Review - Avatar: Fire and Ash

[The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!]

There’s a sequence approximately two-thirds of the way through Avatar: Fire and Ash so deftly orchestrated that I nearly levitated out of my seat as it unfolded. After protagonist Jake Sully is arrested and imprisoned by the corrupt forces of Earth’s imperialist military (this is not spoiler, by the way; Jake’s perp walk appears in even the earliest available marketing materials), three separate, uncoordinated rescue attempts converge in a gloriously anarchic display of meticulously choreographed chaos: explosive arrows ignite industrial refineries, gunships reduce heavy machinery to twisted heaps of scrap metal, and winged Na’vi mounts navigate narrow tunnels that make the Death Star trench look positively roomy. What would have been visually incoherent in the hands of a lesser director borders on poetic with James Cameron at the helm; he grounds the action by clearly defining the geography and emphasizing the emotional stakes. That, I think, is his greatest strength as a storyteller: he makes immaculate craftsmanship seem effortless.

I should mention at this point that this is probably my favorite installment in the series to date—not because it feels particularly radical or innovative compared to its predecessors, but precisely because it doesn’t. By now, all the requisite narrative context has been firmly established; the audience is thoroughly familiar with the setting, characters, and “lore.” Cameron has nothing more to introduce—and, consequently, nothing left to prove. This lends the movie an atmosphere of unshakeable confidence that pervades every frame; the plot hits the ground running and never lets up on the gas, dispensing with unwieldy exposition and convoluted technobabble, instead trusting the universal themes, archetypes, and iconography to keep the viewer oriented, invested, and engaged.

Gradually, the qualities that made the franchise so appealing in the first place are distilled and codified. I’d never given it much thought before, but Cameron really does bottle the perfect blend of cinematic sensibilities: whereas the premise is pure pulp in the tradition of Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs (how else would you describe an old fashioned adventure that features a bewitching warrior priestess ruling over the inhabitants of a volcanic wasteland?), the style more closely resembles the sort of epic, ambitious spectacle typically reserved for “prestige” blockbusters—in other words, the best of both worlds. The tone likewise strikes a delicate balance between simplistic sentimentalism and moral complexity; although Cameron is a sincere romantic at heart, he is also courageous enough to allow his heroes to be extremely flawed—hell, a major conflict revolves around Jake and Neytiri seriously weighing the pros and cons of murdering their adopted child!

Many critics have accused Avatar of lacking “cultural impact,” and while I personally find that argument utterly devoid of merit and not worth addressing, my hypothetical rebuttal would be… “So what?” Is the artistic value of a film measured in how often it’s quoted, how frequently it is imitated, or how long it lingers in the general public’s collective memory? For the duration of 197 exquisitely paced minutes, Fire and Ash made me forget that anything existed beyond the borders of the IMAX screen; from my perspective, that qualifies it as a resounding success, regardless of its eventual staying power.