We can argue something similar about James Cameron, the director. Despite all the box office success (three out of the top four films of all time are his) and the iconic characters he has been responsible for, audiences haven’t warmed to him the way that they have with the impish, late-period, Martin Scorsese. (The current publicity tour seems designed to try and turn Cameron’s prickly reputation around.)
Perhaps it is his background as an engineer and an inventor. The Avatar films seem to have been designed rather than created. They are perfect working prototypes of a Hollywood blockbuster but, despite their phenomenal success, there isn’t a huge lineup of filmmakers trying to emulate them. Or maybe they just don’t have the chops (or the budgets).
Fire and Ash returns us to the lush, bioluminescent moon of Pandora, dreamt by Cameron after one of his famous journeys to the bottom of the ocean. Rapacious humans continue to try and loot Pandora of its natural resources and are even considering the possibility of colonisation – though all of their experience with the indigenous Na’vi suggests they are not only unwelcome but that they will keep getting their asses kicked.
At the end of the previous film, the mixed race Sully family – former Marine paraplegic, Jake, played by Sam Worthington, Na’vi princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), second son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), daughter Tuk (Trinity Bliss) and their two adopted children, Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) and the fully human Spider (Jack Champion) – are mourning the loss of their eldest, Neteyam, who perished in the concluding battle of the previous film.
They know that their sanctuary with the seafaring Metkayina clan puts everyone at risk as the undeterred humans – plus a Na’vi avatar of the evil Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) – are determined to restart their pillaging process as soon as possible. Their efforts to escape bring them into contact with two new clans – a band of traders led by David Thewlis and for the first time we see another side of the Na’vi, a marauding, violent bunch of pirates whose faith in the balance of nature was broken when their homes were destroyed by a volcano.
It’s this expansion of both the anthropological and spiritual worlds of Pandora that are the main novelty in this edition of the Avatar chronicles. We see a richer, more ‘human’ version of Pandora but we also learn more about the mysterious Eywa, the Gaia-like goddess who binds all of nature– and every generation – together.
It’s clear that Na’vi values are hugely important to Cameron – the idea that everything you might need is either within arm’s reach or to be found your feet, and that the wasteful and destructive ‘extractive’ human approach denudes us environmentally but also spiritually. To that extent, Avatar: Fire and Ash is another billion dollar piece of vegan propaganda but Cameron the filmmaker also knows that audiences want some sugar to go with their vegetables and, once again, he proves that there is no better director of large scale action sequences. No one has better command of the physical geography of a scene – you are always aware of where everyone and everything is in relation to each other, a skill that’s surprisingly hard to pull off.
So, as spectacle at least, Fire and Ash is way out in front of anything else and the technical achievements – especially the 3D – are remarkable, but on the giant IMAX screen I found myself noticing the blue-skinned Jake Sully’s stubble and wondering for the first time whether the Na’vi shave and how.
And if that’s where my mind is wandering to, maybe this third time around I wasn’t quite as engaged as I should have been.
Avatar: Fire and Ash is rated M, Violence, & offensive language.
