Aside from an overlong film, there’s little more dull than hearing some overprivileged critic whining about film length. After all, an extra helping of 3D-enhanced escapism measured in hundreds of millions of dollars in bleeding-edge effects: what’s not to love? With James Cameron serving it up, it’s like complaining about a Michelin-starred chef adding four courses onto their degustation menu, no extra charge.
Forgive me, then, for being that critic but if ever a movie could give your eyeballs gout, Avatar: Fire and Air is that film. At three hours and 17 sometimes spectacular, occasionally stultifying minutes (two more than Schindler’s List), your mind will struggle not to wander as human-turned-Na’vi Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his blue clanspeople tackle new-yet-entirely-similar threats in a straining sequel that again zeroes in on Pandoran whale juice as its McGuffin. You will try to make it through this movie without needing a pee. You will not succeed.
Unlike the first two Avatars, which even haters would concede were epic journeys of discovery, with Cameron as an attentive guide to a dazzling alien universe, a sense of familiarity kicks in from the opening 3D shots of a guilt-ridden Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) soaring through the floating Hallelujah Mountains on a banshee. The death of his brother Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) in Avatar: The Way of Water will send him off on his own redemption arc, one of a few half-hearted story progressions in a movie that’s largely content to play the same tunes again.
Cameron trudges off into the undergrowth to bring an anthropologist’s eye to his creations. We spend more time with the reef-dwelling Metkayina clan, where Sully, his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and their three surviving children live with teenage human Spider (Jack Champion). We’re introduced to the nomadic Wind Traders who float across the planet in organic balloons like eco-friendly market traders; we meet the violently apostate Ash People, led by the ferocious Varang (Oona Chaplin, the standout), who have turned against Mother Eywa and her supplicants. By hour three, you may be on board.
When the foot comes off the gas, the cracks become apparent
Jake’s anxieties around Spider’s precarious existence on Pandora kick off the entirely reactive plot, setting off an absolute banger of an action sequence in the skies above Pandora’s marshlands and lagoons – Return of the Jedi’s sail barge scene by a factor of a hundred. It’s peak Avatar, a vertigo-inducing blur of swooping banshees, exploding zeppelins, whizzing arrows and falling bodies that Cameron somehow makes coherent as well as exhilarating.
The villains are solid, too. Stephen Lang’s Na’vi Quaritch strains for revenge against Sully but Cameron’s script, co-written again with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, gives him a scree slop’s worth of scrambling to do as he navigates his human paymasters, led by Edie Falco’s general, and the purring, psychopathic Varang, who spies possibilities in this jargon-spouting military man and his nous with firearms.
But when the foot comes off the gas, the cracks become apparent. Bluntly, this spiritually-led society just isn’t half as interesting as the filmmaker thinks. And Pandora’s divine light, Mother Eywa, and its community of intelligent, talking whales, the Tulkun, aren’t offering a lot that we haven’t already seen, especially in a climactic sequence that gets close to reprising the ending of The Way of Water.
Cameron has said that he’ll be happy to leave Avatar as a trilogy, abandoning plans for a further two movies between now and 2031. For all its spectacle, Fire and Ash feels like right time to hang up the tsaheylu.
In cinemas worldwide Fri Dec 19.