Avatar: Fire and Ash is big, goofy and forgettable

When James Cameron’s Titanic became the highest-grossing film of all time, it also managed to change the face of cinema. Not only did it supercharge Hollywood’s blockbuster fever with an ever-increasing appetite for staggering budgets — occasionally met by even more staggering box office receipts — but its storytelling beats managed to jam themselves all up in the spokes of pop culture.

Romeo and Juliet who? The new star-crossed lovers were Jack and Rose. Macabre, gore-flecked disaster what? After Titanic the epic, Titanic the ship was viewed as something closer to a tragic romance than a harrowing story of industrial malpractice.

Given that similar culture-altering claims could be made of Cameron’s Aliens and his two Terminator films, it makes the tired truism perpetually flung at his Avatar movies all the more sad. That for some of the highest grossing films of all time, from one of the most influential artistic voices of the last century, it is incredible how little impact those blue cat-people have managed to make.

Now back for thirds with Avatar: Fire and Ash, it’s unlikely Cameron’s going to beat those allegations. It’s an argument whose case is made as soon as the film opens: now three years from the previous installment The Way of Water, and 16 from the first film, your ability to remember and understand what’s going on may depend on how familiar you are with the various other stories this one seems to crib from.

Namely: why Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) once fought for the space marines — the American colonial metaphor attempting to expropriate the planet Pandora’s natural resources — but has now joined the Indigenous metaphor, the Na’vi. How his daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) is the reincarnated ghost of a human scientist, now gifted with a unique if mercurial connection to the shared spiritual consciousness dubbed the “All Mother.”

Why the Sully-hunting Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang) is also a Na’vi now, though simultaneously obsessed with finding his human son Miles "Spider" Socorro (Jack Champion). How Spider found himself shacked up with the Sullys, while wearing a battery-powered facemask 24/7 to handle Pandora’s poisonous atmosphere. Why the tree-surfing Na’vi that Sully first teamed up with have since aligned themselves with a seafaring group, who themselves boast a diehard connection to a race of intelligent whale-aliens. (What the cool kids are calling "whaliens.")

And how and why all of that complex basket-weaving of a plot leads to the further complicated instigation of Fire and Ash: wherein humans, now bent on solving the poisonous atmosphere problem of colonizing Pandora, have teamed up with a new, improved, fire-inspired Na’vi group to more effectively kill all the others.

Meanwhile, the Sullys battle through a near-infinitely recursive series of identity crises — debating whether they’re really human, really Na’vi, really sea-Na’vi or really human again — to hammer home a somewhat muddy, occasionally offensive theme around found families and the simple origins of xenophobia.  Oh, and the exploding speed-boats and gun battles.

Granted, none of it is bad. The farther we stray from the first film, the closer Cameron comes to an original story — though the more overburdened it becomes with interweaving, conflicting and subordinate plots. Being a Cameron film, the effects are superb; already locked in with the liquid physics of The Way of Water, the Canadian director and his team only continue their achievements here — just try to ignore the jarring and inexplicable shifts between standard, and high frame-rate that Cameron continues to play with.

Intended to give the action sequences a sense of heightened realism, really all they accomplish is giving some scenes the air of video game cutscenes, and others the feeling of an operating system struggling to render the images.

As for the many, many acting performances needed for what has quickly become an overwrought, almost baroque space-based soap opera, no one’s phoning it in. That is, aside from Champion’s impossibly goofy, unfortunately dreadlocked Spider, and Weaver painfully acting as a girl 62 years her junior.

Elsewhere, Worthington is believably intense as a frantic dad — while simultaneously operating as the patriarchal fulcrum for literally every other character’s “Where do I belong?” story arcs.

But the real stars this time around are Lang’s Quaritch and Zoe Saldaña as Sully’s wife, Neytiri — partially because they are also the only two gifted with actual narrative evolution. In the entire clumsily plotted epic, they are perhaps the only ones to end the film with their belief systems something other than simply reinforced. Particularly in Quaritch’s case, it gives the script a much-needed injection of originality that, otherwise, feels far too paint-by-numbers.

Outside of the action, the story bumps around from narrative station to station like a conductor on a compressed workweek; at first a road movie, then a family drama, then a war tale in startlingly similar fashion to the first outing. It takes a while for Fire and Ash to even work halfway up to the stakes of the prior two entries.

Not until we arrive at a slightly contrived conflict involving an alien parasite and the future of human life on Pandora midway through do we even know what’s at risk, and why we’ve bothered to return to this world once again. And while awkwardly carrying forward the conceit of conquering forces literally appropriating Indigenous people’s bodies to become their full selves — a sort of sci-fi “I don’t see colour,” post-racism moral — it introduces a new, one-dimensional evil Indigenous group to sweeten the pot.

Were they given as deep a lore and tradition as the water tribe from the previous movie, it may have been excusable. But in a serious backslide from The Way of Water, the new tribe’s fire connection is reduced to a few incidental magic tricks, explained away in a brief monologue. Paired with a ham-fisted attempt to pass the torch from Sully to his son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) using a tone-deaf suicide subplot, there’s more than enough to complain about — and little to nothing likely to have any effect on the future of storytelling beyond how realistically filmmakers can animate water.

This still does not make Avatar: Fire and Ash a bad movie. Given the above ingredients, it would be an unqualified success from any other director. But the massive expectations tied to such a massive production leaves it wanting. Because if this, like its precursors, cracks the list of most successful movies ever made, you’d want to have a reason to remember it.