The Avatar franchise is often referred to as the most culturally irrelevant billion-dollar franchise. James Cameron directed three of the four highest-grossing movies of all time. Does it really matter if you don’t see tons of kids trick-or-treating as forgettable scantily clad blue aliens?

Cinema-obsessed philosophers can pontificate what it means for society that billion billion-dollar film contains a bunch of characters with forgettable names, a plot that resembles the love child of Ferngully and Dances With Wolves, and draws out little emotion from its audience when the credits roll besides relief that they can finally use the bathroom. None of that really has to matter. All we should really care about concerning Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third film in the franchise, is one simple question. Is this film any good?

Fire and Ash picks up right where The Way of Water left off. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoë Saldana) are still mourning their son’s death. Jake grows worried that Spider (Jake Campion), the human son of Quadritch (Stephen Lang), who was human in the first film before being resurrected as a Na’vi Recombinant, can’t survive in their environment without his breathing mask. An effort to bring Spider to other humans is disrupted by the Mangkwan, a clan of exiled volcano-dwelling Na’Vi. The Mangkwan leader Varang (Oona Chaplin) allies with Lang and his human handlers, still after whale brain juice and colonizing the planet, to terrorize Sully and his family once again.

The Way of Water premiered thirteen years after its predecessor. Cameron’s second film on Pandora had a lot of natural goodwill going for it, the lengthy gap between installments serving as a natural palate cleanser. The Way of Water was chock-full of technological breakthroughs. Whatever shortcomings existed in its narrative were easily washed over by the breathtaking nature of the cinematography, underwater special effects that had never been done before.

Fire and Ash comes just three years after The Way of Water. Pandora is still a beautiful place, with some of the best special effects in the industry, but it’s not a new place. We’ve been here before.

Complicating matters even worse is the fact that we’ve seen this story before. Fire and Ash is essentially a mash-up of the first two movies. Viewers are once again treated to a giant battle over colonization.

Fire and Ash struggles to overcome the clunky child custody case at the core of its narrative, a story otherwise content with playing a medley of Pandora’s greatest hits. Spider’s arc follows a lot of the same beats as Sully’s journey in the original Avatar. He’s a human who wants to be Na’Vi, caught between a biological father who is now a Na’Vi, and an adoptive Na’Vi father who was once human. To complicate matters worse, Cameron throws in a parallel to the Binding of Issac that seriously undercuts Sully as a character.

The Way of Water spent a lot of time building out Sully’s family, and the water-based Metkayina people. Putting aside the cliches, their family and their world felt alive, something worth the three-hour-plus investment that these films ask of their audiences. Fire and Ash doesn’t really care much about any of that development. The ball isn’t moved forward so much as it’s punted into the ocean.

Instead, we get a lot of repetitive scenes and clunky exposition. The idea of the Mangkwan is mildly interesting, but Cameron does nothing with them. Varang is a one-dimensional secondary villain in a film content to reuse the same big bad for the third movie in a row.

Aside from the heavy emphasis on Spider, the kids play second fiddle this time around. Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), Jake’s surviving son, gets barely any arc. Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) is still weird, a dynamic that isn’t exactly helped by having a 76-year-old woman play a teenager. Avatar has a lot of characters with confusing names, but Fire and Ash doesn’t give many reasons to care about a single one of them.

James Cameron has made at least two of the greatest sequels of all time, in Aliens and Terminator 2. The Way of Water defied all the naysayers who looked to the whole franchise with a collective shrug. Sadly, that appears to be the very same energy Cameron brought with him into Fire and Ash.

197 minutes is quite a long time for most audiences to stay engaged. Fire and Ash’s similarly long predecessor managed to circumvent this dilemma quite well with its strong pacing that still found time to embrace the quiet moments of its narrative. Here, Cameron hasn’t done enough legwork to keep things running smoothly. It’s too easy for the mind to wander amidst a film that’s largely running on autopilot.

Fire and Ash isn’t a terrible film, though easily Cameron’s worst since Piranha 2, his directorial debut that he mostly disavows. In some ways, it’s something worse, a validation of everything that’s been said about the Avatar franchise. Not every movie needs to be a cultural behemoth. Our society is essentially moving on from any strand of a collective consciousness as it is.

But a movie does need to give its viewers some semblance of satisfaction for having made the investment. A lot of time and money went into making this complete bore. For decades, Cameron’s films have wowed audiences around the globe. Sadly, there’s nothing new here.

 

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