An open letter to James Cameron, from a life-long fan:
Stop. Just…stop. Please. Enough is enough…and three, is enough.
The Avatar Detachment Phenomenon is an odd one.
It’s literally the most profitable franchise in science fiction movie history…yet we never seem to talk about it. Why not?
In a broad sense, it doesn’t feel like it’s found it’s comfortable place in the lexicon of contemporary pop culture, despite having had the last 16 years (holy shit!) to have done so, with it being relegated to merely an impressive (but not perfect) cinematic experience that people only seem to recall when prompted. No one seems to go out of their way to talk about the big, blue cat-people movie from the Terminator guy.
Sure, most people thoroughly enjoyed their first Big Screen viewings of the Avatar movies and will readily admit it (right here!), especially those lucky ones who caught it in the intended 3D format (again, right here!)…but the impression is fleeting, merely surface-deep, and it doesn’t last long in the forefront of the consciousness. The Avatar franchise simply doesn’t not live rent-free in the minds of a huge percentage of us movie-nerds, and I still haven’t fully landed on why that is.
All the ingredients are there.
When the first one came out in 2009, it rightfully blew audiences away and made a record-breaking fuck-ton of cash, thus paving the way for Jim to dive into this long-time passion-project (it’s genesis goes back to 1995, while he was writer / producer for one of my favorite neo-noir flicks – Strange Days), which then manifested in the form of a sprawling science fiction epic, to be told as a series of ‘event’ films. With JC behind the wheel, they would also be undoubtedly celebrated for pushing the technological envelope. Always a solid selling feature, where Cameron is concerned.
This was despite the admittedly-deserved criticisms of borderline narrative plagiarism from sources like Dances with Wolves (1989), Ferngully: The Last Rainforest (1992), and Pocahontas (1995), mixed with a now-questionable ‘white saviour’ story, with a liberal dash of his Aliens / Terminator sci-fi gun-nut aesthetic slathered on top.
And make no mistake, I readily admit that those observations are not wrong, but the overall cinematic experience impressed me enough that overlooking the shallow, overly-familiar plot and surprisingly hammy dialogue was pretty easy. A feast for the eyes, not necessarily the mind.
Having now seen the third one, I cannot help but to be reminded about what happened with the Wachowski siblings when The Matrix became a smash hit in 1999. That first movie, which is a masterpiece, soared too close to the sun and gave birth to a pair of undeniably inferior sequels, sequels that notably worsened as they went on and, in my opinion, cheapened the cultural impact of the original, which very well and easily could’ve been a terrific stand-alone movie.
But nope.
Money talks…and bullshit hits the Big Screen.
That is very similar to what’s happening here.
The main difference in that comparison is that while the Matrix sequels tail-spun in quality as the franchise ground on, Avatar does not. Technically-speaking, it’s absolutely top-tier. The problem is that narratively, it’s literally just more of the same with each successive installment. That ‘same’ was great the first time around, passable in the sequel, and now just straight-up tired in this third, and hopefully, final entry.
First thing’s first: The Good
If you come into this one because the visual effects of the previous films blew your skirt up, you will be well served.
Avatar: Fire and Ash looks amazing, and I swear the ongoing improvements to the mo-cap and rendering technology are clearly visible, even when compared to The Way of Water, which only hit theatres in 2022. I was unusually attracted to skin textures and surfaces this time and the knowledge that I was seeing, essentially, highly intricate ‘1’s and 0’s’, was again mind-blowing.
Even though this is a new coat of paint on the same old story, effort was also put into introducing some fresh elements, such as two new types of Na’vi; the benign Wind Traders and the one-dimensionally evil Ash People, plus some interesting additions to Pandora’s wild-life. In contrast, that functional, researched, and ‘lived in’ aesthetic that JC brings so capably to his science fiction is definitely still alive and kicking and, if I’m honest, is my main reason for checking these flicks out anyway. He gave the evil humans some cool new toys to kick some ass with too.
