Avatar: Fire and Ash Review

The financial juggernaut that is the Avatar series film returns for a third film and continues the conflict between the Na’vi and RDA, and Jake Sully and Quaritch.

The Scully family are reunited after the events of Avatar: The Way of Water, but is suffering from grief after the death of their oldest son. The family need to take their adopted human son, Spider (Jack Champion), back to the Omaticaya clan, but they are attacked by the fire-obsessed Ash People. Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) is forced to perform a miracle to save Spider’s life, but makes the teenager a target for the RDA. Quaritch (Stephen Lang) continues his hunt for vengeance against Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and sets out to make an alliance with the Ash People.

The first Avatar film was seen as groundbreaking because of its effects and 3D, and it made for a good introduction to the world of Pandora. The second film made a boatload of money and bucked the trend of declining box office receipts after the Pandemic. I disliked the second film because it was too long, dull, and it repeated the character arcs from the first film. The critical reception for Avatar: Fire and Ash has been more negative. It has a 67% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and the film received 1-star reviews from the BBC and the Daily Telegraph. Dan Murrell said in his review that he thought Fire and Ash was a retread of The Way of Water, leading me to dread the threequel. However, I ended up enjoying Fire and Ash a lot more than The Way of Water.

The Way of Water and Fire and Ash did have some similar issues, so let’s get them out of the way first. Both films were way too long, and Fire and Ash would have benefited from a 150-minute runtime rather than a 197-minute runtime. The high frame rate made action scenes move too fast. The conflict was the same: humanity wanted to rape Pandora of its resources, and Quaritch was still the main villain. Fire and Ash opened similarly to The Way of Water, with the Sully family needing to travel, the Scully children separated from their parents, and one member of the Sully family gets captured. The climax of the film was a cross between the finales of Avatar and The Way of Water. Cameron had made two of the best sequels, Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, which felt like continuations, but the Avatar movie has been incapable of doing this, despite the rich world being created. The question is, has Cameron lost his mojo, or just playing it safe because the financial stakes are so high?

Fire and Ash wasn’t a complete copy of The Way of Water. The threequel didn’t have the tedium of the characters going to a new tribe and learning new skills. Nor were there long, boring underwater sequences. The writers had a shotgun approach to Fire and Ash since the film was filled with story ideas and had a large cast of characters. The overarching plot was the conflict for Pandora, with many ingredients put into it. There was the introduction of the Ash people who wanted the fun of using human weapons, the threat of the RDA capturing Spider and using him in their colonisation effects, Jake refusing to become Toruk Makto again, the RDA wanting to hunt the Tulkun into extinction, and the Na’vi trying to convince the Tulkun to join their side. There were smaller plot threads throughout the film, Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) suffering emotional abuse from his dad, Kiri learning the truth about her parentage and how it affected her connection with Eywa, and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) suffering from her grief. This broad story approach made Fire and Ash’s plotting feel more like a video game, and those video game comparisons were compounded by the climax involving floating platforms.

Fire and Ash felt like it lifted ideas from other films. When the first trailer was released, there were Avatar: The Last Airbender jokes with people quoting the TV series opening. Those jokes became more apt because of the introduction of the Air Traders. When the Sully children were chased by the Ash people, it felt like Apocalypto with blue people. Lo’ak goes on a quest to the ocean like he was Moana, and the Tulkun’s council meeting was like the Ents’ meeting in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

The strongest aspects of the film were the special effects and the action. The previous Avatar films were visually fantastic, so praising them in Fire and Ash would be repeating myself. The most awe-inspiring sequence was early, when the Sullys were travelling with the Air Traders, which felt like a scene from a young adult fantasy. Fire and Ash peppered its action scenes more evenly throughout its runtime, so there was less stagnation like there was in The Way of Water. The best action sequence was when Neytiri infiltrated the RDA’s city, and she went full Rambo as she donned war paint and shot explosive arrows. Neytiri got to be a badass, and the industrial setting was unique for the Avatar films.

The new element was the Ash People, but it was underbaked. Oona Chaplin was great as Varang, the leader of the Ash People. She was the fire-obsessed, sexual lunatic, and she was having fun with the role. But these people were one-note villains who just wanted to watch the world burn. This was an effect of the Avatar movies’ black-and-white view of the world. There could have been nuance since the Ash People’s land was destroyed by a natural disaster, leading them to raid other Na’vi to survive, and they allied with Quaritch as an act of necessity and self-interest.

Fire and Ash does share a lot of the same issues as its predecessor, but it was a better-handled film with pacing and scene distribution. It’s shallow, but it can be a fun time at the cinema because of the effects and action.