The third instalment of the Avatar series, good-Nature-dly called Avatar Fire And Ash, brims over with positivity and humanism. The milk of human kindness flows fast and deep in this ongoing meditation on Mother Nature and Her desecration by her devilish disciples who think religious practices immunizes them from the laws of human behaviour.
Evading plunder is an ongoing concern in Avatar.
Avatar opens with lo’ak conversing with his dead brother Neteyam. The mood of melancholy grief and bereavement never leaves the narration as James Cameron goes from one highly-pitched dramatic segment to another without missing a beat. His direction is plush and passionate. But never over-indulgent. He is not interested in slowing down, or lowering the mood of heightened drama, even when the characters seem in the mood to crashland into vertiginous spectacle.
Even when the scale of presentation gets impossibly exacerbated, there is a sense of restrain in the visuals. Nobody is showing off here, least of all James Cameron. This is why comparing him to Rajamouli is preposterous. Unlike Rajamouli, Cameron doesn’t aspire towards an epic grandeur : he gets there without trying.
The technicians of Avatar: Fire And Ash are not doing this for Oscars. They have been elected to create a parallel ethos so steeped in poeticality, the characters seem to be texting to the Supreme Power without mobile phones.
Among the many things that I find incomparably irradiant in the works of James Cameron is their graceful mise en scene. His frames take in every experience without over-punctuating them. Resultantly the frames breathe even while taking our breath away.
So how does Avatar Fire And Ash compare with the other two Avatar films? Quite favourably, actually! This time the writing is more relaxed, and sinewy than the second part. The last time I saw a narrative with such controlled momentum was in Sholay. And that too in a far-fetched way was about humanism during times of bristling brutality.
Avatar Fire And Ash has a tightly pinned-on emotional core in the protagonists’ Jake Sully and his wife Neytiri quasi-adopting Spider (Jack Champion) as one of their own child. There is a moment of unbearable drama and tension when Jake decides to kill Spider to save his clan, almost comparable with the ‘Katapppa’ interlude in Baahubali.
It is so beautifully ironic that the Avatar franchise opens Oriental doors at time when we are ourselves retrieving the spiritual core in our cinema—for instance, the worship of The Great Mother who is akin to our Devi Maa,or the matriarch’s stronghold over the Sully family.
In a work of equanimous art, I found the climax , though a visual feast, too predictable in its percolating paciness.
‘The Sullys never give up,’ says the youngest member of the family. I sure as hell hope they don’t.
