I’m not gonna waste your time pretending you need my opinion whether to see AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH or not. If you don’t like these movies, no, don’t bother. If you do, obviously you’re gonna see it, it’s a new AVATAR! A new James Cameron! You’re not a heathen. And he’s still pretty much undefeated. The streak continues.

If I were to offer viewing advice it would be to avoid HFR (high frame rate) projection at all costs. I recklessly decided to see it at my favorite theater (SIFF downtown, f.k.a. Cinerama) despite my hatred for that format, and as soon as it started my heart just sank. When projected in this format, what seems like the majority of the movie is presented with the ugly screen saver sheen of 60-frames-per-second, but it repeatedly switches back to aesthetically pleasing 24 fps and if you’re like me you sigh with relief until it goes back and then you start grumbling to yourself again. It felt like I spent the whole 197 minutes fighting over the remote control with some guy who wants the motion smoothing on, so my level of concentration was not ideal for maybe the first 45 minutes. I was so taken out of the movie that a James Cameron directed air battle dropped dead in front of me like some Stephen Sommers clatter. Should be illegal. I’m never doing HFR again.

For that reason only, this is the least I’ve ever enjoyed any AVATAR movie. But it still got me. I still loved it. Can’t wait to see it in a shittier theater where they’re allowed to present it in the style of a motion picture. My largest criticism of the movie itself is that it’s way more like AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER than WAY OF WATER was like AVATAR. It’s not breaking ground, it’s just continuing. I vaguely remember one of the Beastie Boys saying that they reinvented the wheel for Check Your Head but they only rotated the tires for Ill Communication. Man, I love Ill Communication though.

As long as he’s making the thing look like an old soap opera (in select theaters), might as well give us some melodrama about the ongoing lives of some characters we’ve grown attached to. After the first movies I’m invested in:

*Spider (Jack Champion, FREAKY TALES) and his journey to be accepted by the Sully family and Na’vi culture that raised him even though he’s human and the biological son of their greatest enemy.

*Kiri (Sigourney Weaver portraying a teenage Na’vi) and her unusual abilities and frustration over not being able to connect to her god (and mother?) Eywa.

*Lo’ak (Britain Dalton, DARK HARVEST) and his guilt over his brother’s death and lack of understanding from his dad, not to mention the ongoing controversy with his tulkun (whale) homey Payakan, who has been outcast from his tribe for committing acts of violence, even though it saved them from vicious whalers.

Lo’ak’s dad, and part 1 lead Jake Sully (Sam Worthington, CLASH OF THE TITANS) is a little less central in these sequels. In this one Lo’ak even inherits his narrator duties. But I’m still interested in this ex-human Marine who has physically become Na’vi but taught his kids to say “bro” and use guns. The water-based Metkayina clan who took them in in part 2 won’t let them use the guns they find – they say (metaphorically, I think) that using steel poisons you. They would rather he ride the giant Toruk again (the impossible feat that made him the chosen one in part 1), but he says that connecting with the beast turns him into the beast. The abyss stares back into you and all that. I think Cameron is stuck between wanting to be a hippie peacenik and wanting to be a revolutionary. And I get it. I like how much these movies (like T2) wrestle with the idea that violence is corrupting but also maybe necessary. Within this movie the availability of guns almost leads to a suicide and sparks a deadly tribal conflict, among other problems, but also Jake is right that these fucking humans will never stop and might need to get shot. I’m definitely less into guns than Cameron (because I hate them) but I’m not gonna say he’s wrong. South Africa would still have apartheid if nobody was gonna use weapons against them. It’s a tough one.

I felt Neytiri (Academy Award winner Zoe Saldaña, CENTER STAGE) was underserved in WAY OF WATER, and there’s an improvement here in that she gets more things to do and learn, and wears cool mourning makeup and veil instead of repeating the wailing she does in the other two. I do still think she’s comically broad in the portion where she becomes a proud racist, so open and explicit about her bigotry that it tees up Jake for a monologue about how he’s human and his children have five fingers. I really started to think this marriage wasn’t working and that they should split up, but as always their love blooms when they have to go into battle.

Which reminds me – I should mention the story. Jake decides that Spider has to go back to live with their nice earth scientist friends because it’s not safe for him to be out here with finite breathing mask batteries. The Sully kids all agree that “that’s bullshit!,” he’s a member of the family, so as a compromise Jake and Neytiri agree that the whole family can go on the trip to drop him off. They convince Peylak (David Thewlis, THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU) of the Wind Traders to let them fly with his convoy even though they’re wanted terrorists. But the family are separated when the ships are attacked by raiders from the Mangkwan, a.k.a. Ash people, a tribe who live on a volcano, wear cool red and white face paint and reject Eywa. Death metal Na’vi,

It becomes a matter of the kids trying to get safely back to the parents, but meanwhile Quaritch (Stephen Lang, BAND OF THE HAND) shows up and captures Jake for the RDA (his former employers, the earth company ravaging the planet). Remember, Quaritch is Spider’s father, so he and Jake have a truce to save their co-son from Ash people.

