I’ll say this for James Cameron, he knows how to push the envelope of what special effects can do. He gave us the Terminator series, and he sank the Titanic in a spectacular fashion that not only took the ship to the bottom of the ocean but also explained the structural failures that cascaded into disaster after it hit the iceberg. He sinks a few vessels in AVATAR 3: FIRE AND ASH, too, and he once again gobsmacks us with the thoughtfully populated planet of Pandora, where evil corporate types are still stripping that lush planet of it abundant natural resources while also colonizing the resident humanoids, the ones who live in lyrical balance with nature, into oblivion. To be completely accurate, Pandora is a moon of gas giant Polyphemus, which allows for some spectacular celestial panoramas as a backdrop to some spectacular air battles involving quasi-dragons, quasi- archaeopteryxes, and even a flock of jumbo flying fish large enough to accommodate a few Na’vi.
Those would be the seven-foot-tall blue people who are native to Pandora who followed the, ahem, avatar, of human, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) in revolt against the evil corporate types wreaking havoc on their planet. We pick up with Jake and his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) grieving the son they lost in that revolt as they continue their exile among the water people who have given them shelter. Also grieving is Lo’ ak (Britain Dalton), their other son who blames himself for his brother’s death. It is a time of reckoning for the little family, as daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), will discover her true origins, adopted human son, Spider (Jack Champion) will have to face the consequences of >his< true origins, and Jake’s once and future nemesis, Quaritch (Stephen Lang), will find a new way to get even with Jake for siding with the Na’vi against the Earthlings.
That new way would be Varang (Oona Chaplin), a Kali by way of Franzetta with a dash of Amazon rain forest thrown in for the face paint and that truly fetching feather headdress. She leads the ash people tribe, and her particular fetish, when she’s not slinging stone blades and dancing in a frenzy of blood lust, is fire. Also, the potent substance she blows into people’s nostrils in order to learn their secrets by sending them on a hallucinogenic vision quest.
It is a painfully earnest exercise that skirts the shoals of parody with its leaden dialogue that more rightly belongs to the more florid school of early silent melodramas written out on intertitles and bedight with calligraphic flourishes. That is juxtaposed with a story that does not know when to quit. Seriously. This is three hours and change of fracas, skirmishes, full-blown warfare, and a pod of whales that have a sophisticated civilization complete with music, philosophy, and decorative piercings. We also have a take on the difficulties of the father-son relationship that isn’t afraid to get Old Testament at one point, a new take on blindspotting (with its attendant torrent of tears), and a budding romance between Spider and Kali, which will have its own share of drama due to his lack of a kulu. If you don’t know what that is, you’ll get the idea as the film progresses. Mostly. This is a film that expects its audience to know what happened before.
The ci-mentioned leaden dialogue finds an affinity with the plodding nature of the narrative. Jake’s family gets separated under dire circumstances, the family is reunited, the family is separated again in a different configuration. Quaritch smacks his lips and plots vengeance. It’s all punctuated with overlong battle sequences that eventually lose any dynamism they had mustered from constant repetition. And the pacing. On the one hand, why wouldn’t we want to see the way Cameron and company have created an ecosystem of convergent evolution that references what we have here on Earth, but does not duplicate it. There is something dreamlike with the airborne cuttlefish that pull trader’s ships, held aloft by a creature that looks like a lighter-than-air Portuguese man-of-war. On the other hand, Cameron gives us too much time to soak it all in. The bioluminescent flora and fauna is gorgeous, but we’re here for an action flick, not a nature documentary. For the love of all that is holy, get on with the story and edit yourself while you are at it.
True, one enjoys just how much trouble a well-aimed spear can cause a sophisticated flying machine, but AVATAR 3: FIRE AND ASH meanders rather than inspires, with a forward momentum that is all but imperceptible. It negates all that is best here, daring to ponder matters of faith and rendering that effort jejune.
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