Avatar: Fire and Ash: a big, goofy spectacle that wears its heart on its sleeve

There is a spectre haunting Pandora: the spectre of the writers’ room. James Cameron’s claim that he and his team had “too many great ideas” for The Way of Water – necessitating a split into two parts – is a not-so-humble brag. Standard operating procedure for James ‘the King of the World’ Cameron but also an ominous portent in advance of its follow-up, Fire and Ash. Watching the third and draggiest of the Avatar films – which unfolds over three hours while more or less repeating the one-battle-after-another structure of its predecessor – one is inclined to wonder: are these great ideas in the theatre with us right now?

To recap: when we last left Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), he and his blue-skinned brood were licking their wounds and preparing for a return engagement with the diabolical human colonisers encroaching on their turf (and systematically draining their whales for a payload of life-saving brain juice). “Sullys stick together” he says, but the fam is a man down after the tragic, honourable death of Jake’s eldest son Neteyam. Nobody is saying the wrong kid died, but Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) – who feels responsible for his brother’s death – isn’t exactly feeling the love these days. Meanwhile, Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) leverages grief against resentment over the presence of Spider (Jack Champion), the dreadlocked human foundling whom Jake has adopted in what she perceives as an unspoken act of solidarity with his own Earthbound heritage. 

The vibes, as they say, are bad, and dispersed across an ensemble so sprawling that you’d think at least one or two more protagonists might prove expendable. And you’d be wrong: Cameron’s tyrannical tendencies behind the camera belie his essentially soft-hearted attitudes towards his photorealistic characters, whom he loves in a different way than, say, Jean Renoir, but remains committed to developing both on an emotional and technological level. 

Every Na’avi has their reasons, and Fire and Ash does its best to contextualise the pyromaniacal rage of its villain, Varang (Oona Chaplin), the leader of a volcano-dwelling clan known as the Mangkwan. She’s a powerful enchantress with a hankering to snack on her enemies’ hearts: would you believe it has something to do with a bad childhood? At least Varang looks great, a war-painted, belly-baring, sociopathic doppelganger for Neytiri, with whom she tussles acrobatically several times. Tough women – human, alien and in between – are a Cameron specialty; if there’s an organising ideological principle in Fire and Ash, it’s the power of matriarchy. Even the Earth-based military-industrial complex operates under the sway of a distaff commander (Edie Falco), with perennial series baddie Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) – like Jake a stowaway in a massive Na’vi body – reduced to being Varang’s side-piece. (“Sounds like a fun weekend,” he smirks, Colonel Lockjaw-style, when his new nine-foot tall partner suggests he might spend some time in their tent pleasuring her. Lang remains the most enjoyable performer in the cast by a mile). We haven’t even got to the feminine mystique being cultivated by Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), the cloned, adopted daughter of the late Dr Augustine (also Weaver). As in The Way of Water, she exists as a sort of Gaia-ex-machina whose powers pushes the series’ New Age agenda towards (and maybe past) its breaking point. 

Cameron has always worn his bleeding heart on his sleeve; think of the anti-nuclear angst of The Terminator (1984) and The Abyss (1989) (which gets referenced here in a late shot of massive creatures emerging regally from the sea). The hippie-dippy metaphysics of Avatar are part of its charm, with the calls for tree-hugging and whale-saving more persuasive than the guns-destroy-everything rhetoric (Cameron’s fetishistic ambivalence about artillery was more honest in Terminator 2 (1991), when Edward Furlong sees Arnold holding a Gatling gun and snarks “it’s definitely you.”). 

There’s surely a political allegory here about imperialist powers arming insurgents – and plenty of potential dissertation fodder in a subplot about Spider being transformed by an infusion of Pandoran DNA – but the film’s spaciousness is deceptive: it’s more a matter of scale more than sophistication. Like its star Tulkun Payakan – whom fans will be happy to know has even more subtitled, Anchorman-style dialogue than last time – Fire and Ash is big and goofy and pretty much impervious to critical barbs; the trick – or, more annoyingly, the obligation – seems to be learning to stop worrying and love the leviathan. 

► Avatar: Fire and Ash is in UK cinemas 19 December.