{"id":351876,"date":"2025-12-16T14:26:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T14:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/351876\/"},"modified":"2025-12-16T14:26:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T14:26:07","slug":"avatar-fire-and-ash-review-witchy-new-sex-interest-cant-save-this-gigantically-dull-hunk-of-nonsense-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/351876\/","title":{"rendered":"Avatar: Fire and Ash review \u2013 witchy new sex interest can\u2019t save this gigantically dull hunk of nonsense | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

On and on and on it goes. The planet-sized movie franchise of Avatar continues to spin massively in the cosmos \u2013 yet without affecting the tides in any other world. Maybe Avatar is the cosmos and its originator James Cameron<\/a> is the new L Ron Hubbard; the creator, or rather prophet, of a new belief system involving big blue creatures with pointy ears that flap and twitch when they talk, to whom we will all one day be required to bow down when they float past. And while the rest of the cinema industry has quietly abandoned 3D without ever quite admitting it, theatres showing James Cameron\u2019s giant new three-hour hunk of nonsense are still handing out the 3D specs to the customers.<\/p>\n

The first film was about human invaders seeking to exploit and colonise the weird tall blue Na\u2019vi people in another galaxy for their mineral resources by piloting \u201cavatar\u201d replicants into their midst. One of these pilots was Cpl Jake Sully, played by Sam Worthington, who fell in love with Neytiri, played by Zoe Salda\u00f1a<\/a>, and stayed behind as a Na\u2019vi \u2013 thus infuriating his commanding officer, Col Miles Quaritch, played by Stephen Lang, who since then has died in battle but is now resurrected as a Na\u2019vi avatar, looking scarily as if Vinnie Jones had joined the Blue Man Group. Quaritch\u2019s teen son Spider (Jack Champion) has turned against him and lives with Jake and Neytiri as their adoptive child. In the second film, the Na\u2019vi people found a new world of water. Now in this third film they face the new element of \u2026 fire. For the proposed fourth and fifth films, they will presumably tackle earth and wind.<\/p>\n

Witchy \u2026 Varang (Oona Chaplin) in Avatar: Fire And Ash. Photograph: 20th Century Studios\/PA<\/p>\n

So the Na\u2019vi have come into contact with a new and apparently quite unexpected leader: Varang, played by Oona Chaplin, who provides the film with a kind of witchy sex interest. She is the leader of the Mangkwan clan, who live in a volcano and are possessed by the spirit of fire and ash, a fierce destructive belief that survival can only be achieved by dominance. The bullish Quaritch makes common cause with Varang in his need to divide and subdue the Na\u2019vi and gain revenge over Jake, whose treachery he can\u2019t forgive, and so he gives Varang weapons. The film makes it clear with a post-coital shot that they are having bedroom relations, to which the only response is a mixture of \u201cwow\u201d and \u201ceww\u201d.<\/p>\n

As ever, the look of this film is impressive and yet strange. Billions upon billions of pixels have been crunched to create its huge, infinitesimally detailed digital world. Like Middle-earth, it is probably the key to the franchise\u2019s great success but, presented as it is in motion-smoothed high-definition, it looks to me like a \u201cmaking of\u201d featurette projected on to the white cliffs of Dover. And when ordinary human faces appear, they seem bizarrely out of context, as if Photoshopped in, like seeing American movie stars\u2019 faces on a poster advertising a panto. Edie Falco<\/a> again plays the general, her face set in an unvarying expression of pop-eyed annoyance at everything that presents itself to her senses. As an actor, she probably thinks it\u2019s the only way to get through this. Jemaine Clement has a cameo that oddly humanises the film.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

What we are heading for is yet another mighty struggle between the Na\u2019vi and the evil human invaders, the \u201cpink-skins\u201d, and (as ever) it needs to be conveniently resolved by calling on the assistance of huge undersea creatures whose presence certainly levels the playing field. There are, admittedly, some dramatic moments that prevent this third Avatar<\/a> from being quite the bland screensaver the second one was: we get an Abraham-and-Isaac-type crisis that makes Jake question what leadership really is, and also a Holmes-v-Moriarty-at-the-Reichenbach-Falls-type confrontation. Yet audiences may find Quaritch\u2019s decision-making a touch eccentric, and the beginning of the fourth film is now going to be bogged down with a long and contrived explanation about what happened to him. Avatar is as gigantically uninteresting and colossally impervious to criticism as ever: a vast, blank edifice that placidly repels objection.<\/p>\n

Avatar: Fire and Ash is out on 18 December in Australia and 19 December in the UK and US.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On and on and on it goes. The planet-sized movie franchise of Avatar continues to spin massively in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":351877,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,344],"class_list":{"0":"post-351876","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351876\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/351877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}