Review of 'Avatar: Fire and Ash': Back on Pandora, Cameron recycles his plot

“Avatar: Fire and Ash” feels like a van equipped with James Cameron behind the wheel and whisks us away to his favorite place in the galaxy. The 71-year-old innovative director has been visiting Pandora for more than half a century, since he first dreamed of it when he was 19. As 26 Billion Mile Destination Cinema goes, this third update of the adventures of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a former United States Marine turned Na'vi big blue daddy, his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), and their mixed brood of biological and adopted children, is essentially one home too long. movie. There are fights and hugs, hijinks and bonding, and there isn't much momentum in the story. These characters have simply become so real to Cameron that they are family.

Cameron's affection for the place remains a compelling reason to hang out in outer space until the popcorn visionary finally returns to our planet. But as for the plot, the story is the same as always. The earthlings, also known as “pink skins” and “sky people,” want to plunder Pandora's natural resources. The Na'vi, ecological warriors with hard-bodied girlfriends, fight alongside a variety of alien dinosaurs, whales, squid, plants, and masses.

Jake and Neytiri's relationship has been strained since their eldest son, Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), was killed by soldiers in 2022's “Avatar: The Way of Water.” Neytiri, her face smeared with black mourning makeup, has turned to prayer. She never liked humanity. Now he hates “her little pink hands and her way of thinking.”

Her husband Jake, however, can't help but think like the human being he once was. Having gone native and been persecuted for it, he deals with his grief by digging up weapons from the ocean fight in the last film, even though metal weapons are against the rules of the aquatic community that took him in, led by chieftain Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and his pregnant wife Ronal (Kate Winslet).

Their surviving children are a Na'vi mix: Lo'ak (Britain Dalton), Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), and Tuk (Trinity Bliss), and an adopted human named Spider (Jack Champion), the estranged son of Stephen Lang's veteran Colonel Miles Quaritch. There's a flash of drama in the fact that Neytiri doesn't want to risk a custody skirmish with Spider's biological father. He would prefer to exile, perhaps even kill, the child. But you never believe for a minute that Cameron would force his heroine to do something so horrible.

So instead of getting carried away by the narrative, I simply settled down to enjoy the details: hammerhead sharks twisted into beaks, ships scuttling like crabs, the drama of an underwater cry: “Guh-glurrgggh!” I especially like how the Na'vi express themselves with coyote hisses and howls and exhale the foreign name Jake Sully like a sneeze.

To be fair, Cameron's conservationist message is timeless and his passion for nature is so sincere that he went vegan (or, as he prefers to call it, “futurevore”) between the first two films. Even though “Avatar” and its sequel grossed more than $5 billion worldwide, it's not like we pink-skinned folks have agreed to respect our own planet.

In a new twist, there are some nasty Na'vi this time around too: the rebellious Ash Clan, led by the vicious Varang (Oona Chaplin), who sides with Lang's macho, fun-loving Quaritch as a way to smack the planet's spiritual mother goddess. Quaritch is in love with this new villain and we also really like Varang. “We don't suck the breast of weakness,” Chaplin snarls, as his vengeful volcano-raised killer makes a grand entrance in a shirt that's nothing more than a thong. Beneath the digital artifice, Chaplin's eyes shine with fiery conviction and palpable presence. His grandfather Charlie, an actor who embraced visual effects a century ago with “The Gold Rush,” would have been impressed by how his bloodline has kept pace with the evolution of cinema.

Quaritch, who now resembles a Na'vi with a flat top over his rat tail, remains by far the most entertaining character in the series. The lovelorn redneck even paints himself in one of the Ash Clan's tribal patterns: a royal red collar. At one point, his boss, Edie Falco's General Frances Ardmore, accuses Quaritch of transforming into “Colonel Cochise,” drawing a line between her species and the “savages” of Pandora that makes her look like a parody of John Wayne.

“It doesn't matter what color I am, I still remember what team I play on,” Quaritch lectures Jake. While the lines between black and white, or rather pink and blue, are painted rather thickly, Neytiri's own anti-human bigotry adds some nice moral stains.

A postcard of Pandora would show its floating mountains, bioluminescent forests, and sentient hot air balloons. These achievements are striking. But what's become more interesting, and what really feels like Cameron's reckless creative risk, is his insistence on treating the impossible as if it were mundane, like the vision of 9-foot-5 Quaritch casually relaxing in a hoodie, or an opening sequence of Na'vi teenagers circling flying dinosaurs that cinematographer Russell Carpenter films to look crude and sloppy, as if the footage had been shot with a Go-Pro. camera.

Viewed in an ultra-sharp high frame rate, “Fire and Ash” feels so overwhelmingly real that it is surreal again. The collision between the fantastical and the familiar is disorienting, and becomes even stranger when reckless kids start screaming like they're at Muscle Beach. “Cool, bro!” one shouts. “High four!” (You may remember that the Na'vi natives have only four fingers on each hand.)

Cameron has always been ridiculed for his dialogue, but there's no denying that he writes lines that last. Nearly three decades ago, he had Jack from “Titanic” woo Rose by saying “I see you” (a line he would repeat ad nauseam in “Avatar”) and now the phrase is included in ordinary conversation. As silly as it sounds when Spider yells “This is sick!” while doing somersaults with a seal flipper like she's in an intergalactic Sea World show, or when Weaver's perky Kiri learns she was born parthenogenetically and complains, “That really sucks,” Cameron is prioritizing authentic choice over forced sci-fi choice. Well, I'll accept the argument that Sully's offspring would inherit his Jarhead dialect. Given how realistic they look and act, we'll eventually start to wonder what they smell like.

In the shadows of today's generational divide on college campuses, younger Na'vi have an ethical disagreement with their elders over their rejection of an outcast whale, Payakan, who speaks in comically solemn subtitles. “You will never hear my song again,” Payakan intones. The whale brothers have piercings and tattoos on their faces, which raises a lot of questions. How do you get tattoos with fins?

These are the thoughts you ponder as “Fire and Ash” once again asks the same questions as before: Where does Spider belong? When is violence justified? What will it take for these militarized Earthlings to realize they're the bad guys? He already answered them; Philosophically, the franchise doesn't seem motivated by saying new things but rather by asking its protagonists to say them again with a little more nuance. With Cameron suggesting that he wants to keep these characters around for at least five films, the overarching plot of the fight for planetary dominance never generates any tension other than the suspense of wondering if Lang's Quaritch might one day be redeemed.

If we must have a fourth and fifth “Avatar,” Cameron should abandon these increasingly prosaic battlefield thrills for something truly bold: following the kids to the alien university to watch a mumblecore movie. Now that That would be great, brother.