19 December,2025 01:09 PM IST | Mumbai | Mayank Shekhar
A still from ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’.
At 197.21 minutes of running time - as per the Indian Censor Board certificate in the opening slate - James Cameron's third Avatar, titled Fire and Ash, gets over, at least 45 minutes before it finally ends!
Which is to take away nothing from its emotion-laden, conflicting climax - while I worry for kidneys/bladders of viewers in America, England, Australia, or wherever else the movies play without intervals in theatres. Indians are lucky, that way.
Why the film carries on, of course, is not so much for the story - but to keep the prospect of incoming spectacle alive. Yup, a lotta films do that.
But, but, but - it's not the same spectacle! That, too, on the gigantic IMAX screen, with the best-lit 3D projection, and the finest contrast ratio I know!
Sure, we've come to expect that from Avatar; I must confess, not entirely grown used to it, still. For, if you're a believer, what would you consider such minute world-building, if not the work of God. Cameron, 71, behind the camera, comes closest to it with cinema.
Sure, we're aware of that as well. To the point that one begins to feel the existence of stories itself is rather overrated, when it comes to certain films.
That said, what's Fire and Ash about - given the first two Avatars really showed us the possibilities of greed and destruction, if humans did discover a planet, or the moon, as beautiful as Pandora, a century and some, from now?
It's perhaps the rare franchise about aliens and humans, in a state of war, where you root for the extraterrestrials, instead. That point's already been made.
Much as you can belabour it beyond three parts - apparently, there are three more on the way!
At least on the face of it, Fire and Ash starts off with the lead couple, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), mourning the loss of their eldest son. You watched that death happen towards the end of The Way of Water (2022). You can feel the love between them.
The dad Jake, as you'd recall, once human/Sky Person, now Na'vi, grapples with grief by simply keeping himself busy. The wife, on the other hand, detests "pink" blokes - she "hates the insanity in their minds."
As in, referring to us. Or probably the yo-bro Americans in the film, representing humanity, as usual. The line at the opening moments in the movie goes, "The fire of hate leaves only the ash of grief".
That's possibly the most profound thing you'll hear in a likely blockbuster that's more about the visuals than words. But at least it's not merely a deranged blast-fest over gore and blood, while wholly centred on set-pieces, of course.
The main conflict involves the young man/Sky Person named Spider (Jack Campion), who lives amidst the Na'vi folk, on oxygen cylinders.
He's the biological son of late Col Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the enemy, who's returned in the Na'vi form. The kid is also the adopted/foster son of Jake.
Miles and Jake, if you recall, were military colleagues once, until the latter, like a traitor, chose the lovely Na'vis over his supposed nation!
To be sure, Fire and Ash is far too mainstream, in its storytelling, for you to require a primer for a review. As could be the case with, say, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, if you walked straight into its third part, when the Middle Earth will seem a complete mystery.
Dive right into Fire and Ash, even if it's your first Avatar instalment. It'll be clear as Pandoran daylight that the Na'vis are basically facing a fresh threat from their own clan, namely, the bitter Mangkawans, introduced in this threequel.
These are Ash people. They form a coalition with the Sky People to attack Jake and his lot. Varang (Oona Chaplin) is the feisty, feline Mangkawan queen.
I'd still encourage you not to care so much for the detail. No unobvious devil in it. You'd rather trip on the neon lights! As Vadang and Miles do - as the queen gets the colonel to snort on powder, so he's high enough to tell some truths.
This is the bit when I see a scroll on the big screen: "Drugs are harmful to health." No such Censor Board warning for the guns that follow. That's the one time, I realised, I'm in India.
At all other times, with your eyes/body dipping under water, where the lower edge of the screen is the brim; or being engulfed by the fire as ashes meet ether - you knew you were fully inside Pandora, where Cameron belongs. So do we.
The thought going through my head was how wonderfully the 3D has advanced since the first Avatar (2009).
The only fourth dimension possible is if I could literally feel the heat from the volcanic eruption, or the cold of the oceanic waves. Who frickin' knows - maybe that's the future (of screen, that is).
