'Avatar: Fire and Ash' Is Just Too Much

I’m tired. That’s the first thing I felt when exiting the theater after Avatar: Fire and Ash, writer/director James Cameron’s third entry into his apparently never-ending series of films. After three and a half hours of headache-inducing (yet still impressive) 3D action, exhaustion was the first thing I felt.

Blood and Ash is not necessarily a bad film, but it’s too much. Too much exposition, too much silly, weirdly appropriative gobbledygook, too much Fast and the Furious-esque run-on dialogue about family. What makes all this cinematic excess so frustrating is how simple the story is. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) are still seeking safety for their family, now firmly embedded as a part of the water clan of Na’vi, the Metkayina. They’re grappling with the death of their son in the previous film, their children are all struggling with their own personal demons, and the humans still want to wreck everything in the name of the dollar. Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) still hates and hunts for Sully. There are strange animals that the Na’vi are linked with. There are big, eye-popping battles. Love conquers all. Roll credits.

Sure, there’s more to it than that. There’s also an evil group of Na’vi, the People of Ash, led by the bloodthirsty Varang (Oona Chaplin), who ally themselves with Quaritch. Edie Falco is now the leader of the evil humans. And both of those actors do a worthy job of assisting in the film’s propulsive plot. Make no mistake, when Blood and Ash hits its groove, it’s remarkable. The effects are predictably astonishing, and there’s no denying that the 3D effects are astonishing - probably the best we’ve seen. When the action happens, it’s an incredible showcase for Cameron’s technical wizardry, and it feels totally immersive.

Yet it’s too much. When the action slows down, the film absolutely drags. Sam Worthington continues to lack the charisma to carry a franchise - even his CGI eyes somehow seem vacant. The dialogue is somehow getting worse as the franchise continues, nearing George Lucas Prequels level of preposterous. The deeper Cameron dives into the mythos of the Na’vi and their world and their goddess Eywa, the less interesting it becomes.

The runtime is the chief culprit here. There is probably a rock-solid 105-minute film to be found here, but Cameron is, as usual, unable to get out of the way of his own ego, overstuffing the film with everything he can, simply because he can. Instead, we’re forced to endure 195 minutes of cinematic arrogance. The action scenes are too long, just endlessly bombarding us with dizzying light and sound just to show us how damned amazing Cameron’s action cinematography can be. It all starts out exhilarating and then descends into wearying, culminating in a climax that was somehow both jaw-dropping in its visual impressiveness while also utterly draining in its refusal to simply end. You’ll be at the edge of your seat both because of the excitement and because you’re simply ready to go home.

The writing is the second culprit. It’s awful. There’s no two ways about it. It wastes an astonishing amount of talent here. The roster is wild in Blood and Ash — Kate Winslet, Stephen Lang, Edie Falco, Sigourney Weaver, Cliff Curtis, Jermaine Clement, David Thewlis, CCH Pounder! All forced to speak some of the least memorable dialogue of their careers, while clumsily meandering through a story that is almost identical to its predecessors.

I thought back to, ironically, Guardians of the Galaxy. There’s a moment in that film where Lee Pace, covered in purple and black makeup and clad in a ridiculous getup, utters the line “NECROCRAFT PILOTS, ENACT IMMOLATION INITIATIVE” in a completely serious tone. It’s fabulously goofy and fits perfectly in the tone of that delightfully wacky film. Now imagine dialogue of that caliber, taken deadly seriously, for over three hours. It’s nightmarishly tiresome and made worse by the scarce moments of failed levity being provided by the younger characters who inexplicably call each other “bro,” as if they’re channeling Edward Furlong’s painful dialogue in Terminator 2.

It was reported recently that Cameron is considering finding other ways to wrap up this magnum opus of his, and perhaps we should be grateful for that. Because for every technical advancement he makes, he loses a step in his already unsteady writing. Blood and Ash already felt like it was simply playing the same tapes over again, repeating most of the story beats of the previous film for lack of better ideas. Are there parts of the film worth seeing? Absolutely. Is it worth enduring the painful and extraneous dialogue, the leaden storytelling, the sheer overwrought excess of it all to get to those parts? Absolutely not.