‘Avatar: Fire & Ice’ Will Find Very Targeted Appeal

By: Philip Sayblack

This coming May, 20th Century Studios will bring the third installment of its Avatar franchise to home physical release.  The movie, which is streaming now via Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV and Fandango at Home, is an over the top work that simply put, will only appeal to the most devoted fans of this movie series.  There is sadly little to say to the positive about this movie, save perhaps for its production.  This will be discussed shortly.  That is sadly not saying much considering the expansive nature of this three-hour-plus story, even with all of the bonus content that tries to apologize for the story.  Speaking of the bonus content, it is perhaps about the only other positive, if one can even say that three plus hours of extras is a positive.  Keeping all of this in mind, this latest installment of the Avatar series is, again, a presentation whose appeal is going to be extremely limited.
Avatar: Fire and Ash, the latest installment in 20th Century Studios’ ongoing movie franchise, is not a presentation for everyone.  Nor is it a movie that is going to appeal to everybody.  The one thing that perhaps will appeal widely among audiences is its production.  Throughout the course of its three hour, 17 minute run time, the production deserves its share of applause.  This is primarily in regard to its look and sound on Blu-ray and 4K UHD.  Both platforms look and sound quite impressive in their playback on a 4K UHD television.  From the scenes beneath the wave to those in the skies of Pandora to the many other parts of the planet, the colors are rich and the details of every landscape are just as vivid.  The sound, from the soundtrack to the general sound effects, is just as immersive.  Audiences do not even need a sound bar to be immersed by the movie’s sound.  Keeping all of this in mind, the overall production that went into this movie is its main saving grace. 
While the production values exhibited throughout Avatar: Fire and Ash deserves some applause, it is sadly about all that audiences have to appreciate here.  The story here is so expansive that it is easy to feel the desire throughout to just hit the fast forward button.  That is because it feels like the writing team, headed by the series’ creator, James Cameron, did not seem to know exactly where they wanted to go from one point to the next.  At the center of the whole is the human boy, Spider. Spider lives among the Na’vi, just like Sully did in the franchise’s first movie and not to spoil too much, but he ends up being accepted by the Na’vi in the end, essentially making this movie just a rehashing of the series’ first movie.  As the story opens, it picks up shortly after the events of the conclusion of the second movie.  Jake [Sully] and his wife decide that Spider cannot live among them because he is not one of them and that he would never be one of them.  He would only draw the humans to them time and again, according to Jake.  So, they decide to let another group of Na’vi take Spider back to his own people, but Jake’s biological children resist, leading the whole family to join the voyage, which quickly turns bad after yet another tribe, the so-called Ash People, attacks the traders, who were taking the family along for their voyage.
This is where things really become problematic.  The Sully family is separated as a result of the Ash People’s raid.  When Jake’s son spots the Ash people attacking his people through the scope of his gun, he cannot bring himself to just shoot and kill them.  This could have ended things nice and quickly, but obviously Cameron was not about to let that happen.  So, as a result, the family ends up on an even more expansive journey that results in the Ash People partnering with the humans to attack the Na’vi.  The “whale hunt” from the second movie is back here, too, though its use does not even become front and center until the third act.  It feels like Cameron and his writing team just added it in because they did not know how to really progress the third act, so they just tossed it in.  It feels like this is just thrown in as a random plot device to bring the Sully family back together for the movie’s big, climactic final battle.  That battle, by the way, plays out so much like the final climactic battle from the series’ first two movies.
The Na’vi obviously come out on top, but here is the thing: Varang, the head of the Ash People, escapes capture and even death and just runs away in the end while Quaritch, the big bad military guy who everyone thought died at the end of the second movie, dies (or so we are led to believe) again this time.
As if everything noted is not enough, there is even more problem with the story as Spider, who could not originally breathe Pandora’s air, loses his mask along the way, and is “saved” by one of his Na’vi “siblings” and miraculously is able to suddenly breathe the planet’s air.  A later diagnosis of what happened leads him to become even more a point of interest for the humans because of his changed physiology.  Yet somewhere along the way, Spider goes back to having to have a mask while he is underwater, but then as the story ends, he is able to breathe like the Na’vi again.  This back and forth for Spider and its impact on his role in the bigger story complicates things even more because it makes this aspect feel contrived in its own right.  All things considered, the story that was crafted for this movie is so all over the place, that a person is going to need a program to know what the heck is going on.  To that end, it drastically detracts from the viewing experience, hurting the presentation all the more.
Knowing how much the story at the heart of this movie does to hurt the presentation, there is perhaps one other “saving grace” (if one even wats to call it that) in the form of the bonus content.  The bonus content’s total run time exceeds three hours itself.  So that along with the movie’s expansive run time means a total run time in excess of six hours.  No one is going to sit that long for all of that.  The bonus content takes audiences deeper in to the creation of this latest Avatar movie, from the special effects to the costumes, to the set design and related concept art, and even various other story elements and more.  It is a lot, simply put, and because it is so much, it is a presentation that, again, only the most devoted fans of this franchise will appreciate.  Everyone else will be able to watch a little bit and get enough.  Keeping this in mind, the bonus content that accompanies Avatar: Fire and Ash works with the movie’s overly expansive story to make the whole a presentation that really only appeal to the noted most devoted of the franchise’s fans.  To that end, this movie is just another typical Hollywood blockbuster whose home release is coming along just in time to give audiences a way to stay indoors as temperatures start to rise nationwide.
Avatar: Fire & Ash, the third entry in director James Cameron’s ongoing Avatar movie franchise, is not a presentation for everyone.  It is a story that will appeal to a very targeted audience base.  This is proven largely through its overly expansive story.  Between the far too faceted primary story and the equally multi-faceted secondary aspects, there is so much going on from beginning to end that this story is just too vast.  It is too much for itself.  The bonus content that accompanies the movie in its home release further expands on that note because of how much time it spends on so many aspects of the movie.  Yes, it adds some background to the movie to say the very least, but it adds so much that people are going to want to only watch but so much in one sitting.  The only real positive is the production.  The movie actually looks and sounds impressive from beginning to end.  The picture and sound are crystal clear but that sadly is not going to be enough to save this movie.  To that end, this latest installment of the Avatar movie franchise is proof of the old adage that just because we can do something does not mean that we necessarily should.
Avatar: Fire & Ash is streaming now.  It is scheduled for home physical release May 19.  More information on this and other titles from 20th Century Studios is available at:
Website: https://20thcenturystudios.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Avatar
Twitter: https://twitter.com/20thcentury

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