Justin Chang reviews “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” directed by James Cameron and staring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, and Stephen Lang.
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” , 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 , who was born, under mysterious circumstances, to the Na’vi avatar of a now deceased human scientist, Dr. Grace Augustine . 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 , who loves nothing more than to frolic through the wilderness with Lo’ak, Kiri, and their younger sister, Tuk , 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 , 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 , 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. “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 , 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 , 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. ♦
Science Fiction James Cameron Sam Worthington Zoe Saldana Sigourney Weaver Avatar
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