There is a moment in the third act of Fire and Ash that really summed up the experience of watching the film for me. I'm going to spoil a moment so just skip to the next paragraph if you want to go in blind. There is a moment when Jake decides that letting his human foster child, Spider, live is too dangerous. He's developed the ability to breathe on Pandora and if the Sky People can study him they can learn how to replicate that and eventually take over, threatening the Na'vi. He takes him into the forest to execute him and the whole time we know he's not going to do it. He will decide he can't sacrifice the boy and that he is part of his family too. And we know this so strongly that there are no stakes. Cameron commits to the bit so hard he drags out the scene for far too many beats and even fakes us out with Jake striking with his knife only to pull back revealing he didn't hurt Spider. The reveal comes as no surprise because it would have been completely against character for Jake to do it, and it wouldn't have fit the overall narrative. Throughout the sequence I was... well whatever the opposite of "on the edge of my seat" was.
And most of Fire and Ash is like that. The movie plays out like we've seen it before and know what is going to happen. Perhaps because so much of Avatar 3 is repeating plot and set pieces that have been used in parts 1 and 2. I felt there were few moments I didn't know exactly what to expect. And as the credits began the story had resolved almost just as I would have predicted.
Cameron's story telling in this series has been quite heavy handed. He hits us over the head with the moral to his story and his plot is out of a screenwriting instruction manual. I'm not sure you can point to a character that is more than two-dimensional throughout the series, nor one that has a character arc that doesn't feel text book. Avatar has never been about depth.
What makes these films work is the spectacle. They are beautiful films to watch and even if the plot is simple there is enough of it to keep its runtime from lagging. Fire and Ash is no exception. So generally it was a fairly good time, even if, by the end, it all felt rather forgettable. Fire and Ash did make me begin to wonder if Cameron has run out of ideas for his epic series. Or perhaps maybe Avatar was never really about ideas. Maybe it was all form and little substance. Avatar reminds us of all the potential that blockbuster cinema can do technically, but not really what it can do narratively.
For a film whose runtime is as long as it it, it ends rather suddenly. I know the intension has been for the series to continue so perhaps they didn't feel they needed a big finale. The final moments feel more like the end of a chapter than the end of a story. However Fire and Ash does raise the spectre of a well that has run dry. Is there much more story anyone is interested in at this point? I wouldn't count Cameron out. But more than before one feels the need to ask the question.
Avatar: Fire and Ash
Starring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Kate Winslet, Oona Chaplin, Britain Dalton, Jack Champion,Trinity Jo-li Bliss, Bailey Bass, Cliff Curtis, Edie Falco, Jemaine Clament, Brendan Cowell, Jamie Flatters, Joel David Moore, Giovanni Ribisi, CCH Pounder, David Thewlis
Director: James Cameron
Writers: Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, James Cameron
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