Avatar - Fire and Ash Burns the Last Traces of What Remained Exciting in the Saga

Fifteen years ago, the first Avatar arrived in cinemas and immersed us in the alien planet of Pandora, inhabited by the Na'vi. It doesn't seem like we've ever left since then: from the very first scenes of Fire and Ash, there's a sense of deep familiarity in returning to wander through its crystal-clear waters, in the thick of its vegetation. This should be proof of how much this saga has entered our collective imagination, of how deeply our brains have absorbed its settings and atmospheres. Instead, it's the beginning of this uncompromising takedown of a film that aims to attract the viewer with the least ambitious and most disheartening trick of all: giving them exactly the same thing as the first two chapters, with just a little extra garnish to feign some kind of novelty.

A Pandora Now Devoid of Wonder

What strikes you in Avatar: Fire and Ash is the extreme, mortifying conventionality of the plot and narration. That Cameron's imagination has always been very spartan and rhetorical, focusing on the narrative simplicity of some classic tropes of space exploration combined with the conflict between different cultures, explored through a love story, is a given. The immediacy of the story, however, was initially functional to the technical impact, to the unprecedented visual dimension of the first chapter, experienced with 3D glasses in the cinema. Technological progress in subsequent chapters refined what was done in the first, without, however, providing further such visible and impactful leaps. At this point, therefore, the story should be propping up the films of the saga, finally freed from the hassle of explaining who inhabits the planet and how relationships between humans and aliens work.

Instead, in 2025, we are still here witnessing the clash between traumatized good Na'vi and uselessly cruel and sadistic mercenary humans. In fact, along the way, the pressure of a desperate humanity trying to save its planet and procure resources has disappeared, that overwhelming urgency that explained and problematized the most ferocious choices of humans, who here have transformed into a pack of zombies with cell phones only slightly more technological than ours, obsessed with a quick and muscular militarism, not even so well integrated into the story.

The only truly fascinating aspect of this film is how Cameron tries to anticipate some imminent developments in current technology: his curiosity as a fresh billionaire who loves the state of the art in technology is clearly perceptible when he frames exoskeletons and imagines transparent cell phones and operating rooms made of holograms and dematerialized screens.

Too bad that in the rest of the film there is really nothing equally lively imaginatively, except in a trashy way. Starting from the beginning: this writer saw the film in its original language, which allowed to "enjoy" one of the most embarrassing teenage dialogues heard in cinema recently. Two Na'vi have a flying race and bounce one obvious statement after another, ending each sentence with a "bro": it's the first of many passages that leave the impression of an elderly man mimicking the relational dynamics of youngsters, convinced he can speak their language. The original language also allows to "enjoy" Sigourney Weaver voicing one of protagonist Jake's daughters: the voice, clearly that of a mature woman trying to pass for young and chirpy, is once again jarring and throws the viewer out of the film.

So is everything else, in a film that repeats the mechanisms of its predecessor so faithfully and slavishly that it's probably a spoiler to say it recycles and rehashes the ending, including themes and locations. What was done with water in the second film is done here with fire, introducing the first Na'vi villain: the beautiful and dangerous Varang, played by Oona Chaplin, leader of a Na'vi tribe that has repudiated the animism of the rest of the population and wages war on its neighbors with barbaric combat and torture practices. With her brazen wickedness and exhibited sensuality, Varang gives a minimum of verve to the plot, especially in contrast to Zoe Saldana's increasingly sorrowful Neytiri. However, it's impossible not to notice how the film leans into the saint/whore dichotomy in describing its female characters, reduced to a string of stereotypes, even reaching the highest and purest sacrifice for a woman who, needless to say, lives, breathes, and dies in the role of a mother.

At this point in the story, the saga is on the verge of a generational transition between the first generation of human rebels integrated into Pandora, that of the protagonist Jake, and a new generation of young Na'vi. The narrative would thus have the opportunity to explore the moral and social nuances of a colonialist and invasive culture that has taken root and irreversibly modified the host alien society, even when this influence comes from theoretically positive figures like that of the human rebel protagonist.

His counterpart, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), here undergoes his first cultural contamination thanks to Varang. This would theoretically be a strong, even compelling, turning point, were it not for the fact that the film relegates it to a couple of quick narrative links, instead boring us with the dynamics of a group of Na'vi and human teenagers, whose story is decidedly less intriguing than that of a man returned from death against his will, whose son is raised by the rival he swore to kill.

How Avatar fails to find time to invest in the characters that work and the few novelties it has to offer, despite lasting over three hours, is a genuine mystery. Also because by now the natural environment is a conventional repetition of the same flora and fauna, with minimal additions like the aerostatic creatures of the merchants or the alien "seals," presented almost as a screensaver.

The second chapter, The Way of Water, had very little to say overall, but this third one has a confused and unusually muscular turn, which almost seems to contradict the very premises of the saga. If in the first chapter Jake rediscovered the ability to dialogue and listen thanks to the Na'vi culture, contrasted with the mercenary squalor of his profession, here Cameron forces the screenplay to compel the Na'vi to embrace an armed militarism that is an authentic expression of a certain American culture not seen in cinema for a very long time. Fire and Ash is a ground zero of the messages of understanding and listening from the beginning, in a plot that is neither pressing, nor solemn, nor tragic: simply, with some shortcuts, it wants us to enjoy the Na'vi walking "the way of weapons."

Based on simplistic and superficial premises, Fire and Ash collapses precisely because it highlights how there isn't a deep reflection and solid construction of what Na'vi culture and spirituality exactly are. Backed into a corner, the film finds hasty and ridiculous solutions, from parthenogenesis to actual magical powers that manifest suddenly and with perfect timing, denying the audience even the consolation of a moment that escapes the most proverbial triumph of good over evil. Despite the colors, it's a moral black and white that allows no middle ground.

Cameron Finally Betrays the Na'vi

This is continuously noticeable in the way the Na'vi are an other, a different that has never been more than a narrative device. It is striking, for example, how one of the protagonist children, in a long voice-over, speaks of "a sin" atoned for by the creatures of the planet's deep seas. In Na'vi culture, animistic and far removed from Christianity, neither the word nor the very concept of a natural element guided by a divine being who punishes transgressions of a supposed morality should exist.

Moreover, Cameron himself pushes the biblical imagery to the max, with a direct copy of a famous passage from the Old Testament, to create a tragic moment that then, like the aerostatic animals of the merchants' caravan, deflates into nothing.

All this serves to erase a potentially negative trait of Neytiri: her instinctive hostility towards human flesh, colors, and form, which disgusts her. When she describes with horror "Spider's small, numerous pink fingers," the film marks one of its very few truly powerful moments, a core of something painful and alive, not a pretext to create cheap drama. A racial conflict that is wiped away with a sponge, or rather, with the Bible, by a film that increasingly appears for what it is: the bland and confused narrative fruit of a director and producer who has built and financed an enormous, billion-dollar successful excuse to once again test the technological limits of his favorite medium, cinema.