Purely Hating on Avatar: Fire and Ash

Avatar: Fire and Ash is the worst thing I have seen in a movie theater in years. To be fair, I have young children, so I don’t get to the theater much. But it was bad enough for me to write a blog about how much I disliked it.

Let’s start off with the positives. A lot of people will love this movie. It is visually striking, the action set pieces are engaging, and it plays on some fan favorite tropes. There were moments of this film I greatly enjoyed and had me questioning my feelings towards the movie. Then characters would open their mouths, and I found my dislike waiting for me.

That's all I got.

Here is your warning: This will contain heavy spoilers. Do not read this if you do not want the plot of Avatar: Fire and Ash spoiled for you. You have been warned.

I have three major critiques of the latest Avatar installment: Immersion, characters, and themes.

Immersion

My gripes about the worldbuilding may seem small and petty to some, but they constantly took me out of immersion and made me question how the world of Pandora and its cultures work.

Starting with the Sully children; why do they all speak like they are from current day United States of America? Each of the Sully children, including Spider, have spent the majority of their lives surrounded by Na’vi people with a Na’vi mother. Their only access points to people from Earth are their father and the few scientists who remained behind in cooperation with the Na’vi. Yet, every other word that comes out of Lo’ak and Spider’s mouth is ‘dude’ or ‘bro’. None of the humans they know, who are all adults, speak like this. Where did they learn how to speak like this? The other Na’vi children don’t.

It would be nearly impossible for these children to maintain the cultural practices of their father’s homeland when surrounded by another culture, especially for when they never experienced Earth culture. Their father isn’t actively passing down these cultural language practices. The closest he gets is military jargon when training them to fight. But instead of embracing the culture of the people they were born amongst, they practice cultural speech that they have no access to.

Continuing with the children, Kiri, the immaculately conceived child of Sigourney Weaver’s character from the first movie, is voiced by Sigourney. She doesn’t affect her voice to sound like a child. She sounds like 76-year-old, New York City born, white woman, Sigourney Weaver. WHY?

Every time she spoke, I found myself saying ‘well, this is a weird choice.’

Now, that I have annoyed myself by remembering these children, I will move onto inconsistencies.

The Na’vi traditions that respect and value the lives of the animals with whom they form bonds only exists sometimes. The dragon-like creatures they fly with are regularly killed in this movie, and none of the characters care much. These are creatures that save their lives throughout the movie and die for them. Their bond and mourning of such deaths was such an important factor of their culture in the first movie. It’s gone for some reason. Now, they only care about a couple of main whale-like creatures named Tulkun.

And just to prove how annoyed I am with the inconsistencies of worldbuilding in this movie, I will give you one last example. Spider, a human left on Pandora, cannot breathe the air without the use of a mask. A third of the way through the movie the lifeforce of the world and goddess, Eywa, weaves a network of mycelia through his body that allows him to breathe. He can no longer survive with the same air as humans. He specifically has to have a mask to help him breath in the same room as humans in multiple scenes.

Fine. I’m on board. He breathes like the Na’vi now. But then, at the end of the film, he takes a breathing mask from a dead human and uses it to breathe underwater. But I thought he couldn’t breathe the same air as humans, dude!!!!

Characters

I could go into specific acting performances that were weak cough cough, Spider, cough cough but that isn’t what I want to focus on. Somehow this three-hour movie felt like too much of the story was left on the cutting room floor, making character arcs feel incomplete. Some of them could have been great.

Starting with Neytiri, she doesn’t get enough screen time for us to see her arc. She is having the unique experience of hating a human she is raising (Spider) and feeling distance with her children because of the traits they demonstrate that are more human. This makes her face her hatred for the people that destroyed her home and killed her son. How do I know this? Jake says so. We see her anger and dislike of Spider, but not once do we see her question her children’s connection with humanity. This would have been interesting to see, but there was no time for it. So Jake says it and she doesn’t deny it.

Colonel Miles Quaritch is also an interesting character arc we don’t get to explore. He has the memories of

his former life as he lives in the body of a Na’vi. His son, Spider, is a human who hates him for his warring. He has a vendetta against Jake Sully, who ended his life as a human in movie #1. For all of this, he is still dedicated to the military. Then he connects with Varang, the Na’vi leader of a cult-like fire clan. They have a sexual relationship and fight together. Then at some point he starts painting his body like he is one of the fire clan. They don’t dig into why he has gone from fatigues to body paint and what his relationship is with this group. Is he using them for power? Is he starting to feel at home with them as opposed to the humans? We don’t know. And I don’t want them to tell me, I want to see it.

Varang, the leader of the cult-like fire clan, is angry at the goddess Eywa for not saving her people when she was young. Now, she is willing to fight with humans to destroy Eywa. That is the extent of her character. We don’t know if she cares for her people or if they are a means to her ends. We don’t know how she amassed power. And we know even less about her people who are portrayed as savages in all the stereotypes of American cinema.

Lastly, Jake Sully. He lectures the Colonel about how much he has learned to see the interconnected world of Pandora, the beauty it holds, and the wonders of its cultures. Then he proceeds to break all traditions they hold sacred and treat his son like a disappointment because he doesn’t follow orders like a soldier. It could be interesting if we explored this dichotomy. But we don’t and his character is just jarring.

There are too many characters with too much going on to do any of them justice.

Themes

I would argue Avatar: Fire and Ash undercuts all of its anti-colonial themes. The first movie was a white savior narrative, and they keep making the same mistake.

I will start small. This movie doesn’t know how to handle hair. Why is Spider wearing his hair in locs (dreadlocks)? I’m not even getting into the problematic nature of white people locing their hair. White people’s hair doesn’t naturally loc like that. It takes lots of consistent work to loc white people’s hair. It just makes no sense. Why delve into the controversy of white people locs? It makes no sense. I can see the argument that he wants to fit in with the Na’vi however he can, but none of them besides Jake Sully have locs and Spider couldn’t possibly maintain that hairstyle.

I am not an expert white people locs, but they are also constantly in water and I’m pretty sure that would mess up those locs.

Speaking of hair and water. Several of the water Na’vi with curly hairstyles get in and out of water, and their hair is the same as if water doesn’t affect tight curls. They go to great lengths to represent so many hair styles, then treat them like they supernaturally don’t get wet.

Most people won’t care about that. Actually, there will be a good chunk of people who don’t care about this section at all, but I continue.

Why do we only care about humans and human-adjacent characters? The only main characters who aren’t human, formerly human, or descended from former humans are sleeping with formerly human Na’vi. The immaculately conceived link to Eywa is a genetic clone of Sigourney Weaver’s character from the first movie. The character who connects so many of these plotlines is Spider, a white kid with locs who calls everyone bro.

This movie that supposedly critiques colonialism (the humans) constantly centers humans. The indigenous people are the victims and the faceless warriors. The Na’vi still rely on a marine who came to colonize them to rally them together to fight for their home.

Listen, I would be a hypocrite to say that white people can’t tell an anti-colonialism story. That’s what I did. But I think it is a dangerous prospect. Most center white experiences or speak over first-hand experiences. Some people may fell I did the latter regardless of my attempts to avoid doing so.

That being said, Avatar as a series is an example of it going wrong. This story undercuts its themes from the casting of so many white voice actors to play people’s styled after African, Polynesian, and Native American traditions to centering the story on a non-indigenous character.

In short, I hated this movie, bro.