Flasz On Film

There was a time when Blizzard Entertainment, the video game developer responsible for the iconic Diablo, Starcraft and World of Warcraft franchises, would occasionally treat their fans to truly astounding cinematic trailers for their upcoming titles. These two-minute teasers comprising top-class animation, epic music and action—in addition to giving fans a glimpse of such singular characters as Ilidan Stormrage or the Lich King—would momentarily add depth, scope and scale to upcoming video games we all cherished. And almost always these trailer reveals were followed by online chatter where numerous fans would wish they could watch entire feature-length movies that looked like that.

Although in principle there’s nothing wrong with wanting to see high-octane animated movies teeming with familiar lore and oozing tactile action, I have always chuckled a little bit at such ideas because for a movie based on narratives plucked out of these well-regarded video games to succeed, they’d have to offer something original and compelling that would transcend the eye-candy that is totally acceptable for a two-minute teaser trailer unveiled at BlizzCon. A feature-length piece of fantasy that expands upon a trailer for Diablo IV would sure look great—and it would also cost a good coin to make—but it would most assuredly ring hollow.

In fact, we don’t really need Blizzard to expand their in-house trailer team or hire a third-party studio to prove it. Instead, I strongly suggest you put your shoes on and go to see Avatar: Fire and Ash to experience almost exactly what it would be like if someone spent many, many, many, many, many millions of dollars to produce what could easily double as a feature-length in-game cinematic promoting a new expansion to a sixteen-year-old video game about Space Smurfs, complete with new character skins, brand-new adventure zones, novel mechanics and a terrifying new final boss to boot.

Coming only three short years after Avatar: The Way of Water, and only because these two films were produced mostly concurrently, Fire and Ash comes touted as another visual marvel and a feat of strength of performance capture, compositing and lifelike 3D animation that breathes new life to the lush world of Pandora and once again reunites us with Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and their family as they—once again—must face the threat of extermination from the seemingly immortal Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) and a vicious fire shaman Varang (Oona Chaplin).

And once again—predictably so—what this experience boils down to is an overlong computer-generated spectacle that cares exclusively about production design and secondary world-building while completely disregarding narrative novelty or dramatic ambition. In so many words, Fire and Ash plays exactly like a movie concocted as high-polish background to a classy new roller coaster attraction at Disney World, or a compilation of in-game cinematics pulled out of a video game that doesn’t otherwise exist. It’s a dramatically hollow and emotionally lackluster spectacle that offers nothing more than what meets the eye.

And even at that, what meets the eye is more or less the same what we have already experienced a few years back while watching The Way of Water. Narratively we are still retreading the same fundamental dramatic ideas we have seen before: the integrity of the Sully clan is once again tested, the beauty of Pandora is once more under threat from those cursed Sky People, we are once more introduced to magical concepts that serve as nothing more than blatant deus ex machina and, again once more, when events come to a head, Jake Sully must pull his finger out and lead unified clans to battle while shouting “Toruk Makto is back in town, baby” or something to that effect. And it all goes for nearly three-and-a-half hours.

That’s right. If mathematical projections are anything to take seriously, by the time we get to the fifth instalment in the series—which will most likely revolve around one of the two elements that James Cameron has yet to figure out the technology to mo-cap realistically—you might be required to spend a full working day bolted to the seat, hopefully with enough snacks to stay alive and Sudocrem to stave off the development of bedsores. But that’s a problem for six years from now, if at all. In the world of here and now, Fire and Ash already remains criminally overlong, and this is mostly thanks to protracted sequences where our familiar characters interact with the world for no other reason than to give us the opportunity to admire the objectively cool-looking vistas (even if fully CG-generated), and a solid helping of nearly completely braindead bits of exposition. For instance, we do get to participate in an extended scene in which the reef-dwelling Na’vi organize a council meeting where nothing gets agreed and then we see a meeting of Pandorean whales where the Na’vi, with the use of a translator using PSL (Pandorean Sign Language), agree on the plan of action against the impending attack from the very same people they have repelled in the previous movie. I watched this scene while fighting the urge to cackle at the preposterousness on display that makes conveyor belt YA fantasy look coherent in comparison.

So, once you have acclimated to the spectacle and the initial awe of looking at lifelike Space Smurfs dive and swim has finally subsided, what you will be left with is an experience that looks almost uncanny—as though it was not a movie at all. The combination of variable high-frame rate projection and the fact that not only does the camera not stop moving ever but also moves completely unnaturally makes Fire and Ash look and feel like a video game product instead. I might have to seriously revise my own thinking about Michael Bay’s relationship with camera dynamics at this point because when compared to what’s on display here, what I had always seen as preposterously alienating in Transformers movies looks cinematic and grounded in comparison. And this is not an acknowledgment that this movie looks somehow inferior technically to films from over a decade ago. No, no. Fire and Ash looks modern and tactile and colorful, but it just looks completely fake.

Maybe there is something to be said about the pitfalls of complete reliance on performance capture and generating the movie de facto in post. Because what we frequently see is a performance captured from all angles all at once, it gives the filmmaker freedom to position the virtual camera wherever he’d like, thus overcoming such mundane constraints as having to deal with the movement limitations of dollies, cranes and Steadicams. The same “freedom” is afforded to video game developers too and the fact a movie like this opts for unnatural camera placement or dynamics at all times in addition to giving the viewer completely fabricated imagery as well makes the movie not look like a movie.

And that’s how I felt. As though I was watching a three-hour-long video game cinematic that possessed all the technical tells of such a product and also the narrative and dramatic depth of one. I was equally bored and discombobulated because I felt internally that I was watching something that pretended to be real that was also just as shallow as a new adventure campaign in World of Warcraft written by a team of twenty-somethings with degrees in creative writing from middling universities.

Now, James Cameron has never been the strongest writer and the Avatar franchise has also never relied on the freshness of its storytelling either. The original was essentially Pocahontas re-enacted by Space Smurfs, while the sequel was a Space Smurf take on Moana. In fact, Cameron’s propensity to write in cliché has usually been his strength because he would somehow manage to lean on earnest authenticity and relatable emotional realism while delivering the spectacle.

However, as this franchise progresses, it becomes abundantly clear that what he cares about is not building a compelling story but rather finding ways to overcome technical limitations, like executing motion capture in aquatic environs or integrating water physics with physical sets. And it just looks as though these considerations have completely overtaken while leaving precious little mental real estate in charge of story development. And that’s why I think I have seen Apple commercials with more narrative edge than you’d find in Avatar: Fire and Ash.

Taken together, I don’t think I can find much to redeem this experience. It’s too long and too narratively simplistic to stand on its own and as far as technical achievements go, I don’t think you’ll find anything that you have not seen in previous movies in the series already, unless you’d be completely satisfied with a handful of new creature designs, Smurf Orcs and stuff like that. But objectively speaking, Fire and Ash is a movie that promises a lot and delivers little. And what it delivers looks as though it was genetically related to cinematics made for World of Warcraft expansions rather than spectacles of the calibre meant for theatrical exhibition that James Cameron used to be able to deliver without breaking a sweat.