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 here 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 most exciting 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 celebrated 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 viewer. With all that said, Fire and Ash is far from a 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 and timely askance at colonial projects. 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 thwarted settlers 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 really 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. 

The Killer

Director John Woo's second pass at The Killer is a peculiar film, one that feels frozen in a specific, cinematic moment. The screenplay, credited to Josh Campbell, Matt Stuecken and Brian Helgeland, although presumably penned (or at least punched up) recently bears marks associated with the American studio system of the 1990s. Back then, when the likes of Walter Hill and David Giler were circling Woo's original for a remake, it seemed as if Hollywood, as an industry, was obsessed with ironing every property set before it into an easily digestible mulch. As if working on behalf of an audience of buffoons who would, it was then assumed, refuse to entertain the more impressionistic thematic axis of the original piece or, really, any sense of ambiguity at all. Despite retaining Woo at the helm, this Killer - Nathalie Emmanuel's extremely photogenic Killer - is exactly as feared. An overly literal remake that decodes the 1989 film along stringent, and far less interesting moral lines all while insisting that this supernatural murderer have a tragic, flashback-stated past. Omar Sy, the star of Netflix's Lupin series, is a highlight though. The actor a pleasant alternative to Danny Lee's Detective, able to play up the more cartoonish, Spy vs. Spy aspects of the film without allowing them to slip completely into farce. Woo does have some fun here as well - literalising the connection between his Hong Kong project and Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï through the Paris location; while also taking scissors to the frame when mapping out the competing perspectives found in heists, much like Norman Jewison did when assembling The Thomas Crown Affair - but this juiceless exercise is best described in terms of the lack of excitement its gadgets generate: a puttering, electric motorcycle that glides about, responsibly or the silenced competition pistols that track sad, computer generated splatters onto their targets. 

Avatar: The Way of Water

Writer-director James Cameron has a knack for writing chimera: characters who combine, or who are at least attempting to reconcile, two disparate forms of identity. His Terminators are the most obvious example of this psychological discrepancy. They are futuristic machinery wrapped up in a sheath of human flesh that either rots in place after being shot full of holes or transmits such a convincing camouflage that the deception begins to turn itself inwards, inspiring a dot matrix approximation of heroism. In the first Avatar, Sam Worthington's futuristic conquistador, Jake Sully, dreamt himself into a life in which his withered battle-scarred body had been replaced with that of a towering feline alien. This new flesh and carbon fibre bone allowed him to run and leap then, finally, soar with dragons. Sully willingly plugged into this transformative experience, consciously deciding to let his waking - human - life fade away and, eventually, die. 

Cameron, co-writing with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, dedicates no small part of Avatar: The Way of Water to re-examining this process from the perspective of a less enthusiastic participant. Stephen Lang's motion-captured shade of Colonel Miles Quaritch is an abomination; a high-and-tight infiltrator who makes no attempt to assimilate or even disguise his Earthly origins. He is the memories and prejudices of an American imperialist, inscribed on the eve of what he believed to be his career-defining victory then wired into another massive cobalt clone. His arrival on the satellite planet of Pandora is marked by cataclysm. The enormous retrorockets decelerating these unwelcome visitors obliterates the forest setting from the first film; animals and trees alike are shattered then consumed by bubbling firestorms. Simon Franglen's score - which otherwise builds itself around the themes and motifs of the late James Horner - seizes on this apocalyptic, mechanised imagery, quoting the pounding percussion and shrieking strings of Gustav Holst. Mankind's arrival is likened to that of a Martian invasion force. Terraforming on this habitable moon is to be achieved through extermination, a plan of envy straight out of HG Wells' The War of the Worlds. 

The Quaritch thing is always aware that it is a facsimile, it embraces the designation, allowing a video recording of its (somewhat dismissive) clone father to appoint it as a creature of pure vengeance. With very little information regarding its parent's passing - this is reproduction as the purely technological duplication of the hopelessly macho - the zipped-up Na'vi decides to retrace Sully's steps, to experience this planet as he did. Jake Sully's eager symbiosis is caricatured by a team of colossal photostats who refuse to let go of their branded sunglasses and tactical apparel. Quaritch and his thugs only speak the language of conquest, clinging on to the possessions and hang-ups that defined their (now extant) human lives. We are told a couple of times in The Way of Water that Na'vi bodies can easily survive in the oxygen rich environments mankind has created on Pandora. The Quaritch copy though remembers being human, it's fixated on its vulnerability in this harsh extraterrestrial environment. So, rather than breathe shallow in a false climate, it clings to an artificial breathing apparatus, supping on it greedily.