Fire cults and burning banshees: has Avatar: Fire and Ash sent Pandora all the way to hell?

The Guardian

2 days ago

Say what you like about James Cameron, but the man has somehow made three films, umpteen extraterrestrial biomes, and one endlessly grieving smurf wolf pack out of the phrase 'don't touch that tree'. Now, the veteran sci-fi film-maker returns with Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third instalment in cinema's shiniest blue 3D eco fable. And from a preview of the trailer (to be released before showings of The Fantastic Four: First Steps this weekend) this is going to be yet another jaw-dropping, box-office smashing triumph of elemental, stereoscopic worldbuilding – or possibly a very long and very heavy bioluminescent deforestation story, depending on your point of view.
Where The Way of Water took us out to sea to commune with whales who cry in subtitles, Fire and Ash drags us into the scorched heart of Pandora's volcanic badlands. Here we meet the Ash People – an angry, soot-streaked Na'vi clan who appear to have spent the last two films building up a healthy mistrust of outsiders. Imagine running into the scariest-looking Great Plains warriors Hollywood ever dreamed up, then dipping them in tar and relocating them to Mordor. They ride screaming banshees through smoke clouds, and if the trailer is anything to go by, they've had just about enough of Sam Worthington's Jake Sully, his adoptive family and the entire colonial project of humanity in general.
Which is why it's a little strange to see Stephen Lang's Colonel Miles Quaritch, or at least the reborn recombinant that carries the returning villain's memories, apparently sporting the same scarlet war paint as these newcomers to the franchise. Have the Ash People been conned by humanity into fighting their Na'vi brethren, or are they just the latest poor fools to fall victim to humankind's time-honoured tradition of co-opting Indigenous resistance to fight its proxy wars?
Either way, this is a first glimpse of Fire and Ash that in terms of sheer scale, spectacle and blue-on-blue action looks likely to match anything the series has so far delivered. Oona Chaplin's Varang, leader of the new clan, tells a terrified Kiri (the Na'vi born from the dormant Avatar left behind by Sigourney Weaver's late Grace Augustine) that her goddess 'has no dominion here', which must be a pretty scary thing to hear when you've spent your entire life communing with Eywa-infused floating jellyfish. The Sullys appear to be caught up in their own family conflict, and at one point Sully basically tells Zoe Saldaña's Neytiri to stop trying to solve all their life problems with arrows and screaming.
It is all incredibly intense and unapologetically Cameron. Yet there's a nagging feeling that if everyone on Pandora would just put aside their problems and try to get along, the extrasolar moon is such a gorgeous vision of eco-spiritual luxury real estate (if you'll forgive the Trumpian gaze) that they could probably all do quite well financially from low-impact glow-in-the-dark wellness tourism.
Surely this is the sort of place that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are really trying to get to with all those expensive, celebrity-strewn missions to the 'edge of space'. Or perhaps that's just where Cameron is planning to take us with the next episode – a scorching allegory for climate guilt, where hordes of spiritually curious billionaires arrive at Eywa's doorstep in 3D-printed linen and wide-brimmed hats, demanding personalised banshee rides and artisan root-based cleansing rituals. It will be the final defeat of the Na'vi – not by war, but by a full season of White Lotus: Pandora, starring Amy Adams as a well-meaning but culturally disastrous grief yogi who accidentally destroys the Tree of Souls with her Tesla-branded personal eco-hoverpod.
In the meantime, Avatar: Fire and Ash. If you liked the last two movies, this one will most likely boil your eyeballs and your conscience in roughly equal measure. If you thought the whole thing was a load of weepy, whale-whispering space guff, you'll probably spend three hours wondering why the trees are crying again.