Three years ago, I sat down to watch Avatar: The Way of Water with one big question on my mind: Could James Cameron deliver a sequel to his 2009 blockbuster that’s worth a thirteen-year wait? Three hours and twelve minutes later, it was abundantly clear that yup, dude’s still got it.
Earlier this month, when I sat down to watch Avatar: Fire and Ash, I had a lot more questions. A couple were about loose ends from the previous film, but my more pressing queries were about the film itself. Would a new Avatar film after just three years pack as much of a punch as one that benefited from a middle schooler’s lifetime of anticipation? Also, Cameron’s made some of the best sequels of all time, but what does a James Cameron threequel look like? Well, three hours and seventeen minutes later, I didn’t have quite as definitive an answer to either of those questions… but I did have one huge smile on my face.
Avatar: Fire and Ash picks up immediately after the events of The Way of Water. Jake (Sam Worthington), Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), and the rest of the Sully family are mourning the loss of their eldest son, Neteyam (played by Jamie Flatters in The Way of Water). They’ve finally been accepted into the Metkayina clan, but aside from the looming threat of retaliation from the RDA, there are a couple factors preventing them from properly settling down. For one, Jake’s favorite form of grieving involves preparing for war with the humans, an interest the Metkayina clan doesn’t share. Two, they have a kid who can’t breathe. Their adopted son, Spider (Jack Champion), still needs a rebreather to survive in Pandora’s atmosphere, and they only have one backup battery – which, to put it lightly, is stupidly risky. So, Jake makes the unpopular call that Spider should go live with other humans, and to soften the blow, proposes that they make a family vacation out of it by hitching a ride with the nomadic airborne Tlalim clan, aka the Wind Traders.
Aside from all the grieving, Fire and Ash looks and feels very similar to The Way of Water in the early part of the film. While that’s by no means a bad thing, it’s initially lacking in the spectacle, novelty, or for lack of a better word, “newness” I was hoping for from another Avatar. However, that quickly changes with the arrival of the Wind Traders. The Avatar movies have always been a visual feast, but an armada of vessels suspended from enormous flying jellyfish-like Medusoids pulled by cephalopodian Windrays literally and figuratively blows the more familiar imagery out of the water, especially in 3D on a huge screen.
Cameron has always had a flair for large-scale spectacle, but I was equally impressed with the shots of the Wind Traders hocking their wares. In terms of narrative or action, nothing particularly exciting takes place in these shots, but they’re so densely packed with detail, activity, and stuff that I sat forward in my seat. If you’re not as impressed by baskets and gourds at a Na’vi swap meet as I am, don’t worry, the Fire Nation shows up soon enough.
They are the Mangkwan clan – a ruthless and quite literally godless group of Na’vi led by Varang (Oona Chaplin), who is one of the highlights of the film. Chaplin’s performance is properly terrifying, and her whole crew looks and acts more like denizens of Mordor than Pandora. Varang has no qualms about breaking Eywa’s laws, and is extremely eager to get her hands on human weapons. And you know who has access to a lot of those, and a similar penchant for torching Na’vi villages? Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang). Naturally, they hit it off like gasoline and an open flame.
When Quaritch showed up in the first film, I didn’t think he was anything to write home about. Lang gave a decent enough performance as an extremely hateable badass, but when it was announced that he was attached for all four sequels, it didn’t move the needle for me. His performance in Fire and Ash, however, has elevated him to one of my favorite villains in recent memory, especially in his scenes with Chaplin. The two of them don’t chew scenery – they devour it like a five-course meal.
Another character who unexpectedly grew on me was Spider, which is good, because he’s basically the linchpin of the whole film. In The Way of Water, he’s introduced as the annoying neighborhood kid who’s always hanging around, somewhere between The Simpsons’ Milhouse Van Houten and Eli Cash in The Royal Tenenbaums. In Fire and Ash, Spider is part of the family, and I found Champion’s performance to be fully endearing, resembling the combination of earnestness and obnoxiousness that Cameron brought out of Edward Furlong’s John Conner in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
My one hangup about Fire and Ash, if you can even call it that, is that it gave me a sense of déjà vu.
Speaking of which, Cameron has given us some of the most badass moms in movie history. Neytiri definitely kicks some ass in The Way of Water, but it pales in comparison to one particularly explosive sequence that puts her right up there with Ellen Ripley in a Power Loader or Sarah Connor racking a shotgun one-handed. Zoe Saldaña has always been a highlight of these films, but she’s in top form here.