Spider, Lo’ak and Kiri are sort of the leads now, while the other characters introduced in WAY OF WATER (such as Kate Winslet’s character Ronal and her kids) have less screen time. It’s nice to see the relationships established last time pay off, but they’re not the focus of this chapter. The most prominent brand new character is Varang (Oona Chaplin, “Perla de las Dunas receptionist,” QUANTUM OF SOLACE), the wicked leader of the Ash people. She has a pair of curved blades that she spins hypnotically, both in battle and while dancing around a fire. She has a bone she uses to blow Pandoran cocaine up people’s noses and give them visions. Okay all that is cool but she also has a thing for plugging into other Na’vi’s braids and short circuiting them. Or just chopping the braids off! A total violation.

For Quaritch it’s love at first sight, but Varang’s not as impressed by him at first. Then he shows her how to use guns and flamethrowers and both of them get really turned on by it. I mean it’s really funny how horny these two are about firepower. They probly jerk off to PREDATOR.

I think this is pretty much Lang’s film; Quaritch really goes on a journey. He starts out where he was last time we saw him: earthling Marine in an avatar body, back from the dead, wants to kill Jake Sully, has a soft spot for his son. Then he has to work with Jake and is surprisingly cool with that, though he’s way more excited to team up with Varang. They’re both Na’vi who hate Na’vi, I guess. He holds her suggestively while she shoots, he gets high with her, he fucks her, we don’t know if just with the braid or other ways too but the implication is undeniable. He calls her “baby” in one part, kind of a Jakesullyism. I knew this was a great movie when he was bringing her into the military compound, letting her boys set up their tents there, making General Ardmore (Edie Falco, COP LAND) back down when she calls them savages. Then all the sudden he’s wearing their warpaint, looks like one of them from head to toe. Doesn’t seem to admit that he’s kinda doing what Jake did, that he still wants to kill him for. He’s only willing to go native now that he knows some of the natives are just as bad as he is.

It’s fun to see his fellow-dead-Marine-reborn-in-an-avatar sidekick Wainfleet (Matt Gerald, xXx: STATE OF THE UNION) watch him do all this with some disgust and disappointment. There’s a great moment when Quaritch’s plan to approach the Ash people goes well because he has Wainfleet watching with a sniper rifle, then Quaritch follows Varang into her tent, where he obviously has no coverage at all. Wainfleet is asking “What the fuck?,” but he knows what’s up.

That’s also the scene where Quaritch looks around at all Varang’s TEXAS CHAIN SAW bone sculptures and shit and says, “Cozy.” So that brings up another thing I like – he’s funny! Like when he and Jake interrupt their fight to the death to save Spider, they’re all clinging to a rock, wounded and too exhausted to fight, and Quaritch says, “Awkward.” He’s funny but he’s such an asshole that they’re not going to acknowledge it with a smile or a laugh, even at this moment.

In between all that he has these scenes with Spider and Jake, each of them captive in a cell, but he shows them a little humanity. With Spider he comes in wearing a pullover hoodie, basically trying to be Cool Stepdad. Gives him what I believe is sincere praise, tells him he’s proud of him, tells him about his mother, clearly moves him a little (but doesn’t win him to his side). Maybe giving him a hamburger is one sign he doesn’t get this kid at all.

With Jake he’s not as nice, more gloating about the impending execution, but when Jake takes a hail mary at asking him to open his eyes to Eywa and the N’avi way Quaritch doesn’t entirely dismiss it. He laughs about it but I think he considers it. He’ll get there some day. Maybe he already does before this movie is over. In a way.

I really like how every time I watch the first two AVATARs I get swept into the fantasy worlds of the rain forest or the sea and then the last act hits and every time it’s “oh shit, that’s right, and now they get to fight all those fucking earth assholes with their military hardware!” People always scoffed at AVATAR and I said well, but the Na’vi guy is on the helicopter and just grabs a Marine’s head like it’s a baseball and fucking tosses him and there are 500 other things as cool or cooler in the movie. So I’m sorry, these movies are scientifically proven to rule. like that this one mixes up the structure a little so that there’s a major Na’vi vs. RDA battle more toward the middle. There’s the momentous event of Jake being brought in shackled and paraded around like he’s Osama bin Laden, and the inevitable jailbreak (with three individuals separately trying to bust Jake out) turns into a battle inside the compound. Good shit. Later we get a fun, if not-as-revolutionary-as-last-time battle that includes an escalation of the tulkun vs. whaler boat action, with the addition of a new water creature that I think we can all enjoy seeing snatching and eating dudes.

