Here's a useless trifle: Of the 11 canonical Star wars films, eight full-length Death Star one way or another. The game has original weapons that blow up planets. New hope and rebuilt version in Return of the Jedi. We see the first plans for its construction in Attack of the Clonesand this design itself is Revenge of the SithBye Rogue One We are talking about plans to create a space station the size of the Moon. In the sequels The Force Awakens unveils a new planet-sized version of the Death Star, and The Last Jedi compresses technology into a device the size of a cannon, and The Rise of Skywalker The key scene is the wreckage of the Death Star. (If you are keeping records at home, The Empire Strikes Back, SoloAnd The Phantom Menace this is the only exception.)
Why does this matter to Avatar: Fire and Ash? Well, that's a big deal, because just three installments into James Cameron's franchise, it's starting to look like Avatar has already found its own Death Star.
[Ed. note: Light spoilers ahead for the ending of Avatar: Fire and Ash.]
The Avatar Death Star is a series of giant warships that are constantly destroyed by space whales. In 2022 Avatar: The Way of Waterone of these huge vessels was a key part of the Human-led Resource Development Authority's plan to hunt and kill intelligent alien whales ( I will come) on the extrasolar moon Pandora so they can harvest their brains to produce an anti-aging reagent that sells for tens of millions of dollars on Earth. This absurdly villainous, extremely exciting premise ends Path of WaterThe explosive final act, set aboard a sinking ship, combines the best moments of Cameron's sci-fi action film with a sweeping '90s blockbuster. Titanic. In other words, it rules.
But here's the thing Avatar: Fire and Ash ends almost the same. Once again, people hunt the Tulkuns (only now there are even more of them), and again the Na'vi have to fight back to save their aquatic friends. The scale is a bit larger, and there is a giant magnetic vortex that pulls ships into its field and crushes them, which is never fully explained. But for the most part, Fire and Ashthe last battle is more like Path of Water on steroids than the original climax. (For good measure, Cameron and his co-writers also included a re-edited version of the scene where Pandora's animals rise in unison, just like in the 2009 film. Avatar.)
The whole experience is a little like watching Return of the Jedi for the first time (or The Force Awakensor most other Star Wars films). What was positioned as a fresh installment in a beloved franchise instead plays like a remix of an old classic. The rhythm still sounds, but at a certain point it begins to repeat itself.
In this regard, Avatar isn't nearly as far along as Star Wars. Next movie(assuming that he exists at all) could easily abandon the space whale hunt theme and explore some other biome of Pandora. Cameron also confirmed that the last two films were originally one script that became so large that it had to be split in half, which helps explain (but doesn't justify) the sense of cinematic déjà vu that Fire and Ash causes.
But from where we are now, Avatar has never stood on shakier foundations. Fire and Ash suggests the very real possibility that future films might get stuck rehashing the same scene over and over again, finding new ways to send the Tulkun crashing into RDA warships for years to come, just like Star Wars seems to constantly get stuck in the Death Star's gravitational field.
Avatar: Fire and Ash is now playing in cinemas.