To summarize, this flick ticks off ALL the technical wizardry boxes and does so masterfully, if I’m honest. It’s just a shame that some of that VFX goodwill is somewhat undone by the upcoming point.
Having said that, I might as well delve into my first major complaint:
-The High Frame Rate
Oh my god, this looked like shit and I don’t remember if this was an issue I encountered when I first saw The Way of Water.
At least, it wasn’t one that I remember, if it was.
Normal movies have a running frame rate of 24 frames per second, which is the speed needed to make things onscreen move ‘normally’, as our eyes see it. For SOME reason, Cameron opted to go with double that, at 48 frames per second, which looked just fucking awful from the literal second it appeared onscreen.
Lately I’ve been experiencing an annoying little ‘glitch’ on my iPhone where, somehow, I’m triggering 2X speed when I’m checking out Youtube, and that was exactly what I thought of, on literally the opening shot of this movie, which features characters swooping around on the Ikran dragon things, and it was legitimately jarring, the weird digital smoothness of it and at times, it literally felt like someone had hit FFwd on me.
It also did NOT feel ‘filmic’, not at all.
It had the clarity, the absolute lack of ‘grain’ (you know, that sexy onscreen ‘texture’ that makes movies look like MOVIES!), of something shot on a high-end camera phone, and it distracted me all to hell every time it happened, which was often.
Strangely, this was not constant, however, as there were plenty of shots scattered throughout that looked perfectly cinematic, only to be frequently interrupted by this odd, overly-fluid motion, in both character AND camera movement, every time any kind of action played out.
I’m curious to see if my opinion changes when the Home Media Release version (Blu ray all the way, baby!) comes in at ‘normal’ speed, hopefully making this one look / feel more like an actual movie and not some TV Picture Settings demo reel.
Being that any praise I do have for this one is relegated to the technical / visual / production design aspects, what I’ve already touched on kind of sums it up.
Which brings us to The Bad:
Avatar: Fire and Ash’s problems almost all stem from the script, which Jim wrote with a couple others, and the final edit.
I’ll list them here in no particular order:
–Way too much time jerking off the world of Pandora again. This movie has a ridiculous 3 hour and 17-minute run-time, which for me is about 47 minutes too many. Jim again beats his meat to his ocean obsession with even more drawn-out sequences of characters frolicking with marine life, or airborne life, with us stuck watching as though we’re on assignment for National Geographic or something. We already got a shit-load of those sequences in the previous installments, especially The Way of Water, so not really needed here. Yawn-inducing, at this point.
-Key, deserving characters do NOT get their comeuppance onscreen. In conjunction with this, a couple supporting characters on the hero side meet their ends, but in the most unceremonious ways, like the characters were just discarded and no heed is given to their passing.
Then we have key ‘bad guys’ who either get the Implied Off-Screen Death (after having clearly demonstrated their inherent evil) or who we ‘see’ die, without actually seeing them perish definitively, setting up yet another shot at yet another sequel (please, no). There was no satisfaction to the deaths as the lead-up to, and significance of them, were paced badly and not given the expected ‘gravity’ that would make a main character biting the Big One something of note, something memorable even. Not the case here.
-Despite how long it is, certain sequences felt rushed and choppy. Of the three Avatar films, I think I can confidently say that Fire and Ash has the worst pacing. While large sections felt bloated and over-drawn, others felt choppy and inorganic, especially in the 3rd Act. It didn’t flow well, not like the first and, to a lesser degree, the second, and I could feel the editing decisions onscreen, hence the episodic impression. I could ‘feel’ deleted scenes.
-Unlikeable characters. You know you’re in trouble when your main characters and how they’re written become a problem that interferes with your audience’s emotional investment in their narrative journey.
