James, James, James.
Why give editing credits to five people — not including you, as the sixth — if you won’t let them do their jobs?
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| Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and Jake (Sam Worthington) realize that their sky-faring Na'vi clan may not be enough to combat the newest assault by Earth's Resources Development Administration forces. |
Meaning, no dramatic tension.
As was the case with 2022’s second film in this ongoing series, director/co-scripter James Cameron spends far too much time on tight close-ups of slow, thoughtful takes; and half-baked lines delivered with artificially measured, melodramatic pauses and intensity.
Granted, the production design and SFX work continue to be jaw-droppingly amazing; this truly is a marvelous example of imaginative world-building, down to the tiniest detail of flora and fauna.
The underlying environmental message also continues to be welcome, and increasingly timely. It’s impossible to watch Pandora’s massive, ocean-going tulkun — pursued and killed by rapacious Earthers, in order to harvest amrita, a substance in the creature’s brain with the medical power to halt human aging — and not think about how our own Earth’s whale population has been hunted to near-extinction.
Events resume where the previous film concluded, with Jake (Sam Worthington), Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and their family — Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), young Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss) and adopted mysterious daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) — now fully embraced by the ocean-going Metkayina clan headed by Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and his wife Ronal (Kate Winslet), the Shamanic Matriarch.
Lo’ak is haunted by the recent death of his older brother Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), who perished during the previous film’s climactic melee. In typical teenage fashion, Lo’ak disobeys his father’s orders, chafes at often being left behind, and also has distanced himself from Tonowari and Ronal’s daughter, Tsireya (Bailey Bass), much to her sorrow.
The latter is a shame, since the developing relationship between Lo’ak and Tsireya was one of the previous film’s high points.
Now beaten twice but still determined, Earth’s merciless Resources Development Administration (RDA) returns yet again, with an even larger force, still headed by Gen. Frances Ardmore (Edie Falco). She repeats her ongoing mission, word for word from the previous film: “Earth is about to become uninhabitable.”
Meaning, she and her kill-crazy storm troops will stop at nothing to “tame” Pandora’s various indigenous populations.
The series’ primary villain also returns: Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), now wholly comfortable as a 9-foot-tall avatar embedded with his human memories. His hatred for Jake remains paramount, still stung by his perception that the former young Marine betrayed him — and Earth — by fully embracing his Na’vi identity on Pandora.
Their prickly dynamic is compounded further by Spider (Jake Champion) — a human child orphaned by earlier events, and now embraced by Jake and his Na’vi family — because Quaritch has learned that Spider actually is his son. But the boy, in turn, wants absolutely nothing to do with his malevolent birth father.
A new villain emerges in this film: Varang (Oona Chaplin), the terrifying leader of Pandora’s splinter Mangkwan Clan, also known as the Ash People. They’ve forsaken Pandora’s mystical presence — Eywa, the planet’s “All Mother” — in favor of setting up their own violent, fire-based culture. Varang has, to borrow a note from another fantasy series, succumbed to the dark side of The Force.
Additional new characters include Capt. Mick Scoresby (Brendan Cowell), a weathered marine big-game hunter hired by RDA to kill as many tulkun as possible; and Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), an RDA corporate weasel who values the bottom line over trivialities such as ethical and moral considerations.
As a further indication of the way Cameron continues to strip-mine his own previous efforts, Selfridge is a veritable clone of the character played by Paul Reiser, back in 1986’s Aliens.
So: Ardmore and Scoresby will stop at nothing to find and kill every tulkun on the planet, while Quaritch will stop at nothing to capture Jake and kidnap Spider. Quaritch ups the ante by arming Varang’s tribe with state-of-the-art RDA weaponry, in order to tip the scales in his favor. (Hey, what could possibly go wrong?)
This pattern plays out repeatedly: Some of the good guys are chased and captured; they escape; some are captured again; they escape again; some are captured again; they escape again.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
And every time things become too dire, Kiri uses her “oneness” with Eywa and Pandora’s entire ecological system, in order to produce a fresh miracle that saves the moment. Indeed, this film’s climax is a virtual retread of the how matters concluded in the 2009 original.
That takes deus ex machina contrivance much too far.
It’s rather audacious for four other writers to be co-credited for this film’s script, when so much of it is a retread.
Isolated moments and performances do stand out. Chaplin’s Varang oozes malevolence, and her coy, vengeful curiosity regarding the aforementioned weapons — “Show me how to make thunder!” — is deeply unsettling. Saldaña also dominates the first act, when Neytiri is gravely wounded, and must struggle hard to heal, in order to again wield her lethal bow.
But — as was the case with the previous film — the results of motion-capture “acting” are wildly uneven. Some of the aforementioned actors “take” to it better than others; it’s also telling that Champion’s Spider and Cowell’s Scoresby stand out, in terms of dramatic heft. They’re human.
Cameron still threatens — at this point, that’s the right word — to unleash two more films, in 2029 and 2031; the former is in post-production, and the latter is filming as these words are typed.
God, give me strength…
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