Avatar: Fire and Ash <\/p>\n
\ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d7 \ue9d7 \ue9d7 <\/p>\n
Director: James Cameron<\/p>\n
Cert: 12A<\/p>\n
Starring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Salda\u00f1a, Sigourney Weaver, Oona Chaplin, Stephen Lang, Kate Winslet, Jack Champion, Giovanni Ribisi, Edie Falco, Jemaine Clement, Cliff Curtis<\/p>\n
Running Time: 3 hrs 17 mins<\/p>\n
One cannot let an Avatar film go by without mentioning Roger Dean\u2019s covers for Yes albums in the 1970s. The reminders are back. Islands floating in nether space. Elongated roots trailing into nothingness. And, as the Italian dance trio Eiffel 65 once had it, blue, da-ba-dee, da-ba-die. <\/p>\n
Rarely has anything looked simultaneously so spectacular and so monotonous. It\u2019s like being drowned to drunken death in a lake of cura\u00e7ao.<\/p>\n
For all the millions James Cameron and his team have spent designing new technologies, the Avatar films never fully escape the anxiety of influence. Too many of us, in 2009, thought it funny to call the first film Dances with Smurfs. We begin the third \u2013 in many ways, just part two of the second \u2013 with possible allusions to a classic English book and its Disney adaptation. <\/p>\n
The Sully family are coping indifferently with the death of Neteyam \u2013 son of Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zo\u00eb Salda\u00f1a) \u2013 in a brutal fight with the coloniser earthlings. Spider (Jack Champion), a human who requires a mask to breathe on Pandora, is very much part of the family, but, after one too many dangerous incidents, they decide to accompany him on a journey to a safer place.<\/p>\n
Get it? It\u2019s The Jungle Book, and Spider is the man cub. Anyway, after some characteristic Avatar faffing, the family find themselves assisted through the frontier by an air-bound clan called the Tlalim. All goes well until a tribe of maniacs, led by the colourful Varang (Oona Chaplin), gather round ahooting, ahollering and afiring arrows. Now, it\u2019s Red River. Now, it\u2019s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.<\/p>\n
The point of these comparisons is that, at its heart, the Avatar project is a hugely expensive, hugely confusing, hugely huge mechanism for reprocessing stories we first heard long ago. But little has been gained, little has been enhanced. Watching the aerial wagon-train sequence, one finds oneself longing to see the actual western that Cameron will now probably never get to make. <\/p>\n
There is an intriguing political twist here \u2013 referencing any number of treacherous CIA misadventures \u2013 that has the colonisers, again led by the ruthless Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), making common ground with Varang\u2019s subversive rebels, but that political subplot gets lost in the digital crunch and crash. Story is just a drag on all that audiovisual indulgence.<\/p>\n