New Goo Review
by Miles Klee
Some friends and I survived all three hours and seventeen minutes of Avatar: Fire and Ash. Following much-needed bathroom trips, we gathered outside the theater to howl about the nonsense we’d just sat through. The longer this franchise drags on, the more it strains under the weight of its ponderous lore, impossible physics, repetitive character dynamics, and distracting details.
This is a crowd whose love language has always been argument, and films provide premium fodder for our low-stakes, high-decibel disputes. But in this case, all we could do was ask each other to explain how any element of James Cameron’s fantasy world was supposed to work, or what we were meant to understand from its supposed new revelations. (I’m sorry, but even a leadership council of elder whales—excuse me, tulkun—would not wear scarves and capes. They live in the ocean. Be serious.)
For all the valid criticisms I’ve read and heard about this sequel, there’s one my fellow AMC A-List members and I converged on that I hadn’t previously encountered. Despite Cameron’s focus on family at the atomic scale and anthropocene ecological collapse on the macro level, the sweet spot of the Avatar series should logically fall somewhere in the middle: it’s a tale of colonialism, of how the human madness for more and more always blinds them to the richer beauty of the people and places they ruthlessly exploit.
I would argue that Ursula K. LeGuin’s 1972 novel The Word for World Is Forest is a far superior meditation on the same theme, with some of Avatar’s dramatic tensions parallel to those found in the book. The difference is that Cameron hasn’t done the calculus on his clash of civilizations. The conflict is merely assumed, a reverse deus ex machina that prefigures the action instead of concluding it.
Keep us breathing fire!
For $3/month you can read this whole post and get our weekdaily newsletter too!