I’ve been ignoring James Cameron‘s Avatar: Fire and Ash (20th Century, 12.19.25), and for good reasons. I need to see it, of course, but I don’t want to…not really. If I could make this third Avatar flick disappear by clapping my hands three times, I would clap my hands three times.
Ask me to recall key moments from Cameron’s The Terminator (’84), Aliens (’86), The Abyss (‘89), T2 (’91), True Lies (’94), Titanic (’97) and the first Avatar (’09), and I could recite them like a gatling gun any hour of the day.
And yet recollections of Avatar: The Way of Water (12.16.22, 192 minutes) are blurry at best. There’s a reason for that.
If I concentrate I can vaguely recall certain specific bits or accelerators or wowser whatevers from The Way of Water (the sinking super-craft sequence at the finale), but I don’t want to bring it back into my head. Because the whole big Avatar world feels like such a chore — such a flooding, such a visual gullywash that demands as much as it provides — that I want to leave it there and never return.
To be sure, The Way of Water, which opened two and two-thirds years ago, was a first-rate Cameron creation or visitation or envelopment, certainly on a visual level. Like everyone else I loved the 2009 original, which was and is a total transportational knockout, but as far as seeing Avatar: Fire and Ash is concerned, there’s a big, deep-down part of me that’s saying “really? I have to fucking go there again?”
Something inside is telling me that sitting through the Avatar franchise all the way to the end (three more films remain, Fire and Ash being the third) will surely swallow my soul. It’s going to be another huge CG vacuum cleaner ordeal, and I know it’s going to fucking eat me.
Cameron has specified that the running time of Avatar: Fire and Ash (29th Century, 12.19.25) would be longer than the 192 minute length of Avatar: The Way of Water.
Friendo to HE: “The visuals in the Avatar films are more transporting than the stories. That’s why they’re great ‘rides’ (for a while) but not great movies. That was true of the first one too.”
HE to Friendo: “Disagree about the original Avatar (‘09), which delivers a great, well-strategized four-act story.”
Friendo: “I enjoyed Avatar as far as it went (obviously it was visually entrancing, at times miraculous), but that was 16 years ago and I’ve never been remotely tempted to see it again. I had the exact same ‘it’s stunning! It’s ravishing! But I don’t totally care’ feeling about The Way of Water.”