For Avatar fans, I have great news: The latest installment of James Cameron’s magical-alien adventure saga is here, and you’re going to love it. Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third entry in a franchise that has consumed the attention of Hollywood’s greatest action-movie director for the past two decades, is a giddy bundle of familiar sights: willowy blue warrior-aliens; Day-Glo beasts of air, land, and sea; eminently jeer-worthy humans trying to invade a celestial paradise. The bad news for anyone not already on board: This film has no interest in you.
The sense of exclusivity is the one big charge I can level against Fire and Ash, which furthers the fable of Pandora, the fantastical moon that’s home to the Na’vi. The focus remains on Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington), a soldier who has permanently ported himself into a Na’vi body; he’s now raising a family with his warrior-queen wife, Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña). The previous chapter in their tale, 2022’s The Way of Water, felt like a newcomer-friendly reinvention for the series. Its sequel is a straightforward continuation by comparison, mostly keeping to previously introduced environments and enemies. But Cameron has spent ample time building out this sci-fi world, whose nooks, crannies, and philosophical limits are still delightful to examine.
Fire and Ash makes clear up front that it’s different from the previous Avatar films, though, by opening on a downbeat note. It picks up directly after The Way of Water, which is a cheerful romp through a reef-side Na’vi community that ends in tragedy: Jake’s oldest son dying in a fight against an army of human colonizers. Thus, Fire and Ash has a dark pall over its proceedings; the protagonists are still in mourning and planning courses of vengeance. It contains less of the sense of discovery that makes the prior entries so thrilling, such as their navigation of an ecosystem and all of the intricately designed creatures within it. Instead, the movie devotes itself to weighing the cost of Jake’s arrival on Pandora, and his transformation into a member of its native species. The heavier tone is appropriate for the story Cameron is trying to tell. It’s just also a little less joyful.
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Meanwhile, as ever with Avatar (and most of the director’s works), the screenwriting is direct to the point of clunkiness. All of the dialogue is geared toward communicating plot or plainly stating a character’s emotional state. The straightforwardness is in the service of Cameron’s real preoccupation, however: exploring and further building out this strange utopia. This film’s best invention is the “ash people,” a Na’vi clan that lives in the volcanic mountains. Although the other Na’vi are very tapped into large Mother Gaia notions of flora and fauna, and the belief that everyone is connected on Pandora, the ash people have a much more nihilistic worldview. Their disdain for their home is somewhat frightening, as is their eagerness to take up human arms—yet they’re refreshingly novel too.
The ash people’s perspective allies them with the group looking to strip-mine Pandora’s resources. They get on particularly well with the franchise’s knottiest figure, the villainous Quaritch (Stephen Lang). He’s a wonderfully perverse creation, an invading warrior now trapped in the form of his enemy; after dying in the first Avatar, Quaritch had his consciousness cloned into a Na’vi body. As usual, Lang plays the brute’s Heart of Darkness–esque descent into madness with gleeful relish. Quaritch finds a twin soul in the form of the ash people’s leader, Varang (Oona Chaplin). The two pretty quickly embark on a lot of drug-fueled campfire happenings, as if they’re at Burning Man. Theirs is the kind of loopy side quest that only Cameron has the guts to cram into a Christmastime blockbuster.
Narrative turns such as this are why I find it impossible to be bored by these movies. There’s always some bizarre new sci-fi consideration among the extravagant bits of combat. One of the most notable ideas that Fire and Ash throws around is the relationship between Sully’s adopted teenagers: Kiri (Sigourney Weaver, playing a dreamy pseudo-clone of the actor’s human character in the first Avatar) and Quaritch’s son, Spider (Jack Champion), who has miraculously adapted to life on Pandora like some space-age Tarzan. Each of them represents evolutionary concepts, such as adaptation, through which Cameron expands an already-mystical universe; their paths pave the most intriguing ground for future stories to develop on.
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Their subplot also represents Avatar at its most complex. Playing the hits—Jake, Neytiri, and company doing glorious battle with men in mech suits—would have been easy, and Fire and Ash still serves up plenty of impressive warfare. Yet the Na’vi are just as often seen plugging their ponytail into an animal, or even into the roots of trees, to share their consciousness. That’s Avatar’s potent, if polarizing, cocktail: Hippie-ish spirituality comfortably exists alongside absurd action scenes, such as when Jake nerfs Marines with a carbine rifle while flying on the back of a dinosaur. I have no clue whether Cameron wants to keep working on the series; he’s been somewhat demure about the possibility of additional sequels, having already devoted a huge chunk of his career to the skies and seas of Pandora. The director clearly isn’t trying to win people over in the meantime, but I’ll never turn down a chance to delve into this gigantic, goofy world.
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