The Banal Spectacle of “Avatar: Fire and Ash”

The last of James Cameron Avatar the film opens with a scene of innocent wonder. Two young brothers soar through the air on winged beasts, admiring the dizzying views of their majestic homeworld. Both are Na’Vi, agile bipedal inhabitants of the verdant moon Pandora introduced in 2009’s first entry in the series. The boys discover Pandora as a playground, its psychedelic flora and fauna an inexhaustible source of pleasure. The problem is that one of the brothers is dead. The shared flight is only possible because a ritual (and literal) connection to nature and the shared memory of their world allows the living one, Lo’ak (Brian Dalton), to commune with his older brother, Neteyam (Jamie Flatters). For the Na’Vi, the environment is kin, so much so that a special organ allows them to connect to the planet itself.

This bond, and the transcendental encounters it makes possible, are threatened in Avatar: Fire and Ash. In Cameron’s third trip to this Edenic land, the conflict between the dutiful Na’Vi and the greedy, space-faring earthlings of the first two films has escalated into a full-fledged war. In the previous film, that of 2022 Avatar: The Way of WaterNeteyam died in a decisive battle between the humans and the Na’Vi, a loss that haunts the aftermath. Now his surviving family, the Sullys, must mourn Neteyam while mobilizing to fight for Pandora’s future.

These themes – war, heartbreak, colonization, environmental calamity – are the subject of epics, but Cameron cannot escape bland allegory. The Na’Vi, already a fine mash of New Age woo-woo and stereotypical indigeneity, are further diluted in Fire and ashes. To try to complicate his noble savages, Cameron introduces the dastards: the Ash people, a group of Na’Vi arsonists who turned against their kind because their village was destroyed by a volcanic eruption. When the Ash people team up with the humans, Pandora faces internal and external threats for the first time. But the new antagonists only highlight how little the Na’Vi have been represented since the first film.

Fire and ashes cements the void of Avatar. The hit series is supposed to be about the conflicts of civilizations and their disparate relationships with nature, but for nine hours of screen time, it relied on rigid binaries: machine versus organic, alien versus indigenous, science versus magic. Cameron’s incurious characters rarely seek third (or fourth) positions or express and experience wonder on their own terms. Since it ushered in the modern era of 3D cinema in 2009, Avatar was presented as a series to watch, to get lost in. But the deeper Cameron dives into this fictional universe, the more superficial he turns out to be.

Fire and ashes rapidly gaining momentum. After opening with the brothers on the run, the film focuses on the rest of the Sullys, who are also struggling to cope with Neteyam’s death. Stoic Father Jake (Sam Worthington), the former Marine turned Na’Vi in the first film, broods and compiles weapons for the battles to come. Meanwhile, warrior mother Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) seethes, throwing dirty looks at their adopted son, Spider (Jake Champion), a human raised among the Na’Vi who is essentially a teenage Tarzan. And flower child Na’Vi Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), another adopted Sully, yearns to reconnect with nature, which has mysteriously excluded her. Concerns about Spider’s ability to breathe, which requires gas masks because Pandoran’s air is toxic to humans, leads the family to join a convoy of “Wind Traders” to take him to an area safe for humans.

The Traders hint at a more complex story. Despite the winged creatures they have been flying around on since the first film, the Na’Vi have previously been described as territorial, rarely venturing far from where they roost. We wonder: is there a Na’Vi economy? Do they exchange information about human encroachment? How far apart are these communities?

Cameron glosses over such possibilities, instead relishing the supernatural spectacle of the cars, designed like a sort of organic steampunk hot air balloon. Flying creatures reminiscent of manta rays pull the ships, while the “balloons” resemble pearly jellyfish. It’s certainly a spectacle, but after the Ash people attack the convoy, the story leaves the traders and any interest in the broader Na’Vi outlook behind.

From there, Fire and ashes becomes an elaborate game of cat and mouse as the Sullys escape central antagonist Quaritch (Stephen Lang), a resurgent commando in The way of water as a Na’Vi determined to capture Jake. Quaritch portrays Jake as the ultimate traitor to the species, boasting, “No matter what color I am, I remember the team I play for.” » But he finds himself on the same path as his nemesis: like Jake, Quaritch has become increasingly comfortable with the Na’vi way of life despite his allegiance to Earth, an irony that deepens when he falls in love with the fiery Varang (Oona Chaplin) of the Ash people. They bond over their mutual bloodlust, with Quaritch suggestively vowing to help Varang “spread your fire across the world”.

