The adventure in Pandora continues as the Sully family mourns the loss of their eldest son, Nataeum.

As they decide the fate of their adopted son, Spider, they're faced with a new enemy.

It's Avatar Fire and Ash.

I'm Ronald Young Jr.

And I'm leaving the theater.

All right.

This is Ronald and I am leaving the theater after seeing Avatar Fire and Ash.

Avatar Fire and Ash written by James Cameron, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, directed by James Cameron, starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldanya, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Una Chaplin, Cliff Curtis, and Kate Winslett.

And for complete cast listing, as always, you could go to the link in our show notes.

It is just me today.

For those of you that are in the Patreon, you probably saw my review of Avatar and Avatar The Way of Water, the first two installments of the Avatar Saga epic, whatever you will call it.

This is the third movie in what is currently planned to be five movies.

And I say currently planned because if it keeps making money, they can make ten of these easily.

This is the third installment.

Avatar Fire and Ash is the third installment.

I'm not going to talk a lot about the plot of the first two movies because I do a lot of that in the on the Couch episode.

So if you want to check that out.

If you're a Patreon, you can go check that out.

If you're not a patron, and hint patreon dot com slash Oh it's big ron.

This movie, we find it is very much a direct sequel to the Way of Water in both positive and negative ways.

The positive ways is that it picks up right after the action of the Way of Water.

It shows us a family that is grieving.

They have adopted Spider, who is Korich's Sun, which you find out very early in Avatar The Way of Water.

So if this is a spoiler for you, you missed an entire movie.

And we find that the family is navigating their life with the Reef people and trying to think about ways to take the fight back to the sky people aka the humans of Earth, and in engaging that fight, they discover a new enemy, which is another Navi clan called the Ash People.

I don't actually think they're called the Ash People.

I think they have an actual official name, but they are referred to as the Ash Clan or even the Ash people.

Who knows this movie desperately wants to be a four star movie.

It desperately wants to be a four star movie.

And when I say that, I'm saying that as as if the movie were sentient itself.

It wants to be four stars so bad, and it has at least four plot points that probably could have gotten it there if they weren't all done at the same time.

I think they could have max done three of these, and I want to point out I am saying four plot points.

Let me check my notes.

I actually have five written down.

I think they only had enough room in this film to actually explore three of the five plot points, but they chose to go with all five.

And sure, this is probably seeding things that are going to happen in future movies, but they are such large portions of the movie that I'm watching right now that it constantly feels hamstrung.

It just feels like every time this movie wants to move forward and continue being a movie that is well edited, that is kind of well written, when it tries to do those things, it's just hamstrung.

By Oh, but here's this other really massive plot point that we need to talk about right now, and we may or may not resolve it in this film.

This movie is also held up by the fact that it is slowing down obvious beats that we know are coming.

Whether it be because while this movie is not entirely a retread of the first two movies, I would say they started off in a different direction, and when they got there, they found familiar story beats that made sense to them, and then just started doing those again.

When I say that, I mean initial conflict, discovery, setback, large, setback, huge battle.

And that's all three of these movies.

If you rewind and say the four or five things I just said, that is the blueprint of all of these films.

Now, let me tell you about the five plot points specifically.

So there are five very good ideas.

One of them is ash people introducing those characters, which is what the preview is set on, which is part of what the the the name of the film is Fire and Ash and also talks a lot about grief.

There's like a there's kind of an illusion to grief.

There a lot of grief in this film, very destructive grief.

Grief that overlaps and in a lot of ways is another part of what hamstrings the plot in that it's not the type of grief that people are moving through, it's the type of grief that people are just sitting in.

And if you're writing a story, you can't have five or seven people sitting in five or seven different types of grief in a movie that's supposed to be an action adventure, like We've Got to Move Forward, and there's large swaths in which characters are learning lessons I think they should have learned a full three hours ago.

This movie is three hours and seventeen minutes.

The second movie was three hours and fifteen minutes.

The first movie was two hours and forty five minutes.

There's lessons y'all should have learned many many minutes ago, many many many minutes ago, and they're still learning them in this film.

I think that's the negative way that this film is connected as a direct sequel to the Way of Water, meaning that large swaths of Jake Sully's relationship with his son are the main plot of the Way of Water, and then they also become the main plot of this movie in a way that made me said, all right, already.

