Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
Is ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ the kind of visual spectacle audiences now expect from James Cameron? Absolutely. Once again, viewers will find themselves wide-eyed, mesmerized by the dreamlike, blue-hued landscapes of Pandora.
Sam Worthington is back as Jake Sully, now living with Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and their children among Pandora’s water tribes. The story of ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ is narrated by Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), Jake’s second son, and begins with him and older brother Neteyam soaring across Pandora on their flying beasts.
Neteyam meets a tragic end in ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ during the climactic battle against Quaritch (Stephen Lang). So, James Cameron opens this third chapter on a note of grief and unresolved loss. Antagonist Quaritch survives and returns, once again threatening Jake and the Na’vi. This time, he allies with a hostile outlier tribe led by Varang (Oona Chaplin), a faction that rejects Eywa and stands in stark contrast to Pandora’s other clans.
While themes of colonization, aggression, and genocide persist, ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ finally adds a new variation: a tribe weaponized against its own people. Quaritch cleverly instigates the Ash people into going to war with the other tribes and siding with… well… aliens (yes, the humans AKA the ‘sky people’). And this internal violence mirrors real-world colonial strategies, where indigenous communities are turned against each other to weaken collective resistance and enable domination.
But does this new strategy actually change the game? Given James Cameron’s fondness for grand, crowd-pleasing (and cliched) finales, the climax comes as little surprise. If anything, ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ feels like a rehashed version of ‘The Way of Water’, recycling familiar plot points while adding only a handful of new elements, like some fresh villains and a couple of new tribes, which provide some visual variation.
Here’s all the familiar territory revisited by ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’: Lo’ak’s struggle to live under his father’s shadow, Neytiri’s unresolved grief and strained dynamic with Water Tribe’s Ronal (Kate Winslet), Kiri’s identity crisis, Spider’s (Jack Champion) uneasy place withing the Sully family, Jake Sully’s status as a hunted traitor, and the brutal slaughter of the Tulkun by the sky people.
But oh well, when has ‘Avatar’ been about the story? Honestly, I couldn’t help but swoon over its visuals, especially in the first hour, but by the second half, I could feel the yawns setting in. At three hours and seventeen minutes, the runtime is simply too long and could have easily been chopped down by at least half an hour… if not more.
Among some of the standout moments in the film is the appearance of the wind tribe, which glides through the skies aboard gorgeous airships. It might remind some viewers of Scott Westerfeld’s epic sci-fi fantasy ‘Leviathan’, where living creatures function as airborne vessels. One of my favourite visual touches is the Ash tribe’s use of red body paint, which offers a vibrant contrast to the franchise’s signature blue hues.
At the cost of being repetitive (which clearly James Cameron has no problems with), yes, ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ isn’t anywhere near ground-breaking when it comes to storytelling. It’s same old, same old. But remains a visual spectacle for fans of franchise, with stunning special effects and excellent emotive acting.
Rating: 7 on 10. Watch ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ in theaters.
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