Avatar: Fire and Ash’s bum-numbing 197 minutes is saved by wild new villain

The bum-numbing Avatar: Fire and Ash proves no film needs to be 197 minutes long.

While the movie keeps things surprisingly pacey and is, of course, a visual treat for the eyes, there was no getting away from the fact I was starting to feel quite uncomfortable at the three-hour mark.

From this, you may gather that James Cameron’s Avatar threequel, coming three years after Avatar: The Way of Water, didn’t keep me enthralled all the way through – and I’m disappointed to admit that.

In 2022, The Way of Water seemed like the sequel no one wanted, coming 13 long years after the original and surely confirming that we were over Cameron’s blue nine-foot and three-fingered aliens.

But with so much more introduced of Pandora and its Na’vi, as well as the film’s new approach and storylines, I was happy to be proven wrong.

For Fire and Ash, we don’t experience that same reinvigoration or match those same narrative highs – sections of the screenplay feel a bit copy and paste here – so I’m fascinated to see how this performs at the box office, given the record-breaking combined haul of the first two: over $5.2billion.

We rejoin the Sully family one year on from the devastating loss of son and brother Neteyam in The Way of Water’s climactic battle against the resource-hungry humans of the RDA, who are mining Pandora for Unobtanium.

For Fire And Ash, the focus is starting to shift more onto the second generation of Sullys as Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) plays occasional narrator while he grapples with the grief and guilt over the loss of his older brother.

He longs to support this parents, Jake and Neytiri (Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldaña, impressively committed to their performances as ever), on the frontline in the fight to save Pandora and their adopted home with the Metkayina clan, but must also watch out for sisters Kiri and Tuk (Sigourney Weaver and Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), as well as adopted human brother Spider (Jake Champion).

However, the dangers are deadlier than ever before once a new, aggressive Na’vi tribe – the Mangkwan clan – ally with Jake’s enemy and old commander, Quaritch (Stephen Lang).

As Mangkwan leader Varang, Oona Chaplin is the best thing about Fire and Ash, eating up the screen with her simmering rage. She upends the usually peaceful inter-relations of the Na’vi and brings a welcome boost of unpredictable energy.

It helps excuse some of the similar back and forth in plot terms to The Way of Water between the RDA and the Sullys, with both Jake and Spider – Quaritch’s biological son – targets once more, before it all builds to a huge climactic battle (again).

With this, Avatar: Fire and Ash could be the film where the wider audience starts to drop away, losing patience for both the plot’s digressions and sense of holding back – Fire and Ash feels like the bridge film to something even grander for Cameron’s hoped-for Avatar 4 and 5.

It also must be emphasised that Avatar: Fire and Ash is still visually, absolutely stunning – the water, the skin texture, the Na’vi facial expressions (you can see, more and more, those tiny nuances that animate the faces of the actors in real life). And this type of tireless, ground-breaking work that goes into the film’s VFX could easily be taken for granted when nothing else is touching it in cinema.

Avatar: Fire and Ash could have withstood a pretty monster edit and still delivered all the plot points it needed to – but gargantuan runtimes have hardly interfered with Cameron’s success previously.

Avatar: Fire and Ash is in cinemas from Friday, December 19.

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