Avatar: Fire And Ash is a mess. A beautiful mess? Sure? A terrible mess? Hard to say. How good are your ears?
Jake (Sam Worthington), Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), and their various kids, by birth or adoption or otherwise, are back, baby! Except for that one kid, although he shows up too, thanks to James’ Cameron‘s hippy-dippy hard sci-fi world of Pandora, which looks like all-you-can-eat night at an Ibizan sex club where catgirls get their first two orgasms free. That kid, Neteyam (Jamie Flanders) has a chat in the Pandoran with his still-living brother Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) to fill in a few gaps. What he doesn’t mention is that the main man now is Pandora’s first grommet, Spider (Jack Champion): adoptee, son of sorta kinda Big Bad Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who is now kitted out with his own irremovable fursuit and feeling some paternal feelings for his now trans-species kin. Did I mention the Saviour Of Humanity is now dick drunk on blazin’ alien Ayahuasca pussy? It’s a wild film.
I love James Cameron as a filmmaker – my hand to Eywa. His best film remains the original The Terminator, and I hope he doesn’t know that – this deep into his career, that’d sting. My favourite of his is The Abyss, which is the source of both his fascination with water and my deathless grudge against the good staff members of IMAX Sydney, who shat the bed when trying to, I dunno, flick a switch on the occasion of the one-night-only screening of the aforementioned film. I don’t hate ’em, mind you – perish the thought. I just hope that someone does, and that they can feel it.
But Spider is the main character here, even if he’s not the Main Character. After all, that’s Wortho’s Jake, or Majake, or whatever, right? A character whose reaction to loss is wildly inconsistent – remember when he lost a literal twin brother in the first film? Dude bounced off that without losing a feather. “I gotta hate my surviving son!” is at least a step up there, which leaves room for hating Spidey because, if you’ve seen the trailers ol’ Low Tide can now breathe Pandora’s atmosphere and is growing a psychic ponytail vagina. OH MY GOD! THEY COULD GET EVERYWHERE!
Which is great – that’s an idea you could see from about a parsec out, mind you. It always seemed obvious to me that the Na’vi weren’t native to Pandora – they only have four limbs, after all, and that speaks volumes. That Pandora is unconquerable because it just folds any interlopers into its own way of being is now clear. What Fire And Ash does smartly is show us what it might take to reject that, in the form of a hopped-up Quaritch “going native” I am gonna point you to the excellent review by Walter Chaw here. Walter will almost certainly forcefully reject my description of this as “smart”, but I think I can buttress my argument by pointing out that our Colonel takes the only exit door that will cut him off from Pandora’s techno-psychic afterlife.
Interesting. Interesting. And one thing that has always struck me about the Avatar series is that is a tendency to say the dumb things loudly and the smart things lightly. There are many smart things in Avatar: Fire And Water. Can you hear them above the cacophony? That’s a good question.
Avatar: Fire And Ash is in cinemas now.
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