Avatar: Fire and Ash

Avatar: Fire and Ash occupies a special place in James Cameron's filmography: it's the first occurrence of a second feature-length sequel for the writer-director. Given Cameron's ability to amplify previous entries, arriving at a hair-raising timbre that pulls apart and reexamines prior works from a (somewhat) metatextual perspective, there's a confidence going in that stakes can be raised; that our conceptual understanding of these well-established circumstances could be exploded. It's disappointing then to report that Fire and Ash does not make any great strides to push this story forward. Described in press meetings by Cameron as the other half of Avatar: The Way of Water, Fire and Ash isn't so much a distinct second portion of that particularly story, more a strange sort of echo that could very well be taking place concurrently alongside (or instead of) its own prequel. 

If anything, this threequel repeats set-pieces and situations that already felt fairly well examined in Way of Water - the children of Zoe Saldaña's increasingly bitter Neytiri and Sam Worthington's Jake Sully are relentlessly imperiled or captured and a concluding battle shifts thanks to the participation of this planet's enormous sea life. Even Brendan Cowell's repulsive human whaler returns, complete with a robotic arm and a concluding note, in this chapter, that still doesn't feel definitive enough. We all want to see this guy reduced to bleeding viscera, right? Why this obvious repetition then? Oona Chaplin's bloodthirsty Na'vi chieftain Varang, easily Fire and Ash's greatest addition, promises blasted terrains and some kind of volcanic framing for a third-act struggle but sadly this doesn't come to pass. Although Stephen Lang's cloned Quaritch beds down with this witch, transforming her tribe of psychopaths into a subordinate, human-allied fighting force, we don't sink into their perspective like we did with the tree-dwelling Omatikaya or the sea-faring Metkayina. This collection of orphans simply enjoy burning or mutilating other sapient life. 

In a sense Fire and Ash could be likened to T2-3D: Battle Across Time, the Universal Studios stunt show attraction that Cameron co-directed a live-action element for. Both of these follow-ups frame their predecessors, in Battle Across Time's case Terminator 2: Judgment Day, as totemic license to be wielded rather than expanded; re-deployed rather than re-examined. This state of re-telling is key to the overall product's appeal then, no matter how disappointing that might be for a more demanding audience. With all that said, Fire and Ash is far from a complete misfire. Wētā's work is exemplary, even if the constant frame-rate changes do, unfortunately, replicate the passage from jittery pre-rendered cutscenes to more stable interactive sections in video games. Cameron, co-writing with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (with Josh Friedman and Shane Salemo given story credits) have crafted a film that not only gallops relentlessly forward, even if the route often feels circuitous, but also registers as a furious askance at the American project. Save the odd Antipodean accent, Fire and Ash's many human villains are pointedly white, middle-class and American. 

They are a people likened to alien invaders; hairless, diminutive apes capable only of murderous and consumptive waste. Their blubbery vulnerability, and the vast compounds they seal themselves in, evocative of the Martian invaders in HG Wells' The War of the Worlds. These colonisers are biologically incompatible with this environment yet still they persist, grasping for any kind of leverage or claim they can then transform into a revenue stream. Perhaps the film's biggest biome reveal then is the enormous human machinery that Neytiri buzzes through on her bioluminescent pterodactyl. It is a gun metal blot on this landscape; a concrete and steel melanoma that scales up the terraforming complex seen in Aliens to a city-sized mechanism that seems to produce nothing but fire and smoke. Again and again we are reassured that these pink-skinned trespassers offer nothing constructive and that their only purpose on Pandora is to be slaughtered by gigantic, alien fauna. These deaths described in gleeful, computer-generated detail with The Walt Disney Company both footing the bill and distributing the images worldwide. Nevertheless, with Fire and Ash Cameron is two sequels in and still failing to deliver on the promise of the original Avatar's coda: Na'vi festooned with explosives and automatic weapons, ordering mankind off their world and, perhaps, even making a claim on their would-be conqueror's home planet.