Jake, Neytiri and the Sully family face a new threat in the form of Varang and the Ash people.
Avatar fans initially had to wait 13 years between the original film and its 2022 sequel, The Way of the Water, but thankfully, James Cameron hasn’t left us waiting so long this time around and has reduced the gap to just three years.
Avatar: Fire and Ash, which was filmed at the same time as The Way of the Water, reunites us with Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), their children Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) and Tuk (Trinity Bliss) and surrogate kids Spider (Jack Champion) and Kiri (Sigourney Weaver).
This unusual family is still living with the Metkayina water clan and mourning the death of son/brother Meteyam in the previous film.
The action begins in earnest with the introduction of a fearsome new villain Varang (Oona Chaplin) and her clan, the Ash people, who launch an attack on their fellow Na’vi and team up with the Sully family’s longtime nemesis Miles Quadritch (Stephen Lang).
As we have come to expect, this film is visually stunning and technically impressive; it looks absolutely glorious, and you forget you’re watching actors via performance capture (except Champion), and everything you see has been made digitally.
There are plenty of action setpieces to keep us entertained, including a spectacular battle sequence in the final act.
But unfortunately, the narrative is underwhelming and repetitive. There are interesting new aspects, such as the villainous Na’vi and a moral dilemma involving Spider, but it feels like more of the same and repeats several beats from the previous film.
Given that the film has a whopping runtime of three hours and 17 minutes, you would expect the story to progress quite far, but the narrative doesn’t move on much from the beginning to the end.
Cameron could have easily cut out some of the repetition and made the film shorter, although it has to be said that the movie doesn’t feel quite as long as it is because it moves at a slick pace.
In addition, the Ash people are a really exciting addition to the cast and bring an interesting dynamic to the mix. Varang and her group are genuinely menacing and threatening, and it was refreshing to see some bad Na’vi, but they weaken their power by aligning with Quadritch and it just becomes the Jake vs. Quadritch show yet again.
Besides the final act, you can’t help but feel like you’ve seen it all before and that Cameron has run out of story. If he intends to make the fourth and fifth films, then he really needs to take the narrative in a new direction and make the most of exciting new characters.
In cinemas on Friday 19th December.
By Hannah Wales.
© Cover Media