In the middle of Avatar Fire and Ash, I broke. It is a film that lasts 200 minutes, so it probably happened after about an hour and forty minutes, when suddenly something in me snapped. I, who loves long films and prefers maximalist cinema over minimalist cinema. I, who for forty years has admired the filmmaker, trusted him, and waited impatiently for every new film. I, who loved the first Avatar, which lasted 162 minutes, and lived peacefully with Avatar 2, which lasted 192 minutes. After already spending nine hours of my life on the Avatar films, watching the third film filled me with sadness and despair. Because I felt that the director, truly one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of Hollywood in my opinion, had simply gotten lost on the planet Pandora and was wandering helplessly between forests and oceans searching for new ideas.
After the phenomenal success of Avatar in 2009, which was the highest grossing film of all time, the filmmaker announced that he would direct a series of sequels based on the four elements. Water, fire, earth, and air. The previous film was water, and now comes the chapter of fire. In the first two films, the inhabitants of Pandora were busy repelling the invasion of humans who fled Earth and found this planet in order to conquer and settle it, while pushing aside the indigenous race, the Na’vi. In Avatar, this becomes an uprising on a universal scale.
In the new film it turns out that there is another Na’vi tribe on the planet, the Ash People. It is always convenient in sequels to discover tribes and races that were invented only to provide new storylines for a universe you thought was already complete. They are painted in red war colors like fire, and they are not kind and gentle like the Na’vi or the ocean people with blue skin. On the contrary, they are eager to place their hands on the metal weapons of the humans, to stand alongside the well armed invaders, and to fight with them against the natives who oppose their arrival.
If the first two Avatar films presented cinematic universes unlike anything we had seen before and proved that the director is a filmmaker with an exceptional visual and technological vision, Avatar 3 suddenly looks outdated in comparison. The same world, the same characters, and for long stretches, exactly the same situations.
The conflict between humans, who in this cinematic world represent absolute evil, and the good Na’vi now reaches the domestic capsule. A female Na’vi character continues to mourn the death of her son at the end of the previous film. His brother feels guilt over his death, and over the fact that it probably happened because of him. The main hero, a human who rejected human ways and embedded his identity as an avatar into the body of a Na’vi, struggles with what to do about his adopted son, who is entirely human.
Worse than that, thanks to the biological mysticism of Pandora, a hybrid character manages to fuse the boy’s body into the spore filled biosphere of Pandora and turn him into the first human in the universe who can breathe the planet’s air without an oxygen mask. This is bad, because if all humans learn how to perform this trick, the human invasion of Pandora will only intensify. Then, in a scene that looks like an alien version of a biblical sacrifice story, the hero decides that in order to prevent the boy from becoming a prototype of a human who can live on Pandora without oxygen, he must take him deep into the forest and slaughter him. It ends exactly like the biblical story. The script is credited to five writers, and therefore there are entire scenes that look as if they were written by different people who came and went throughout the long years of production.
But just like the previous film from three years ago, after two and a quarter hours, when there is still one hour left, something happens that is impossible to ignore. The film finally begins. All the situations and dilemmas and arguments and conflicts and conversations have been laid out, all the metaphors and images have been clarified, and now everything finally starts to move.
In Avatar 2 this was truly impressive, excellent and thrilling naval battle scenes that made it clear why this film needed to be made. The final act of Avatar 3 is too similar to that of the previous film, but bigger. More warships, bigger ships, and more and more creatures, in a battle scene where all of Pandora’s nature, from sea animals to birds of the sky, rises up to fight the invaders. This is the moment when I remembered what a good director he is, a director of spectacles who knows how to work on the largest possible canvas and uses every millimeter of the three dimensional IMAX screen.
In fact, it was again so impressive that when leaving the theater I admitted with embarrassment and defeat that I would be happy to watch Avatar 4 as well, in which, as promised last year, the plot will move from Pandora to the dying Earth. This is the earth element in the series of natural elements in the film titles.
The film is so long and repetitive that it allowed me time to think. For example, to roll the film’s name around in my head and think how nice it is that the Hebrew translation creates an alliteration in which all the words begin with the same letter. And that in English one could call it Fire and Ash. And about the fact that a child who was born when the first Avatar was released is celebrating a sixteenth birthday this year, and it is interesting to wonder whether Avatar is interesting to him at all.
The director, now in his seventies, has been working on these films for at least twenty years. While at the beginning I could still find logic in his obsession with this series, by the third film I already felt that he was stuck on a commissioned project that he is committed to, but no longer has the energy for. It was recently announced that he has begun working on another film as a director, an adaptation of a nonfiction book dealing with testimonies of people who survived the atomic bomb in Japan in 1945. It is unclear whether we will need to wait until the end of the Avatar series for this project, or whether he will manage to make another film in between.
Avatar 4 is scheduled for release in 2029, on the twentieth anniversary of the first film in the series. I can only wish for us, the audience, that we will get to see another film from this filmmaker that does not take place in the cinematic universe of Pandora. After all, time is not on his side. One of the producers of Titanic and the three Avatar films passed away a year ago at the age of sixty three after battling cancer. It would be terrible if the director wastes the rest of his life making more and more Avatar films and eventually dies on Pandora. His fans, and they are not growing in number, are waiting for something new from him, because at this moment the filmmaker who always invented and always renewed is, for the first time, making a film we have already seen.