Avatar: Fire and Ash

I guess this is the best of the Avatar movies? They're all pretty much the same, but this one finally has a decent antagonist! (Well, for a little while anyway). James Cameron's Avatar pictures are the biggest box-office hits of all time, yet I don't know a single person who really likes them. Still, even in a year where I permitted myself to skip movies I knew I wouldn't like, there was no way I wasn't gonna see the third Avatar.

What sucks most about Avatar (aside from its meandering, shallow, mildly offensive, and utterly derivative premise and story) is that it has a completely nothing protagonist played (sorry, Sam) by a spectacularly unexciting leading man, and two of the most annoyingly one-dimensional antagonists of all time. The one played by Giovanni Ribisi (not sorry, Giovanni) may be the single most annoyingly written and performed bad guy in the history of cinema. What made the sequel Avatar: The Way of Water, more satisfying was that the main character, Jake Sully, was less central to the story, leaving room for more interesting supporting characters to emerge. The water-based environments also felt much fresher and more distinct than the jungle scenes from the first movie. Giovanni Ribisi was hardly in the film at all, and Stephen Lang's Colonel Miles Quaritch was developed into maybe a one-and-a-half-dimensional villain.

Avatar: Fire and Ash finally gives us an alien worthy of appearing in the most successful sci-fi series of all time. Her name is tsahik Varang, the leader of the volcano-dwelling Na'vi clan who have rejected the harmonious religion of the Na'vi and harnessed the power of fire to wreak havoc on the rival clans. She becomes Colonel Quaritch's lover and forms an alliance with the evil human "sky people." Looking and moving like a cross between Grace Jones and a Velosaraptor, Varang commands the screen. I had no idea who played Varang (since the good IMAX theater in my area had a defective DCP that didn't play the end credits), but when I looked her up, I discovered she was played by Oona Chaplin, the daughter of actor Geraldine Chaplin and cinematographer Patricio Castilla, granddaughter of Charlie Chaplin, and great-granddaughter of Eugene O'Neill. That's a hell of a pedigree for playing a sexy space savage, but I guess that's what it takes to make the greatest movie spectacle of the age feel even the least bit spectacular.

Unfortunately, while Varang seems like she's gonna elevate the series to something worthy of its status, she gets quickly relegated to Quaritch's sidekick so that the movie can get back to its tired father-son themes just in time for the inevitable bloated third-act mega-battle sequence. This climax is a bit better than the previous two "final battles," though it still has one comically inept narrative line that attempts something spiritual. It's very telling that even in this movie's most serious attempts to be mystical and sacred, the characters still call each other "bro" and say things like, "Let's do this!"

Do I need to talk about the 3D and the on-again-off-again high-frame-rate shooting? No, I yammered on about it enough when reviewing the last movie. Instead, I'll just share that I host a movie trivia night, and last week we did a round of questions about fictional planets in sci-fi movies that have more creative names than Pandora. I wrote in the intro to the round that James Cameron has recently suggested that if this movie doesn't do as well as the prior installments—which broke box-office records as literally the most financially successful movies of all time—that this might be his last visit to planet Pandora. I assumed this would get a few chuckles, but the roar of cheers and shouts of things like "Fuck Avatar!" really seemed to capture the sentiment around this odd compulsion we all seem to have, and resent, that we must go see these disappointing films before and pay the premium ticket price to experience them in IMAX cinemas. It's a wild phenomenon, but I can say that, while I still don't think these movies are very good, I am glad I didn't miss Avatar: Fire and Ash. If nothing else, it was at least a hell of a lot better than One Battle After Another by every conceivable measure.