Review: Avatar: Fire and Ash

I never really cared about Avatar at all when it came out. I was squarely in the demographic: an 11 year old boy obsessed with aliens and monsters and robots who saw every new Transformers movie opening weekend. But for whatever reason, I just never connected with James Cameron’s Pandora. So I was shocked when, in 2022, Avatar: Way of Water became one of my favorite movies of all time. I saw it in IMAX 3D and couldn’t believe what I was seeing, nor what I was feeling. I was so shaken by the experience that I went to see it again on the smallest theater screen possible, in two measly dimensions, to confirm I wasn’t just being hypnotized by the physical hugeness of the spectacle. And yup, I still loved it. I even still loved it on the tiniest shittiest airplane seat-back screen a few months later. In fact, I even still love it when I’m watching it right now in my brain while thinking about it.

I don’t know exactly how or why this happened to me. I think my fairly low expectations let Way of Water sneak through my defenses and genuinely touch me. For the past year, I’ve been kind of in disbelief that we were getting another Avatar movie already. After all, the last one took over a decade to make. And my once-low expectations were now sky-high. How was Fire and Ash going to measure up?

Well, I don’t think this is a fair thing to lead off with, but Way of Water was Way of Better. That’s not to say Fire and Ash wasn’t good. I’d even say it was great. But I left the theater questioning if maybe a movie at the scale of Avatar really does need thirteen years in the oven to achieve its fullest potential.

Fire and Ash continues to tug at the character threads that made Way of Water so fascinating to me. The bizarre relationships between Quaritch and Spider, Kiri and Spider, Jake and Spider, and others that don’t include Spider are poked at and extrapolated in a way I found very satisfying. While other characters certainly have their moments, the movie’s strongest through line is the triangle between Jake, Quaritch, and Spider, which goes to some fun and intriguing places that I won’t spoil. It also definitely maintains the same sense of spectacle, huge-scale action, and technical achievement you’d expect from a James Cameron tentpole. I was once again an HFR skeptic, but I found that when combined with the 3D it took me only a breezy 20 minutes to become fully acclimated. The only hiccups are, as before, when the movie shifts down into a normal frame rate and suddenly looks like it’s coming over your parents’ old cable box.

More than its predecessor, Fire and Ash feels long. Way of Water spent a lot of its runtime treading water, but the water it was treading was the beautiful marine ecosystem of Pandora’s ocean. When Fire and Ash’s plot meanders it ends up feeling more like narrative table setting. There aren’t new environments to discover on the scale of the ocean. We visit a few new biomes, but they serve mainly as backdrops to the action, not as depths to dive into and explore. Cameron’s heart is clearly not in the Ash People’s home turf, or the RDA’s oppressively industrial city, both places I would have loved to spend hours delving into. The lack of extended nature-documentary-esque sequences draws more attention to the cookie-cutter elements of the plot. It’s harder to swallow narrative dawdling or tropey foregone conclusions because they’re not accompanied with a lovingly rendered entirely new frontier. Fire and Ash largely feels like it’s biding time. Way of Water introduced dozens of new characters, but Fire and Ash merely pushes them forward along their tracks. The result is a movie with a plot that feels like concatenated TV episodes. Way of Water served as a complete reconfiguration from the original Avatar, and it seems I was a little foolish to expect that Fire and Ash might offer the same huge leap.

I’m really trying to take Fire and Ash on its own merits, but it’s difficult because many of the overarching story beats are basically the same as Way of Water. There were several scenes I felt like I had already seen before because of how similar they were to sequences in the previous movie. Even the big action climax is like 90% the same, but slightly worse. The new stuff we get in the movie is great– the Ash Clan had me smiling and leaning forward in my seat– but it only lasts so long before the plot snaps us back into all-too-familiar territory. Way of Water set up a whole bunch of dominoes, and while Fire and Ash knocks a few of them down, it has more of a tendency to show you the same dominoes again, just on a slightly different-looking table. James Cameron has demonstrated time and time again that he understands how to make a sequel feel novel and uncharted. My diagnosis is that he just liked Way of Water too much to truly move on from it.

Something I love about Cameron’s storytelling is his willingness to interpolate other stories into his epics. In Way of Water he tackled the sea from every angle, transposing Titanic, The Abyss, and even Moby Dick into Pandoran terms. It made a pretty straightforward plot feel sprawling and real and thematic. If Fire and Ash focuses on one thing it’s what it means to be a na’vi. How cool is it to have a movie with separate character analogs for T.E. Lawrence, Colonel Kurtz, and Tarzan, all tangled together in a bizarre net of cloning, surrogate fatherhood, and identity? Cameron is a master of the stock character, delivering just enough of a science-fiction twist on each familiar trope to let his Ahabs and Ripleys and Paul Atreides breathe. I’m even a sucker for minor players like Lyle Wainfleet or Norm Spellman.

Of course, the standout new face is Varang, the sadistic tsahik of the Ash People. She quickly becomes one of the best characters in the whole franchise. I think because of the love scene in the first Avatar, there’s still the idea that na’vi connecting their braids with each other is a sexual act. This is something that will make one of Varang’s signature attacks seem a little over the top. Something I’ve seen a lot of people talk about is that this is a very ‘horny’ movie. I think people tend to exaggerate this kind of thing because of how chaste most big budget movies are nowadays. That said, there is no other blockbuster franchise where 99% of the runtime is occupied by giant lithe oiled-up cat people in rope bikinis cavorting and undulating through a sweaty jungle. This is James Cameron’s true strength: to build a genuinely interesting and weird world filled with inspired design choices and near-Bone Tomahawk levels of cultural questionability, and to make it accessible enough that people smear it as Disney slop.

All in all, Avatar: Fire and Ash is an action-packed epic from one of our greatest blockbuster artists. It’s also basically an expansion pack for Avatar: Way of Water, for better and for worse. People already predisposed to these movies will probably be thrilled to re-immerse themselves in the eternal struggle of the Sully family, but I can’t see Fire and Ash converting skeptics to believers like Way of Water so unanticipatedly did for me. Cameron’s threequel’s greatest weakness is its proximity to its predecessor, and the fact that it’s impossible to talk about without invoking what came before. I still had a great time. I spent a lot of words talking about the specific ways it disappointed me, but I’m still probably going to go see it again today. Lol. Four stars.