Quaritch’s human son, Spider, a minor character in the previous film, becomes the centerpiece, one of the film’s thorniest turns. Through a twist, he becomes able to breathe the planet’s air, making him a high-value target for humans. If they can reverse engineer the process that allows it to breathe, human colonization could accelerate. Neytiri, fearing this outcome and motivated by a growing hatred for humans, suggests killing Spider, a move which Jake later opposes and considers. Spider, for her part, feels more and more attached to Pandora and even develops the Na’Vi organ which allows communion with nature, blurring the line between native and extraterrestrial.

There’s a lot going on here: contested authorship, purist ideas of kinship, extinction, racial allegiance, and grievance. But the film rarely slows down enough to push these threads in fruitful directions, always heading toward the next big battle or twist. Cameron’s understanding of difference is too simplistic for these shifting views to seem revelatory. We see this when the Ash people enlist with Quaritch in exchange for weapons. As part of this arrangement, they move to the human center of Pandora and have no difficulty adjusting. Likewise, when Spider is captured and taken to that same city, the story goes through what should be a dizzying predicament: Spider is part of his species, but not his people, all while on the verge of being the savior of his homeland and the destroyer of his adopted country.

There is little internal disturbance in the midst of all this body jumping and all this mixing of species. Cameron’s characters bicker and fight without ever transforming, often giving far-fetched reasons to explain their inertia. “People say that when you touch steel, its poison seeps into your heart,” Lo’ak says at one point, describing an arbitrary Na’Vi ban against the metal. The Na’Vi have literally been invaded by aliens, but Cameron can only imagine them as folk mystics.

The failures of Fire and ashes are all linked in this strange and artificial fixity of the Na’Vi. Over the course of the series, they lived through human colonization for decades – enough time for humans to build a city, for businesses on Earth to be involved in the intergalactic extraction of Pandora’s resources, for some Na’Vi to learn English, and for Jake, a former human, to start a family. But this story has the slightest imprint. The Na’Vi call humans “sky people” and “pink skins”, shorthand terms that signify racial difference more than planetary or political divergence. Speaking of planets, despite living on a moon, the Na’Vi don’t even have a cosmology: we never learn the name of the planet the moon revolves around, nor the Na’Vi’s beliefs about what lies beyond Pandora’s atmosphere. Cameron gives them a religion, an all-encompassing spirit that they call Eywa, but their conception of nature is ultimately earthly and static, bound to the soil. This choice reveals the extent to which Cameron imagines his race of heroes.

This flat outlook persists even if you try to enjoy the thrill of popcorn Fire and ashes. Yes, it has the cutting edge of digital effects and is relentlessly filigreed with textures and colors. Although it was filmed at the same time as The way of water, Fire and ashes is even more dazzling: the flame pattern gives shadows and chiaroscuro lighting even in underwater scenes. And the attention to detail is exquisite: At one point, a whale-like creature with septum piercings reaches across the water to speak with the Sullys, and when she speaks, the water around her ripples and splashes in perfectly imperfect concentric circles. The level of scrutiny applied to the visual environment of this story is endlessly astounding.

But this precision ultimately makes the saga’s innate flaws more unbearable. Even though the world has become richer through three films, the people of Pandora haven’t been granted much interiority or depth: Cameron’s Na’Vi are virtuous stewards of the landscape; his humans are warmongering brutes. Pandora is a lush paradise, while Earth, which we never see, is a wasteland just industrious enough to sustain interstellar capitalism. He attempts to reverse that dynamic here with Spider, a valiant human who wants to be Na’Vi, and the Ash people, crazy demons who want to turn Pandora into a wasteland, as well as the Sullys’ various arcs.

But the positions the characters can occupy, the thoughts they can think, and the paths they can take remain circumscribed—a determinism at odds with the romance and fantasy that Cameron works so hard to fuel. Fire and ashes is the most boring kind of science fiction, complex but uncurious, sprawling but closed-minded, the story never evolving beyond Cameron’s circuitous love of indigenous environmentalism and his penchant for loud, funky action. No matter how ornate the CGI, this series sticks to the same offensive premise: cowboys and Indians.