By the way, I really appreciate that marine biologist Dr. Ian Garvin [Jemaine Clement, M3GAN 2.0] got to sell out nature for the entirety of part 2 before pulling a RETURN-OF-THE-JEDI-Lando in this one. If he’d done it last time I think it would’ve lessened the impact of the message about scientists compromising by working with the wrong financiers.

Like WAY OF WATER, this screenplay is credited to Cameron and DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES writers Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver, story by those three plus Josh Friedman (WAR OF THE WORLDS) and Shane Salerno (SAVAGES). Some people (including those dearest to me) claim Cameron is a good director but bad writer, and if I’m in an argumentative mood I ask them what single word or syllable should be changed in ALIENS or TERMINATOR 2, and why they are trying to get sued by me for ruining perfection. Even the “bad” lines in those are classics – you can pry “if you really wanna shine someone on you say ‘hasta la vista baby’” from my cold, dead hands. Obviously those movies have incredible concepts, structure and storytelling that maybe my friends are taking for granted as part of the writing process. What they don’t like, really, is the occasional bluntness/corniness of his dialogue. I would argue that it’s partly an intentional style, while agreeing that that doesn’t mean you have to like it.

For me, though, the repeated concepts that are part of the Na’vi world view are fuckin great. The “I see you”s. In this one I really noticed the talk of “paths.” This is my path, brother. Or our friends’ path is our path. Jake is always trying to find his path, and ends up making his own. He was a marine grunt. A disabled veteran. A guy filling in for his dead brother on this crazy planet. A spy. A double agent. A chosen one. An actual Na’vi. A guerrilla leader. A dad. A dad who’s learning how to chill out and accept his son who hangs out with violent whales. He’s actually always learning and evolving. I think so far he’s a pretty good role model for macho dudes. Um… most of the time, anyway.

There’s some pretty crazy shit that happens in this one, the most shocking one being (DO I REALLY NEED SPOILER WARNINGS AT THIS POINT?) when Jake out of the blue decides that Neytiri was right, they should murder Spider. Kiri does this whole thing where fungus grows inside the kid and changes his organs to be able to breathe the atmosphere, and Jake knows the RDA wants to reverse engineer it to make colonization easier. I mean, you can guess whether he goes through with it or not but the fact that he does a whole Of Mice and Men thing, really intends to do it, reveals to Spider that he intends to do it… it’s heavy shit, man. On one viewing it felt a little forced for Jake to do that, but the emotions work. What he says at the end… I mean, heart-on-his-sleeve James Cameron is one of the James Camerons I love. If you’re too cool for TITANIC maybe you’ll hate this too. I don’t care. It’s your loss. I’m not participating in that.

Bringing these old fantasy and adventure tropes so lushly to cinematic life seems to trick people into not noticing that he’s not saying the same things with them. Lo’ak finally impresses his father by convincing an ancient race of pacifists to change their ways and kill the fuck out of the humans! Kiri, the actual daughter of their precious goddess, finds a way to communicate with all of nature and her message to it is “KILL ALL THE SKY PEOPLE!” Not even “shoot them in the kneecaps.” I like that these are some of the biggest blockbusters of all time but they’re designed to not deliver a nice, comfortable moral. Now the Na’vi have a machine gun, ho ho ho, and it’s a fun story development but it’s not progress for their society. We’re not supposed to be that type of thrilled by it. I would rather the tulkun council not have to huddle underwater and conclude that earthlings are such despicable monsters that it’s time to abandon the code of peace they’ve lived by for thousands of years. The things the natives have to do to fend off the colonizers are yet more desecrations caused by the colonizers, sure to have endless repercussions.

FIRE AND ASH has an end credits song by Miley Cyrus. I think it would be funny if they pulled a Steven-Tyler-playing-an-elf-in-POLAR-EXPRESS and had her appear in the movie as a Na’vi singer. But it’s good that Cameron doesn’t do every stupid thing I think would be funny. Instead he does every stupid (or otherwise) thing he thinks would be cool or beautiful or moving. And most of it works! The man is 71 now and even though we got Scorsese and Eastwood making movies in their eighties we gotta be realistic about how long these ones take before taking it for granted that he’ll really make the two more AVATAR movies he once promised. It was a surprise when it turned out spending more than a decade on one series was his path, but I feel like this is a George Lucas situation. He put himself in the position to make movies nobody else could on a technical level, and he wasn’t gonna waste it on the same thing some other person might’ve done with that ability. So it’s four quadrant spectacle but it’s weird and it’s heartfelt and it’s him. I can’t wait to return to Pandora, Eywa willing.