Got it all? Good. Avatar: Fire and Ash is many things: a lengthy demo reel showcasing the latest advances in performance capture technology, for which we can credit the increasingly realistic quality of the Na'vi characters, and the third chapter of a blockbuster mega-franchise that – had Cameron had his way, an unlimited budget and perhaps a package of memories and the body of the Na'vi himself – would have stretched on to infinity. But the film is also, perhaps most notably, a maddeningly complex maelstrom of transmigrated souls, cross-species bloodlines, and unholy alliances. Gone are the simpler days of the first Avatar, an anti-imperialist war film whose moral lines were as clear-cut as Jake the Marine.
Now human conquest seems more insidious and complicated. This goes beyond the hostile occupying military presence under the command of General Ardmore (Edie Falco), who in the film's ocean battle sequences are easily dispatched with a mighty swing of Cameron's digital wand. Fire and Ash is a largely relaxing experience, but like its predecessors, it certainly knows how to make us cry out for the blood of our own species. At the director's command, deadly squid-like monsters attack Ardmore's ships out of nowhere, and the darkly eloquent sea creatures known as Tulkun suddenly go into killer whale mode. However, it is much more difficult to get rid of the deep emotional, spiritual and cellular connections that have arisen between the human world and the Na'vi world. Witness the scene in which Kiri, in attempting to save Spider from toxic suffocation, ties her fate to Pandora's in a way that only foreshadows further human invasion. In short, the series has become one long parable about intragalactic miscegenation, a concept that Cameron, in one initially insane sequence, pushes to Old Testament levels of reckoning.
More than once during the deadly confrontation, Jake asked Quaritch to open his yellow Na'vi eyes, look past their petty squabbles and see how vast and beautiful the world around him was. But Avatar: Fire and Ash, for all its mind-bending complexities, is a decidedly less immersive experience than its two predecessors, although at three hours and fifteen minutes it is certainly more expansive. What it lacks is the sense of transition, of progress from one world to another, which even cinema of continuous sensation requires. Cameron (usually) knows this better than anyone. That's why the first Avatar, with its bold, immersive use of 3-D, took us to what seemed like a startling new plane of existence: Our first look at the desert of Pandora, where Jake lumbered around on his new Na'vi legs, evoked nothing more than Dorothy's first color glimpse of Munchkinland in The Wizard of Oz (1939), a famous favorite of the director. movie. The Way of Water, while unable to match the impact of the first Avatar, instead shrewdly took us into deep sea diving, in the great tradition of Cameron's The Abyss (1989) and Titanic (1997). Talk about reef madness: the depths were gloriously enveloping and the fish were making strange hoots.
Fire and Ash, on the other hand, has no new worlds to conquer. Of course, there are some eye-candy wonders, such as the fleet of Na'vi hot air balloons, each equipped with a bulbous translucent shell and a mass of trailing jellyfish tentacles. There is also Varang (Oona Chaplin), Mangkwan's cold-blooded leader, a seething, magically seductive spectacle unto herself. The rest trample and retreat through the water. An endless string of arrests, escapes and pursuits unfolds across the heavily fortified human compound, and while man-made ugliness is partly to blame – what a depressing contrast to the gloriously green jungles and luminescent flora and fauna of the Na'vi world! – in this case it is also a trigger and, possibly, a manifestation of boredom.
Cameron appears to have a long-term goal in mind, but here, by returning to the usual flatness of his characterizations and the self-indulgent cheesiness of his dialogue (“Smile, bitches!” is what counts as an insult), he almost seems to be stalling for time. Will the planned next films in the series offer a chance for redemption? With each outing, it became increasingly clear that Jake was essentially an avatar of Cameron himself, who became a full-fledged Na'vi many years ago and may never return – and despite being stuck, can only hope to convert those willing to his side. He devoted years of his life to the Avatar project and, at seventy-one, continues to fight like an obsessive director or just a trapped one. Pandora locked him up. ♦