Just be proud of your son, be be good to your son.

Why are we Why are we still doing this?

I don't understand like this.

I don't want to do this anymore.

And and let me let me say the other four.

So the first one is the ash people.

The second one is the abilities of humans to breathe atmosphere on Pandora, And I'll just leave it at that and say that it is a part of the story Quorich changing his mind.

And I'm not saying whether he does or not, but I'm saying grappling with the idea of him maybe not being an antagonist.

Uh.

And I'm just saying grappling with the idea.

Before y'all listen and say that's a spoiler, it's not.

I'm telling you that is grappling with the idea of who he is.

It's something that was in the way of water when he's deciding what to do with his son and whether or not he has a relationship with his son.

The next one is the whales.

Obviously the whales are a huge plot point.

And the final one is whether or not Kirie, which is Sigourney Weaver's character, whether she is some sort of all powerful you know, able to commune with I keep wanting to call it Gaya, but it's not Ay.

Whether she's able to commune with Awa, control the earth all of that.

Those are five distinct directions in a movie that is this even that is three hours and seventeen minutes.

You had, you could do three of those, and on top of that everything I just mentioned, only one of those was directly dealing with what the humans are doing?

What are the humans doing?

I don't know what's happening on Earth.

I know that in this movie, somehow they've built an entire city, and none of the humans that are in the city except for the three leaders.

We'll go with Quorich, We'll go with Giovanni Ribisi, whatever his name is, and we'll go with Uh.

We'll go with old girl from the Sopranos, Edie Falco.

Those three people are the only ones we get any real interiority on.

We don't understand how the other humans feel about everything going on.

They're kind of depicted as this angry, bloodthirsty mob.

So I'm gonna say those five plot points again, and then I'm gonna point out what I'm trying to say.

It all Ash people, humans, the ability of humans to breathe air, and when I say breathe air, I'm sorry, I'm saying humans breathing air, breathing the atmosphere on Pandora, Quorich changing his mind, the whales, and whether or not Kiri is a super being entity whatever.

The name of the movie is Fire and Ash, so let's just deal with the Ash people and call it a day.

But the Fire and Ash and the Ash People are only one aspect of the movie, and of those five plot points, they are the least important.

They are the least important, and their existence directly hamstrings Quorich's ability to have the journey that they're signaling for him to have in the first act of this film.

So later on in the film, when we see what's happening with Korich, I remember thinking, why do you keep having Jake have these heart to heart conversations with Korich that are never going to go anywhere in this film?

They're setting us up, And I'm sure if you're listening to this, you're like, well, they're setting it up for future films.

That may be the case, but then don't spend so much time in this film convincing me of something that's not going to happen.

It's like they're waving around, I believe it's called Chekhov's Gun, just waving around, being like, we're definitely gonna fire this bullet.

And then not only do they throw the gun away, they pull out a knife and say we're gonna stab someone and say, psych, we're not even gonna use any weapons in this there's no action in this movie at all.

Look up Chekhov's Gun if you don't know what I'm talking about.

And I'm being honest with y'all.

I thought all of those were good threads.

I thought they were a good direction for these films to go in.

But because they had so many of them, you might as well have had none of them, because all of them were hurting each other, none of them were really working together.

And the thing is, maybe three of them could have found a way to work together.

Because the whales become a really bad And I know they're not called the whales, but I'm not gonna sit here and try to they're called till I'm not gonna do it.

I'm gonna have to look it up.

They're called whales, they're whales.

They are whale surrogates.

That's what they are.

Don't get mad at me.

They're whale surrogates.

That's what they are.

The whales end up being a big part of what is the final battle in the film.

So if that's where we're going, then let's talk about that.

And I said five, I didn't even I'm just mentioned the sixth, which is Jake Sully's relationship with his son, and then there's all these interpersonal things going on with the Sullivan family, which might as well be a seventh.

So I'm saying all that to say, it's too much dip on the chip.

It's too much dip on the chip.

In the worst of ways.

It's too much dip on the chip.

You need more chips, You need more chips, and they don't have it here.

They don't have the chips.

They don't have the chips.

They have a bunch of dip.

You put so much dip on the chips, it's just all dip now.

It's all dip now, all dip.

Now.

It's too much dip on the chip.

Okay, okay.

