Up next is the latest instalment in James Cameron’s saga about a not so little man who lives in a blue world—and by now, anyone keen to watch it is already invested in his story of strife upon the planet of Pandora. So, for those, who does this followup to his extravaganzas of CG turn out?
As always, on the technical side, there’s top marks as you might expect from Cameron, who after all was putting in all the effort even as a set designer for Roger Corman B-schlock. Even the original Avatar still looks good next to certain modern blockbusters that skimp out with overworked CG houses forced to crank out reshoots in the wake of mismanagement and vision-less finagling. Now, the previous film managed to justify itself with brand new sides of this world we hadn’t seen before, and did break some new ground with genuinely impressive underwater effects—do we have any such thing here?
Eh. Everything is well-shot as before, but let’s just say that even within the series’ context there’s a lot more deja vu, and what’s new is more glimpsed this time around. Other than that, it does follow up pretty directly from Way of Water, with the same cast given more focus—if you weren’t impressed by that one, this one won’t really do it either.
But for those that were interested to see more, I’ll actually grant that there is improvement on characterization and theme to some degree. We still have Sam Worthington as human-turned-native Jake, fighting alongside his wife Zoe Saldana, against Stephen Lang as a similarly reborn Quaritch. We have newcomer Oona Chaplin as leader of a much more brutal tribe of local Na’vi, who really isn’t in the film long enough as one might think—which is a shame, as her ad-hoc relationship with Quaritch is one of the more enjoyable and unexpected aspects here!
Otherwise, we do have more ambiguous themes of confronting hate and the cycles it begets, as well as being torn between worlds ever more pronounced with Jack Champion as Spider—this is well and good, but with the film’s runtime, it sometimes feels a bit stretched out. You can definitely see what Cameron is aiming for here, but at the same time we’re still getting stuck on more business with whales.
And, well, the climax also feels a bit familiar after the last two films—considering also we did have glimpses of rather spectacular volcanic vistas or cyberpunk colony cities, with one sequence in particular set in the latter crying out to be expanded and maybe made more of an actual finale.
Overall, that leaves Fire and Ash a somewhat mixed bag—there’s ideas that could’ve made it the best and most interesting of all the Avatar films so far, but with a bit of trim could’ve left them more pronounced. For all the multicolored spectacle and scope some enjoyed from before, that’s all on full display now—but there could’ve been just a bit more served up with this latest course of visual feast.
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