Avatar: Fire and Ash
Click the pic below for my FOX19 Extra review of Avatar: Fire and Ash!
Scroll beneath to read my full Report Card Review
Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri's (Zoe Saldana) family grapples with grief after Neteyam's death, encountering a new, aggressive Na'vi tribe, the Ash People, who are led by the fiery Varang (Oona Chaplin), as the conflict on Pandora escalates and a new moral focus emerges.
STORY: C-
Too much story. Not enough time.
Despite a run-time of over three hours, Cameron tries to pack too much into the film. Here’s a partial list of sub-plots:
Quaritch hunts for his son. Quaritch hunts Sully. A new clan spews fire from the skies. The humans are hunting the Tulkans again.
I’ve never seen a three-hour movie in such a rush to get through everything it wants to do. At times, the movie feels like watching the McCallisters from Home Alone as they madly scramble to catch their flight. And in the chaos, like the McCallisters, something important gets left behind: a satisfying story.
PEOPLE: C+
The characters keep getting more compelling.
It’s hard to tell if the acting has gotten better throughout the trilogy, or if the improved motion-capture technology deserves the credit.
Either way, a lot of these performances are wonderful. Small details - like a raised eyebrow or worry lines bubbling up on a forehead - allow more nuances of the human actors’ performances to make it on to the screen.
FILM NERD STUFF: A-
Editing whiplash.
Like a small liberal arts school facing an SEC football powerhouse, the editing team does its best but is ultimately steamrolled by the enormous amount of ground the story insists on covering.
Quick jumps between storylines confuse us. Sudden leaps from location to location confound us. The result is little to no flow in the narrative.
Still, the film earns high marks in this category due to the boundless score, its luscious production design, and its trailblazing technology.
ONE BIG LESSON: D
If a movie is about everything, can it really be about anything?
The film throws a lot of spaghetti at the wall, thematically. Family. Perseverence. Fathers and sons. The environment. Teamwork. Growing up. Overcoming differences.
Many topics, few kernels of wisdom. Avatar: Fire and Ash tries to be important by being about so many things that it ultimately doesn’t say anything terribly meaningful.
FINAL COMMENTS:
Cameron settles you into your seat, lowers the bar over your head, and sends you on a thrilling, colorful, sensory-slamming roller coaster ride. And like a roller coaster, it’s a blast while you ride it, but the excitement doesn’t last long afterward.
Cameron’s early films prove that he’s a master storyteller. This is, after all, the guy who made us all sob our eyes out over a cold-blooded assassin robot. At this stage of his career, it seems he’s more focused on advancing the tools we use to tell stories (which to be fair, have changed the future of filmmaking for the better) than in taking the time to craft the stories themselves.
I hope Cameron decides to marry his two strengths - the stories he tells and the means with which he tells them - with his next project. I’m guessing the best way to do that is to leave Pandora for new frontiers. We’ll see if billions of dollars of ticket sales disagree.