Avatar: Fire and Ash movie review – stunning visuals carry breathless third instalment

4/5 stars\nJames Cameron is back, and so is Pandora. The director’s 2009 megahit Avatar and its 2022 sequel Avatar: The Way of Water remain two of the highest-grossing films of all time, both gargantuan 3D-rendered sci-fi epics that transport audiences to the forests and oceans of a faraway planet.\nHow you will react to Avatar: Fire and Ash (also known as Avatar 3) is very much dependent on your feelings towards its predecessors.\nIn this beautiful bioluminescent land that is a wonder of visual effects, Cameron returns us to the world of the blue-skinned Na’vi creatures, as well as Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), the ex-Marine who crossed over and now lives with his indigenous family.\n\n\nTrue to Sully’s promise that “this world goes much deeper than you imagine”, the film moves beyond the Reef people introduced in The Way of Water – including Kate Winslet’s pregnant, free-diving character Ronal – to reveal a more primal group: the volcanic-land-dwelling Mangkwan clan.\nSully’s former employers, the profiteering RDA, are desperate to colonise the planet, regardless of the atmosphere’s toxicity to humans. With Sully labelled “a traitor to the human race”, the unhinged Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) once again leads the charge.\nQuaritch forges an alliance with Varang (Oona Chaplin, who is excellent), the hissing leader of the Mangkwan – even introducing her to military hardware while she intoxicates him with a hallucinogen in one of the film’s more amusing scenes.\nQuaritch is also out to get his son Spider (Jack Champion), adopted by Jake and his Na’vi partner Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), who has survived on Pandora so far through a breathing apparatus.\n\nMeanwhile, the RDA is gearing up to attack the very core of the planet’s ecosystem – the hyper-intelligent whale-like species known as the Tulkun – as Cameron rams home, with little subtlety, mankind’s penchant for savaging Mother Nature.\nRunning at a colossal 3 hours and 17 minutes, Fire and Ash is not for the faint of heart. It bombards the viewer with hyperkinetic, swooping aerial shots as Sully and company take to the skies and do battle. The film boasts far more action than The Way of Water, which feels like a meditative soak in comparison.\nAt times, it is overwhelming, but there is a propulsive energy to Fire and Ash that keeps you invested – even if it comes nowhere near a Cameron classic like Aliens.\nThe Avatar arc has always been more melodramatic than sophisticated, but it is hard to deny the film’s visual pleasures. Wallowing in the wonders of Pandora, Cameron and his VFX artists still have the skill to make us care about this psychedelic planet and all its living creatures.\nWant more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook\n