In this case, I found ‘Jake’ (Sam Worthington) and especially ‘Neytiri’ (Zoe Saldana) borderline intolerable, and definitely annoying, with ‘Jake’ now just a one-note stern military stereotype who barks Army-Speak at everyone when he isn’t waxing poetic about the ‘importance of family and blah blah blah’. And ‘Neytiri is reduced to a growly open racist fueled by rage and crippling grief, only steps away from gleefully murdering ‘Spider’ (Jack Champion), their kids’ one human friend, who happens to be the orphaned son of their main antagonist ‘Quaritch’ (Stephen Lang), as established in Water.
In a nutshell, I didn’t find anyone to root for in this one.
-Rinse and Repeat story structure. We thought we saw this with The Way of Water (and we did), but here, it’s definite. All the same story-lines and narrative beats are just reheated for a third time. It’s literally that simple.
We yet again get multiple kidnaps / rescues of various friends and family, yet another grand humans / Na’vi battle, again to save some precious natural aspect of Pandora, again set to some kind of ticking clock motif involving the evil humans. We again get Eywa, the nature god of Pandora, stepping up to join the battle, again at the 11th Hour, in what was nearly a carbon copy of the first movie’s climax.
As I texted a buddy when I got out of the theatre, ‘just mash One and Two together…and you have Three’.
And, again, it really is that simple.
Hell, I thought it was bad when Jim repeated his original ‘Jake’ vs Angry Thanotor’ scene from the first one in The Way of Water, right down to having the new attacking creature, in that case a giant sea predator, literally grab our protagonist’s weapon away from them, tossing it off to the side.
Guess what…he does exactly that AGAIN here, right down to the beast in question again reaching into our hero’s hide-out to grab the offending weapon, breaking it and wrenching it away.
James Cameron is a brilliant filmmaker / writer…but c’mon, man!
-Convenient plot events and vague explanations. Such as where did ‘Kiri’ (Sigourney Weaver) come from, as asked in The Way of Water? Now, almost an immaculate conception, only this time through the miracle of…spontaneous unexplained cloning, I guess…somehow mysteriously triggered by Eywa, in the first movie? Or characters who just magically seem to appear places, when the suggested journey alone could’ve been its own cool story? Or characters who just cease to exist in the storyline, with no definitive closure, despite what may have been set up already. And there’s others. Again, most noticeable in Act 3.
I’m sure there’s more I can delve into but I, unlike James Cameron, don’t want to waste anymore of your time, Dear Reader, than I have to.
If you go into Avatar: Fire and Ash simply looking for a feast for the eyes, based on having enjoyed the previous two on that same level, then you will be MOSTLY well-served in checking this one out.
Mostly.
In league with that, the 3D is damn good, as we’ve come to expect from JC, and almost makes up for that fucked-up frame rate, so I can reasonably also recommend you do see it on the Big Screen. It’s where these movies are meant to be experienced, after all.
But for the casual viewer, just wait to stream it. With the hefty run-time, this would be best watched at your leisure. If you have anything resembling a home theatre, you’re already halfway there. Maybe break up your viewing over a couple nights? Maybe not confined in one spot for almost 3.5 hours to a story that may not deeply invest the viewer, but acts as a cool feast-for-the-eyes and time-killer?
If James Cameron can hit pause on his ego and recognize that anything further from this franchise would be him officially outstaying his welcome in pop culture (especially when he still has so much more to offer with other material), and acting on that by NOT pursuing his already-scripted plans for Avatar’s 4 and 5, opting to leave behind a visually-enthralling, but narratively immature trilogy that ends just well enough to be mostly accepted by fans, I’d be happy with that, even if I feel the end lacked the impact it should’ve had, if this is it.
The Avatar Trilogy, in this current form, is a very GOOD, but not GREAT, series of movies telling a somewhat repetitive over-arcing story, greatly bolstered by the imagination, influence and dedication of James Cameron and his team of highly-skilled tech nerds to bring us sumptuous visual feasts like this, even if the narrative dish supporting them is weak or unoriginal.
Jim, just stop.
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