Both culturally and financially, there seems far less at stake with Avatar: Fire and Ash than there was with its predecessor, 2022's The Way of Water, where everyone was looking for post-lockdown numeric proof that The Movies™ were back. This is perhaps as it should be: 2025 has spawned several other major tentpole hits, and after somewhere between seven and nine hours of this series, cinemagoers will now presumably have decided whether or not they're in it for the long haul. Today's studio executives have apparently made peace with the fact their creative endeavours are less likely to bust the proverbial blocks than they are to draw an audience of ultra-devoted obsessives: as underlined by the surprisingly soft numbers for the recent Wicked: For Good, presently being outperformed week in week out by Disney's Zootropolis 2, the popular cinema is well into its era of widespread popular indifference. I've long since made a peace of my own with James Cameron's Avatar films as flotation-tank cinema par excellence: every few years, it seems, we'll be encouraged to don our 3D goggles, sit back to observe everything within our immediate field of vision turning blue, and then spend between two and four hours switching off from an outside world that grows ever more stressy and tiring. It is all a bit woo-woo, yes, but arguably no more cuckoo than that outside world, where the woo-woos are increasingly coming from sirens and alarms. One question the new film raises, however, has less to do with the woo-woo element than what we might call the wow factor: is the spectacular novelty of the Avatar franchise finally beginning to wash off through industrialised repetition?
As the contemporary cinema's pre-eminent deep sea diver, Cameron at least is still fully immersed: you fear he may never come back up for air again. Where 2009's opener served as recon, allowing for all manner of enchantment and eye-opening discovery, The Way of Water began to put down roots, carrying us all further away from the human world and towards the otherworldly. (To the extent that it's now something of a surprise in this third movie when Giovanni Ribisi and Joel David Moore, faces less cerulean than California-tan, rematerialise before us: oh, you go, they're still here, bobbing for paycheques.) Most of Fire and Ash centres on the Sully clan, a family mired in grief after the events of the second film and beginning to divide against themselves. This is tricky thematic territory for a franchise that has always sat closer to lucid dream than theme-park spectacle, being floatily untethered, often vivid once you're in the midst of it and oddly forgettable thereafter. (Fire and Ash actually opens with a dream of fraternal reconnection - possibly inspired by the between-film passing of Cameron's producer and longtime brother-in-arms Jon Landau - and concludes with a new Miley Cyrus song, "Dream As One".) The thing about dreams is that, upon waking, we tend to remember the big picture (whether planetful of blue people! or I was in bed with Sydney Sweeney!) and selected highlights (be that there were massive whales there! or we were interrupted by a talking bear!), but not the mundane narrative smallprint of how everybody wound up here. With the undecideds having made their minds up, the franchise approaches its next inflection point: from here on out, for maximum enjoyment, you will need to know which avatars have perished, if not necessarily which of the Sully kids - this franchise's Muppet Babies - is which. So more questions bubble up into view: how much do you care about the world of Avatar beyond its abundant spectacle? And, crucially: do you care enough to sit through, in this instance, a further three hours and fifteen minutes of it?
You will already have your own answers, I suspect; these films are so sui generis that a therapist may be of greater guidance to you at this stage than any critic. (Fire and Ash is the first movie I've seen that feels obliged to insert a suicide hotline number between its closing cast and crew credits, lest the process of navigating back to reality proves especially problematic.) As a handful of splenetic first responses in their own way bear out, what Cameron appears to have taken from his Titanic experience is that the staggering mechanics of these event films will ultimately matter less, in the popular imagination, than how they make you feel. For my part, I'm not going in up to my chest for these sequels, and I'm certainly not willing to get my hair wet, but I'm happy enough to roll up my trouserlegs and have an occasional paddle. (One way of framing this franchise: as an awayday, the world's most expensive seaside special.) As with all those Star Wars spinoffs currently cluttering up the Disney+ menu, the Avatar series seems likely to proceed via some combination of spectacle and soap opera. Fire and Ash introduces a sexy new lady avatar, represented by a pixellated Oona Chaplin wearing fetish gear and a St. George's cross across her torso; she's both Cameron's idea of an Alexis Carrington-style maneater and what would happen in the unlikely event somebody put Christina Aguilera in charge of the English Defence League. No Na'vi (or Na'vi-adjacent species) has ever had anything interesting or memorable to say for themselves, an ongoing problem; in Fire and Ash, it's those morosely whistling whales who get all the best lines. But arm this new character with a flamethrower that signals an elemental seachange for the series, and ask her to threaten to burn this brave new world down, and suddenly you've got yourself a picture: an insurrection against democracy, civility and - eventually - the entire human race. Fire and Ash is Cameron's January 6th, only bigger, smarter and vastly better organised.
That latter, I think, is why I keep coming back to these films, and why I cannot bring myself to dismiss them or otherwise write them off as many esteemed colleagues have. If the studios are going to default to making bum-numbing 12A-rated fantasies, far better they be engineered by a precision-seeking control freak like Cameron. The high priests of the cinematic artform can (and will) rail against Fire and Ash all they like, but this filmmaker has amply achieved one of the goals 21st century studio cinema has set for itself: building a coherent universe for audiences to explore and escape into. Seven hours in, and he's finally filling in the characters and their attitudes. (Better late than never, one might say.) While the new film never doggypaddles too far from the shallow end when discussing empathy and race relations - yes, there's more of that business of plugging your dreadlocks into your fellow avatars, or some central Tree of Life; I spent a good twenty minutes wondering whether the Sullys keep a drawer filled with discarded ponytails that might fit different sockets - even this material has been more organically integrated than the comparable editorial in One Battle After Another and The Running Man. (Cameron makes you feel it rather than think about it, or allowing you to quibble with it.) Like I say, I circle back this way not to convert or recruit you to this cause: I'm hardly an Avatar diehard, let alone a zealot. But the three Avatar films so far may be as close as any earthling has come to realistically achieving the Muskian dream of relocating us from a stricken planet onto a higher plane of consciousness; there's more vision visible in these frames than any of our politicians is currently proposing. That's why these sequels will find their people and do okay, even as some viewers find themselves rediscovering a yen for dry land and everything non-turquoise. We will all exit this particular flotation tank in a far wrinklier state than first we entered it, no-one more so than Jim Cameron himself, moving heaven and earth to make this franchise happen. Yet if 2025 taught me anything, it's that we need to apportion our remaining hours on this earth wisely, and not necessarily likewise.
Avatar: Fire and Ash is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
No comments:
Post a Comment