Avatar: Fire and Ash

As a sizzle reel for the next wave in CG-animation technology, Avatar: Fire and Ash delivers, with one eye-popping sequence after another that displays the seemingly infinite possibilities of combining human actors with motion-capture characters in settings that appear natural even when they’re not. As the third chapter of a story involving characters and an ongoing struggle that is meant to be moving, or even engaging, this latest chapter once again falls short.

Director and co-writer James Cameron has a lot to say about colonization and guns and the environment and, while that messaging is noble and right-minded, it’s delivered with blunt force. The 3D here is stunning, but the metaphors come at your face with the same propulsion as the images.

Jake Sully (voiced by Sam Worthington) and his Na’vi family are regrouping after the events of the previous movie, in which his oldest son lost his life. Matriarch Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) continues her mourning while guilt-ridden middle son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) looks for ways to step up. As human colonizers continue their assault on the planet, Jake reverts to his former tactics as a soldier while the rest of his family seeks answers elsewhere, with Kitty (Sigourney Weaver) attempting to tap into the planet’s very essence and maternal spirits and Lo’ak reaching out to the ocean’s powerful whale-like creatures.

Meanwhile, Sully’s arch-nemesis Quaritch (Stephen Lang) — or his clone, anyway — forms an alliance with an apostate cult, led by the striking Varang (Oona Chaplin, Game of Thrones), that doesn’t worship Na’vi’s mother spirits. A slinky and ferocious creature who suggests an avant-garde supermodel moonlighting as a tribal chieftain, Varang pops in Avatar: Fire and Ash, both because her red-and-black-on-white color scheme so clearly differs from the blue-on-blue of the other characters and because her seductive and sadistic brand of evil clashes with the huggy communality of our heroes.

But not even the introduction of this evil clan, known as the Mangkwan, does much to lift the narrative torpor here, since Cameron and his collaborators haven’t introduced them with a motivation beyond “they want to kill everybody,” which makes them not all that different from the human invaders, whose weapons of mass destruction the Mangkwan covet. Whatever tensions are introduced build up to a third-act clash that’s the same as the third-act clash in both previous Avatar movies, with the bad Earthlings seeking to massacre the planet’s inhabitants, and those inhabitants fighting back in ways the humans don’t see coming.

But oh, the visuals: You can see the forests and the trees, and cinematographer Russell Carpenter’s 3D cameras make them lush and forbidding and enveloping. (We also get a cool new undersea peril that no doubt has some official Na’vi name, but “killer calamari” is as good a descriptor as any.) Apart from the film’s unfortunate habit of dipping into jarring high-frame-rate crispness, often for a few seconds at a time in the middle of an otherwise engrossing action sequence, the craft on display is breathtaking, and worthy of better scripts.

Apart from Chaplin, who’s electrifying whether she’s moving or striking a pose, the cast is mostly subsumed in digital effects. Edie Falco and Giovanni Ribisi are wildly overqualified and should be earning combat pay for the amount of standing around and barking at screens they are called upon to do, and this third Avatar finds an answer to the question, “What can’t Sigourney Weaver do?” and it’s “play a tentative, hesitant teenager via motion capture.” (She’s absolutely killing it, however, in Dust Bunny, also out in theaters now.)

If you’re here for the unintentional laughs, Avatar: Fire and Ash delivers a few, from an absurd childbirth-on-the-battlefield sequence to even more subtitled whale conversations (in the Papyrus typeface that Cameron will apparently not be talked out of using).

Cameron threatens-promises two more chapters of this saga, and it may be too late to hope for any narrative fireworks from him at this point. May the technological advances continue, and may they eventually benefit filmmakers who actually know how to create characters and plots.

Director: James Cameron
Screenwriter: James Cameron & Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver; story by James Cameron & Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver & Josh Friedman & Shane Salerno
Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Oona Chaplin, Cliff Curtis, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Edie Falco, David Thewlis, Jemaine Clement, Giovanni Ribisi, Britain Dalton, Jamie Flatters, Trinity Jo-Li Bliss, Jack Champion, Brendan Cowell, Bailey Bass, Filip Geljo, Duane Evans, Jr., and Kate Winslet
Producers: James Cameron, Jon Landau
Executive producers: Richard Baneham, Rae Sanchini, David Valdes
Director of photography: Russell Carpenter
Production design: Dylan Cole, Ben Procter
Editing: Stephen Rivkin, Nicolas de Toth, John Refoua, Jason Gaudio, James Cameron
Music: Simon Franglen
Sound design: Gwendolyn Yates Whittle, Brent Burge, supervising sound editors
Production companies: 20th Century, Lightstorm Entertainment
In English
195 minutes