Producers: James Cameron and Jon Landau Director: James Cameron Screenplay: James Cameron, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Oona Chaplin, Jack Champion, Kate Winslet, Cliff Curtis, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Edie Falco, David Thewlis, Jemaine Clement, Giovanni Ribisi, Britain Dalton, Jamie Flatters, Trinity Jo-Li Bliss, Brendan Cowell, Bailey Bass, Filip Geljo, Duane Evans Jr., Dileep Rao and Max Gerald Distributor: Disney/20th Century Studios
Grade: C
The visuals are again the thing in this third installment of James Cameron’s “Avatar” saga. The hybrid live-action-and-animated characters move a tad more smoothly than before, the production design by Dylan Cole and Ben Procter is evocative, the visual effects (the huge team supervised by Joe Letteri and Richard Baneham) are predictably impressive, and Russell Carpenter’s cinematography positively glows; as an added bonus, the Dolby Vision3D is much better than in the old days when the process brought severe darkening and the glasses could be cumbersome. The look of “Fire and Ash” doesn’t carry the “wow” factor the first chapter did in 2009, of course—improvements are now incremental rather than revolutionary—but the picture looks great by any measure, and it sounds so as well.
But there’s that pesky matter of a script. Just as “Star Wars” was modeled on old outer-space serials, Cameron’s inspiration for “Avatar” obviously came from Westerns, with the first movie a variant of Kevin Costner’s “Dances With Wolves.” The subsequent films have fed further on the genre, this time, for example, incorporating the hoary cliché of a tribe’s desire for firearms transported to Pandora, which the earth’s Resources Development Administration is plundering on land and at sea.
Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), the former Marine recruited to be transformed into an avatar resembling one of the Na’vi (the tall, blue-skinned, tailed indigenous inhabitants) has gone native, married Na’vi Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and is raising a family with her. In “The Way of Water,” to escape Jake’s former commander Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), now an avatar himself, they and their family left her clan to join another, coastal one. But in the ongoing battle with the RDA, their eldest son Neteyam was killed, and Neytiri is especially hostile to their adopted son Spider (Jack Champion), the human son of Quaritch whose presence is a constant reminder of her loss.
Quaritch is back, obsessed with pursuing Sully, whom he considers a traitor. Jake and the family flee into the wilderness, where they encounter a fierce, warlike tribe of Na’vi led by the ferocious Queen Varang (Oona Chaplin). Quaritch enters into alliance with her, promising the tribe firearms for their assistance.
If there’s a thread that ties together all the tiresome surrenders, captures, escapes, battles and verbal bickering that make up “Fire and Ash,” it’s the development of Spider, the outsider, into a fully accepted member of the Na’vi. The process is both physical and social. The former centers on his ability to breathe Pandora’s air, something humans cannot do (hence the creation of the avatars in the first place). Spider must therefore wear an oxygen mask to survive, and at one point in the action his fails, and the replacement is unavailable. But through the agency of Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), the family’s young adopted daughter who has a special connection to Eywa, the Great Mother or spiritual force uniting everything on Pandora, some sort of flying, luminescent jellyfish saves the boy by entering his lungs and changing him biologically to breathe the atmosphere. (That’s just one example of how things happen without much explanation simply because they’re necessary to further the plot.)
But Spider’s newfound ability to survive on Pandora makes him a target of the RDA, which hopes to experiment on him and extract the secret so that other humans will be able to exploit Pandora more efficiently. Quaritch also wants to woo the boy away from his devotion to Sully’s family.
But Spider’s physical transformation is only part of the process; he must also be accepted by the Na’vi and their protector Eywa. That must begin at home. Though Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), Jake and Neytiri’s oldest surviving son who’s still grieving Neteyam and is desperate to convince his father of his reliability (and who serves as narrator whenever Cameron feels the need of one), passionately embraces Spider as his brother, Neytiri just as passionately refuses to accept him, demanding that her husband send the boy back to his “own kind” or, at one point, even suggesting that Jake kill him—an episode that might have you thinking of Abraham and Isaac. Fortunately, she changes her mind and Jake doesn’t follow through; in the end Spider proves where his loyalty lies and is accepted by the Great Mother herself.
Eywa also intervenes, after much dithering, in the inevitable final battle, a prolonged affair that sees virtually every species in Pandora—save Varang and her tribe—battling the air and sea forces of the RDA. At one point, of course, all seems lost, but a last-minute intervention saves the day, and Spider makes his definitive choice of family; it’s not much of a spoiler to report that Quaritch dies, but not to worry—that’s happened before and will probably happen again if Cameron’s projected additional installments materialize. One particularly satisfying moment in the mayhem occurs when Brendan Cowell, as the captain of the mercenary fleet hunting Pandora’s whales, suffers a fate lovers of Melville will relish. How many of the target audience will recognize the reference is questionable.
The cast is tasked with playing characters hobbled by the awful dialogue Cameron and his co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver have saddled them with; most of the lines are simply puerile. But Worthington and Saldaña do what they can with it, while Dalton, Champion and Weaver, not acting her age, are fine as members of the younger generation. Lang and Cowell make hissable villains, but Chaplin is encouraged to camp it up to such an extent as Varang that she winds up seeming comical; physically, too, her animated form looks absurd. (She, like some other Na’vi, have the habit of exchanging growls and hisses with their foes; these are so numerous that if they were all excised, it would probably shave a few minutes off the bloated running-time allowed by the squadron of five editors– Stephen Rivkin, Nicolas de Toth, John Refoua, Jason Gaudio and Cameron. Any shortening would have been much appreciated.) Most of the rest are adequate in parts that don’t go much beyond juvenile sketches, but the most thankless task certainly goes to Edie Falco as the general in charge of RDA forces, who simply struts around issuing banal orders that inevitably lead to disaster.
“Fire and Ash” does, it must be said, provide a surfeit of spectacularly choreographed action, complemented by a pounding score from Simon Franglen that, at IMAX volume, might well rattle your teeth. That might be enough to satisfy the most devoted fans of Cameron’s otherworldly saga. But like “Return of the Jedi,” the third installment in the first trilogy of George Lucas’ space epic, it might make many feel that enough is enough. If they ever were, the visual attractions of the “Avatar” series are no longer sufficient to justify a narrative so simple-minded, derivative and repetitive.