Any filmmaker who asks a moviegoer to sit still for more than three hours had better have a really good reason. James Cameron does not. I lost an afternoon to the latest AVATAR movie and I can’t get it back.
Let the record show that I fully appreciate the visual marvels Cameron has at his command. The characters and settings are so perfectly rendered that they put some earlier attempts at motion capture to shame. The integration of flesh-and-blood characters with the animated ones is absolutely seamless. Cameron doesn’t like using gimmicky 3-D but the opening minutes of this epic do serve to show off the dimensionality in a pleasing way.
Then there is the matter of the bloated screenplay, which is credited to the director, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver.
For the first portion of the film I was confused, not having revisited either Avatar or its follow-up, Avatar: The Way of Water as preparation for this screening. The midsection of the film bored me to tears. And unless I’m going senile I would swear that the climactic fight and chase sequence, which has its fair share of excitement, is just like the one in the last picture.
Again we have some gems of dialogue, ranging from “Don’t shoot anyone you love” to “Beers are on me,” shouted by one of the bad guys in a Henry V moment of cheering on his troops.
I know I am in trouble when my mind starts wandering from the movie in front of me. To paraphrase Pauline Kael, it would be a good film to read by if there was just enough light. I wouldn’t recommend Avatar: Fire and Ash to anyone. It’s a tremendous waste of time.
