One cannot let an Avatar film go by without mentioning Roger Dean’s covers for Yes albums in the 1970s. The reminders are back. Islands floating in nether space. Elongated roots trailing into nothingness. And, as the Italian dance trio Eiffel 65 once had it, blue, da-ba-dee, da-ba-die.
Rarely has anything looked simultaneously so spectacular and so monotonous. It’s like being drowned to drunken death in a lake of curaçao.
For all the millions James Cameron and his team have spent designing new technologies, the Avatar films never fully escape the anxiety of influence. Too many of us, in 2009, thought it funny to call the first film Dances with Smurfs. We begin the third – in many ways, just part two of the second – with possible allusions to a classic English book and its Disney adaptation.
The Sully family are coping indifferently with the death of Neteyam – son of Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoë Saldaña) – in a brutal fight with the coloniser earthlings. Spider (Jack Champion), a human who requires a mask to breathe on Pandora, is very much part of the family, but, after one too many dangerous incidents, they decide to accompany him on a journey to a safer place.
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Get it? It’s The Jungle Book, and Spider is the man cub. Anyway, after some characteristic Avatar faffing, the family find themselves assisted through the frontier by an air-bound clan called the Tlalim. All goes well until a tribe of maniacs, led by the colourful Varang (Oona Chaplin), gather round ahooting, ahollering and afiring arrows. Now, it’s Red River. Now, it’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.
The point of these comparisons is that, at its heart, the Avatar project is a hugely expensive, hugely confusing, hugely huge mechanism for reprocessing stories we first heard long ago. But little has been gained, little has been enhanced. Watching the aerial wagon-train sequence, one finds oneself longing to see the actual western that Cameron will now probably never get to make.
There is an intriguing political twist here – referencing any number of treacherous CIA misadventures – that has the colonisers, again led by the ruthless Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), making common ground with Varang’s subversive rebels, but that political subplot gets lost in the digital crunch and crash. Story is just a drag on all that audiovisual indulgence.
This isn’t quite what Marshall McLuhan meant when he said the medium is the message. It would be better to say the medium is the core, the heart, the soul of the Avatar saga. Why, as a million reviews have asked, has the most successful franchise ever (on a dollar-earned-per-film basis, anyway) not given the world more recognisable characters, situations and dialogues? Because audiences are flocking to experience the medium: the digital effects, the next-level 3D, the colossal sound.
All those things are in place, but the screenplay, by Cameron, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, is again a sprawling mass of pulp inanities and video-game cliches. Not surprisingly for a film that stretches to three hours and 17 minutes, the pacing, despite the surfeit of action, has all the breakneck oomph you’d expect from an Antiques Roadshow marathon.
One cannot even, in good faith, praise the actors for putting in a bit of effort. Perhaps they are doing just that. But so buried are most in the technological goo that they may as well be voicing characters in an animation.
And yet. All indicators suggest Fire and Ash is set, like its predecessors, to make a squidillion dollars. The medium is sufficiently impressive to satisfy a great mass of moviegoers. Good luck to them. Something has to keep the lights on.
In cinemas from Friday, December 19th
