There is no mistaking that Avatar: Fire and Ash is the work of a talented filmmaker. Pandora remains a lavishly imagined, technically immersive world, rendered with a level of craft few directors can rival. But to borrow a phrase, it is ultimately full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
James Cameron’s third iteration picks up precisely where The Way of Water left off. Following the death of his son, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his family remain in self-imposed exile among the Metkayina water tribe, still pursued by the indefatigable Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang). The entire logic of this arrangement was meant to spare Sully’s original clan from retaliation. Yet, the film is oddly incurious about the moral contradiction at its core: Sully has no reservations about placing his gracious hosts squarely in Quaritch’s crosshairs.
Meanwhile, Sully’s adopted human son, Spider (Jack Champion), who we learn is Quaritch’s biological child, begins exhibiting the predictable symptoms of oxygen deprivation, the narrative consequence of the small logistical inconvenience that humans cannot breathe Pandora’s air. He is easily the film’s most interesting character, torn between blood and the family that actually raised him.
Though his voice has deepened since The Way of Water, Sully’s son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) has not matured much beyond his previous incarnation. He remains a grating presence, communicating in the emotional register of a tween Disney Channel protagonist. The only other character of real interest is Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), the family’s adoptive daughter, whose struggle to commune with Pandora’s energy force in the prior film evolves here into a mysterious and transcendent power.
The overarching justification for humanity’s continued presence on Pandora remains that Earth is irrevocably doomed and can no longer sustain life. Cameron offers scant detail but insists we sympathize with the Na’vi regardless. And this is where Avatar falters in ways other science fiction and fantasy worlds do not.
What works in Middle-earth, Westeros, or even the Star Wars galaxy is that their conflicts are hermetically sealed within their own mythologies. We can live vicariously through them without being conscripted into the moral equation. Avatar breaks that spell. Cameron shoehorns the Na’vi into our ethical universe, declares our planet unsalvageable, and then expects us to root against humanity’s survival for the preservation of a tribe of glow-in-the-dark, forest-dwelling space communists whose governing philosophy amounts to “from each according to his neural braid.”
Fire and Ash complicates this moral binary further with the introduction of the Ash People, a splinter Na’vi faction alienated from the other clans and eager to settle old scores. Unsurprisingly, Quaritch wastes no time befriending, arming, and legitimizing them as a counterweight to the rest of Pandora’s pesky indigenous population. In doing so, Cameron appreciably embraces Cold War realism: when direct conquest proves messy, you fund the dissidents. The Ash People function as Pandora’s contras — a proxy force enlisted to fracture native unity while providing the comforting illusion that colonization enjoys local buy-in.
To Cameron’s credit, the Ash People are among the film’s most compelling additions. The cinematography and action sequences, particularly those featuring Ash warriors raiding rival clans atop flying mountain banshees, are spectacular, among the most accomplished set pieces Cameron has ever staged. They are the film’s undeniable highlights.
But Cameron’s unsurpassed command of spectacle only throws into sharper relief how muddled and morally evasive the worldview beneath it has become.
The Ash People are also more aggressive, more violent, and occasionally borderline cannibalistic. If Cameron is still angling for a Native American parable, their inclusion, despite shattering the illusion of a pristine Pandora, ironically makes his world more plausible. Like many nomadic societies throughout history, the Na’vi, lacking centralized governance, appear perpetually on the brink of internecine conflict.
As Donald Rumsfeld might have explained at an RDA briefing, sovereignty is not an aesthetic preference but a credential that is earned through centralized governance, enforceable law, the protection of individual rights, and the capacity to engage with the international (or interplanetary) order. By that standard, the Na’vi don’t so much possess a state as a vibes-based belief system. Their social organization is tribal, localized, and governed less by law than by cutesy customs and an all-knowing forest god — hardly a compelling argument against colonization when humanity is facing extinction.
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I harbor an irrational aversion to Avatar. Cameron, the filmmaker who gave us such ineffaceable and clever classics as Terminator and Aliens, began developing this franchise in 1994, released the first film in 2009, and will apparently continue iterating on it through 2031. It is an inexcusable squandering of talent; one that ought to vex movie lovers the way a young Paul McCartney announcing he will spend the next 35 years of his songwriting career producing nothing but increasingly elaborate variations of “Happy Birthday.” The production values are unquestionably through the roof, but art is not a technical demo.
For all its scale, noise, and self-importance, Avatar leaves no cultural imprint, advances no enduring ideas, and ultimately signifies nothing.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.