My one hangup about Fire and Ash, if you can even call it that, is that it gave me a sense of déjà vu. Some of the visuals and story beats tread very close to those in the previous films, to the point that it almost felt like deleted scenes or alternate takes intercut with new material. But, looking at Cameron’s past work, it’s safe to assume this is a feature and not a bug. George Lucas once described the Star Wars prequel trilogy’s relationship to the original by saying, “it’s like poetry, they rhyme.” I would argue that Cameron’s sequels have a tendency to amplify and echo; rather than taking a familiar concept, theme, or visual and presenting it as a flipped mirror image, his sequels take something we know and present a grander, more operatic version. “Once more, with feeling,” as the saying goes. Fire and Ash is the first “Part 3” he’s ever done, so I wasn’t sure how it’d shake out. Does it get louder? Does it rhyme? Does it do something completely different?
Watching The Terminator and Terminator 2 back to back, they both open on tandem time travelers, escalate into shootouts and truck chases, then culminate in factory showdowns. Alien and Aliens both feature a crew investigating a distress signal on LV-426, taking some casualties, and misreading a motion tracker with terrifying results before featuring a tense final sequence in which a flamethrower-toting Ripley rescues a loved one before blowing a xenomorph stowaway out of an airlock. In both cases, these similarities are obscured by better effects, incredible action sequences, great characters, and the delightful twist that unlike in the first film, where a scary android character tries to murder the heroine, this time the android is her friend instead.
The Way of Water didn’t subvert Avatar as much as it did submerge it. Jake’s training sequence and rite of passage to join the Omatikaya clan in the first film happened all over again, underwater with the Metkayina. But The Way of Water does have its share of little twists too, In the first film, Jake earned the Omatikaya’s respect by bonding with the vicious killer pterodactyl everyone fears and respects; in the second, Jake’s son is shunned when he bonds with a huge murderer whale that they all fear and hate because of complicated politics, like, one time. In both cases, the big cool animal shows up in the final battle and saves the day.
A lot of The Way of Water was spent establishing new characters, relationships, stakes, and rules, but in Fire and Ash, the groundwork has been laid, so everything hits the ground running. Cameron does plenty of his trademark super-sizing of existing ideas, but the new film “rhymes” as well. For instance, Quaritch’s relationship with Varang is like a twisted reimagining of how Jake and Neytiri started out, and as much of a thrill as it is to see all the visual spectacle and action sequences, it’s just as cool seeing the Quaritch/Varang dynamic juxtaposed with Jake and Neytiri, who are long past the honeymoon phase.
When watching Fire and Ash, it was hard not to compare it to third installments in other notable sci-fi and fantasy movie franchises, and it kept reminding me of a couple all-timers. As a direct continuation of The Way of Water, it’s reminiscent of The Return of the King’s escalation in the wake of The Two Towers. That’s not to say Fire and Ash has multiple false endings, but rather that it’s got some truly epic battle scenes and enough plot threads going on at once to keep it from dragging, but not so many that it’s difficult to track who’s doing what.
Cameron also has some wonderful new toys to play with courtesy of the army of artists at WETA, and he gets plenty of mileage out of those, but for a few scenes he also drags out a couple huge Tupperware tubs full of action figures, vehicles, and playsets made for the first two films and dumps their contents into the mix. In that sense, Fire and Ash’s big final battle reminded me of how Return of the Jedi’s Battle of Endor is like a souped-up spin on A New Hope’s grand finale. Yes, it has some familiar elements, but the sheer volume of other stuff flying around the screen makes that feel like a stupid thing to get hung up on.
With the exception of bright orange explosions and the occasional vat of yellow molten steel, Cameron’s earlier films make such heavy use of the color blue that it’s almost a running joke. Fire and Ash, despite its two-tone namesake, refreshingly makes use of the full visible spectrum to great effect. There are a few psychedelic scenes that push the boundaries, but ironically, seeing 3D CGI renditions of the effects of hallucinogens is somehow less hallucinogenic than the rest of the film.
It’s hard not to compare Fire and Ash to third installments in other notable sci-fi and fantasy movie franchises.
Enough has been said about how much Avatar films need to be seen in theaters, but if you’ll allow me to beat a dead direhorse for a moment, it’s true – especially in 3D. As was the case with The Way of Water, some scenes are in a higher frame rate than others, and the transition can be occasionally jarring, but that’s a minor nitpick considering how genuinely awesome everything else looks.
