Avatar: Fire and Ash
Film
In the wake of a devastating war against the RDA and the loss of their eldest song, Jake Sully and Neytiri face a new threat on Pandora: the Ash People, a violent and power-hungry Na'vi tribe led by the ruthless, Varang. Jake's family must fight for their survival and the future of Pandora in a conflict that pushes them to their emotional and physical limits.
James "Big Jim" Cameron is back with the third entry in his Avatar franchise, Avatar: Fire and Ash. We're back on Pandora, back with the Na'vi, back swimming with the Tulkun, back with some state-of-the-art visuals – it's all back. For most mega-blockbuster sequels, a three-year gap between movies would seem like the right amount of time between projects. You need time to get the story right, time to work through pre-production, time to get the budget secured, time to get everyone's schedules lined up, time to shoot the movie without rushing through it, time to work through post-production, time to prep your audience with some strategic marketing, and time to promote the movie. Just ran the numbers, and that's a lot of time. But again, three years is a timeline that seems logical given the scope and size of this caliber of blockbuster – more specifically, the highest-grossing films of all time.
In that sense, a new Avatar movie showing up this year feels kind of... rushed? And even a bit... underwhelming? It's been three years since the prior sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, which arrived after an almost inconceivable 13-year hiatus following the gargantuan success of the first Avatar film in 2009. But for Big Jim-Cam (that's what I like to call him, and I think he would either think that's the dumbest thing ever or he'd be sneaky into it), that's business as usual. This is the same guy who took seven years between Terminator movies; and then after making the once movie ever, Titanic in 1997, he cooled down for 12 years before releasing Avatar, the biggest movie ever. Oh, and then just to retierate, 13 years between Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water, which is the second biggest movie ever. When you put it like that, and based on the long runtimes of his movies, James Cameron works less than James Cameron's editing team – and James Cameron is on James Cameron's editing team! He doesn't always take his time, but when he does, he's usually making a fucking masterpiece.
Now I'm not insinuating Avatar: Fire and Ash would be a masterpiece if he spent a decade making it (but it probably improves its chances); I'm also not insinuating that Big Jim-Cam is incapable of a making a masterpiece in less than a decade (look at his filmography and you'll see a few smaller windows that led to some of the best movies of the last 50 years, ahem Aliens, ahem ahem, Terminator: Judgement Day). What exactly am I insinuating then? Avatar: Fire and Ash is far from that level, definitely the weakest entry in the Avatar series, and it is a minor work from a major filmmaker. There I said it. I'm not saying it's actively disappointing and passively bad, it's just kind of middling, a bit redundant with the The Way of Water, and feels like an aftershock rather than an earthquake – an aftershock that will still indubitably make well over a billion dollars at the box office without breaking a sweat.
Avatar: Fire and Ash has a repetition problem, which probably has something to do with the fact that it was conceived, written, and filmed simultaneously with The Way of Water. If I remember reading this correctly, the two Avatar sequels were intended as interconnected stories within a single script – which makes a lot of sense when you take a step back and think about both movies. The central conflict and core themes from the first Avatar continue through each of the sequels, and the story beats involving the Metkayina clan from The Way of Water and the Mangkwan clan from Fire and Ash don't just echo one another, they feel almost analogous. Pretty much the entire cast and crew is back from The Way of Water, with a few welcome additions that help make Fire and Ash feel like something new.
Getting back to the shorter gap between movies, the release of Fire and Ash feels rushed, not just because it's only been three years, but because the movie feels more formulaic than it does inventive. What made the first two Avatar films special (like many of Big Jim-Cam's other greatest movies) is that they're wholly unique and can stand alone (even if they're sequels) creatively. He's proven to be incredibly thorough and ensures his movies are so carefully crafted and constructed – don't get me wrong, Fire and Ash is well-made (in fact, very well-made for the most part) but it has a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," or a "let's just play the hits" mentality. What I was hoping for was something fresh but still familiar, risky but still cohesive.
I'm not sure if this is a totally fair or a completely unfair comparison to make, but I think Avatar: Fire and Ash is sort of like a better version of The Godfather Part III – what I mean I by that is I think it's unfair to make comparisons between those films and the films they followed. When you compare The Godfather Part III to the The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, you're comparing the third film to two of the greatest movies ever made ("there he goes, rambling on again about The Godfather movies as if that's all there is to ever talk about"). On the flip side, when you compare Avatar: Fire and Ash to Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water, you're comparing the the third film to two of the biggest and most successful films ever made (and perhaps best, depending on your how much you like your mileage to vary). It's all but utterly unreasonable but also totally unavoidable to hold these movies up and compare them to one another and say with a straight face that they should be regarded on equal playing field. Where I land with with Avatar: Fire and Ash is that it's a B-level Avatar movie, a C-level blockbuster, and a D-level James Cameron movie, which I think encapsulates exactly my positive-but-mixed-but-disappointed feelings about it.
The last I heard, two more sequels, Avatar 4 and Avatar 5 are still greenlit and on the schedule – apparently for 2029 and 2031, if you can even imagine us all being alive or try to fathom what it will feel like going to the movies in the 2030s. Now that we've reached the very, very backend of this write-up, I want to ask a (potentially controversial) rhetorical question before we wrap: are the Avatar films a good use of Big Jim-Cam's time? I mean that with all due respect (which I understand prefacing this is inherently disrespectful and its nearly impossible to parse out the respect from the disrespect based on how big the hole is I've dug for myself here). Listen, Cameron and the Avatar movies have literally nothing left to prove to anyone. He is essentially the most successful blockbuster filmmaker alive today (please don't come after me Stevie Spiels) – but at 71 years young, there's only so much left in the tank. Wouldn't it be rad to see him take one more big swing, leaving Pandora behind for someone else to excavate? He seems to have boxed himself in with this world he's created, and it's stunted some of his creative liberties. We'll see, whatever makes you happy, I guess.
