand. “Fire and Ash” is a largely enervating experience, but, like its predecessors, it sure knows how to get us crying out for our own species’ blood. At the director’s command, lethal squid-like monsters attack Ardmore’s ships from out of nowhere, and sombrely eloquent sea creatures, known as Tulkun, abruptly shift into killer-whale mode. Far more difficult to shake off, though, are the profound emotional, spiritual, and cellular bonds that have developed between the human and Na’vi worlds. Witness the scene in which Kiri, trying to save Spider from toxic asphyxiation, tethers his fate to Pandora’s in ways that portend only more human encroachment to come. The series, in short, has become one long parable of intragalactic miscegenation—a concept that Cameron pushes, in one primally deranged sequence, to Old Testament levels of reckoning.
More than once, during a deadly confrontation, Jake tells Quaritch to open his yellow Na’vi eyes, look past their petty squabbles, and see how vast and beautiful the world around him is. But “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” for all its heady complications, is an altogether less transporting experience than its two predecessors, though, at three hours and fifteen minutes, it is certainly vaster. What it lacks is a sense of passage, of progress from one world to the next, which even the cinema of non-stop sensations requires. Cameron (usually) knows this as well as anyone. That’s why the first “Avatar” ushered us, with a boldly immersive application of 3-D, into what felt like a startling new plane of existence: our first glimpse of the Pandoran wilderness, with Jake roaming about clumsily on his new Na’vi legs, evoked nothing so much as Dorothy’s first Technicolor glimpse of Munchkinland in “The Wizard of Oz” (1939), famously the director’s favorite film. “The Way of Water,” though unable to match the impact of the first “Avatar,” shrewdly took us deep-sea diving instead, in the great Cameron tradition of “The Abyss” (1989) and “Titanic” (1997). Talk about reefer madness: the depths were gorgeously enveloping, and the fish were a trippy hoot.
“Fire and Ash,” by contrast, has no new worlds to conquer. There are a few eye-candy wonders, to be sure, such as a fleet of Na’vi hot-air balloons, each one equipped with a bulbous, translucent envelope and a mass of trailing medusa tentacles. There is also Varang (Oona Chaplin), the Mangkwan’s cold-blooded leader, a seething, witchily seductive spectacle unto herself. The rest of it treads and retreads water. An interminable sequence of detention, escape, and pursuit unfolds at the humans’ heavily fortified compound, and although the man-made ugliness is partly the point—what a depressing contrast with the magnificently verdant jungle visions, the luminescent flora and fauna of the Na’vi world!—it is also, in this case, a trigger and possibly a manifestation of boredom.
Presumably, Cameron has a long-term destination in mind, but here, falling back on the habitual flatness of his characterizations and the self-admiring wretchedness of his dialogue (“Smile, bitches!” is what passes for a putdown), he almost seems to be stalling for time. Will the planned next films in the cycle offer a shot at redemption? With each outing, it has become increasingly clear that Jake is, in fact, an avatar for Cameron himself, who went full Na’vi ages ago and may never come back—and, stuck as he is, can only hope to convert willing audiences to the cause. He has committed years of his life to the “Avatar” project, and, at seventy-one, he soldiers on, like a filmmaker possessed or just plain trapped. Pandora’s boxed him in. ♦
