Bigger, longer and uncut could be the tagline for James Cameron’s latest “Avatar” chapter, “Fire and Ash,” which at three hours and 17 minutes is five minutes longer than 2022’s “Way of Water” and 35 more than the 2009 first film in the series, still the all-time top at the box office at nearly $3 billion in ticket sales. Where the franchise is going seems to be one long continuous saga akin to the J.R.R. Tolkien films (“Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings”).
“Fire and Ash” picks up a year after “Way of Water,” with the nefarious Resources Development Administration still hunting the whalelike tulkun for amrita, a substance in their brains coveted by rich humans back on Earth for its antiaging effects. Unobtainium – such a great and obvious name for a super metal – was the object of corporate greed in the 2009 original, but now seems to be an afterthought. Back then, to gain control of the resource-rich planet Pandora, the RDA sent in the Marines to expel the indigenous Na’vi, the 10-foot tall, blue-skinned humanoids with cool prehensile tails and limpid yellow eyes, who were in the way of the extractive mining. Now beyond pillaging the sea, it feels like Pandora might be a good spot for humans to relocate, as Earth has become dangerously close to depletion (we’re circa 2150). Intergalactic colonization isn’t a new cinematic concept, to be sure, but Pandora has air that is toxic to humans. They must wear oxygen masks to get around.
This brings us back to our series stalwarts: Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), the marine transplanted into a Na’vi body – the transplanting is the “avatar” concept of the title; love-interest turned wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), who taught Sully the ways of Eywa, the symbiotic life force of the planet; and Tarzan-boy Spider (Jack Champion), the loincloth-clad human adopted by Scully and Neytiri who suggests an answer to the oxygen mask problem. The heroes try to rouse the water Na’vi to fight the RDA as the intergalactic conglomerate prepares for a big roundup of tulkun when the cetaceans mass in a shallow cove for their annual birthing – like baby seals … or sitting ducks.
We also meet the Mangkwan, a war-bent Na’vi that live in ash-strewn wastelands at the base of a volcano (a society and setting reminiscent of the zombies under the rule of the Alpha in “28 Years Later”). Led by the fierce warrior priestess Varang (Oona Chaplin, Charlie’s granddaughter), they fall in with the RDA. Old foe colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang, also onscreen currently as a baddie in “Sisu: Road to Revenge”), still in an avatar/Na’vi form and willing to go to all ends to advance RDA’s interests, looms large and semper-fi formidable. It adds a dash of fire that he and the screen-grabbing Varang have pent-up sexual tensions that play out regularly in snarled innuendo amid “I will kill you” standoffs. They provide smoldering spectacles of do-or-die righteousness, but Cameron and his posse of writers unwisely let them languish as two-dimensional characters too often relegated to the background. It’s a bad move, because Sully, Neytiri and Spider – especially Spider – are not all that compelling without them.
What lifts the film are riveting visuals and ever-expanding world building, but even this is undermined by colonialist-critical roots and a tendency toward generic good-versus-bad hoedowns. The whole “Fire and Ash” shebang cost more than $400 million to cook up and has been nominated for the Golden Globe Cinematic and Box Office Achievement – odd because a requirement for the category is that the film earns at least $150 million in ticket sales. The just opened “Fire and Ash” will likely do that over its first weekend … but what if it didn’t?
What you ultimately get is a Part II to “Way of Water” that ends with the promise of Part III. If we look at the series as representative of the five elements of the natural world (amazing how our creative palette is limited to what we know in the material here when painting fantastical foreign worlds) we started with the Sky People, so we can check off air, and have added fire and water. That leaves earth and aether – space or spirit – which would make sense considering the ever-looming presence of Eywa. That syncs with Cameron’s slate showing “Avatar IV” and “Avatar V” set for screens in 2029 and 2031. I’ll prognosticate that mole-men Na’vi are in the mix for “IV” and somehow in “V” Eywa has to fight some new RDA force – Quaritch, who somehow slips into the planet’s neural net and becomes a supreme being similar in power but not in benevolence.
Each new “Avatar” installment has been notably longer and more eye-poppingly impressive (do yourself a favor and see this one in 3D Imax), but also rides the rails of diminishing returns – more is not more. The screening I attended had Cameron in a prefilm message promising that no AI was used in onscreen generation, and that all was done with live actors. As he talks, there are cutaways to the making of the film on set compared with the final rendered product. It’s illuminating and adds context for appreciating the onscreen accomplishment. It also adds another five or 10 to the running time.
For What it's Worth 
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