So the point of what I'm saying is all of those plot points swirled into a circle doesn't work for me, and I think ultimately, again, any of those done well together probably would have brought this to could have made this a four star movie.

But because they weren't done well and when the movie ended, I was very confused as to what message was told.

I think this movie has now, this series has now swung way back into the kind of culturally appropriationy centering white saviorism trope that it kind of was starting with in the first one.

I mean, you if Kirie is this fantastic being that's able to communicate with uh, with Awa, and you have Spider whose role is expanding, Ultimately, these are two white people.

Now, I know, in the confines of the story, Kirie would not be considered white, she would be Navi.

Like I know, in the confines of the story, that's what the case would be.

Uh.

But it's still as someone just watching it, as just like a black person that's sitting here watching this.

I watched this, and I'm like, I know what's up here.

This is You're you're still writing a story.

You're you're still writing and telling a story that is centering white folks who are now adapting to this culture and making it their own.

And at one point one of the discussions in the in the movie is about how how Natiri is has too much hate in her heart and she's not doing enough to change as a result.

And and I feel like that conversation just irritated me.

It irritated me to know, and I was so confused as to why it was happening.

I was confused as to as to what message it's trying to send in this film, especially coming from the white dude that wrote this, you know, or the white people that wrote this.

I believe Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver are both white as well.

So it just it felt like I remember thinking, what was your purpose of saying back to the indigenous person whose life has been turned upside down by white folks coming in here and doing whatever they wanted to do.

What was the purpose of you saying no, you're the hater?

You know what I mean?

Like you turned to Naetaria and say no, you need to change yourself.

No, natarias every right to be upset.

She has every right to be angry.

It makes sense that type of hate, and she's harpering in her heart.

It's sure it's hurting her, but there's a different person that should have that conversation with her certainly not Jake Sully, and I know he's married to her, but he has to have some awareness at this point.

Okay, all of that being said, it's a movie that desperately wants to be good, but unfortunately it falls so short of that that while I would watch this again, it's just barely so.

This is the most razor thin margin three star movie that I'll ever give.

I want to give it two point nine to nine very bad, which is what I give to films that almost I would watch again, but not quite there.

This one, it's just there.

It's just there because I would watch it again.

There are aspects of this movie that I did enjoy and I do want to see again, and it fits in with the rest of the Avatars.

But I hope that for the next couple of movies that they nailed down the story details in a way that concludes the series peacefully, or at least gets to its point.

Please, Otherwise they'll I mean, these movies are gonna make a billion dollars, and maybe they'll just make two more movies that are just three star movies and that's all they are.

That's perfectly fine if that ends up being the case, but my god, I don't want to have to sit in a film for three and a half hours and wonder about retreads, wonder if it.

Yeah, I just don't want to have to do that again.

I don't.

I don't want to have to go through this again.

I'm going to keep watching the Avatar movies because they are a fun spectacle to watch in the theater.

However, they could be better, and the technology is good, the visuals are good, and I'm really proud of what James Cameron is doing.

This really is kind of his magnum opus in a lot of ways.

But ugh, I feel like they're gonna end up remaking this fifty years from now and they're gonna fix all the problems and I'm not gonna be around, well fifty years when I might be still be around, but I might not be around to really enjoy it and critique it the way I want to.

So yeah, with that, Leaving the Theater is a production of owitz Big Ron Studios.

I mixed this episode and today is December eighteenth, and that means yesterday I saw Anaconda, which will not come out until twenty twenty six, and next Wednesday, December twenty fourth, I will be going to see Marty Supreme.

I Am and I did Avatar on the Couch a few days ago, which went on Patreon.

On the leaving the theater side of Patreon, we are rocking and rolling.

We are putting out more content for y'all.

You still have the ad free feed, you still have the discount code for Heartbreaker.

There's still a lot of good things happening on Patreon.

We have expanded the patroon base.

We have added over sixty patrons, which is amazing, and we're not going to stop.

We're going to continue the drive for the rest of the month.

And I'm realizing that by pivoting this way and by investing more in the Patreon and investing more specifically in people that like, oh it's big Ron studios and the stuff that I put out, it is making me beholden to you the audience and you the listener.

Now this doesn't mean you can just tell me what to do, but what it does mean is that I'm really really thinking about what it is that you like about these shows, continuing to give you more of that, continuing to give you more in the Patreon and it allows me to work more freely.

It makes clear my directives in a way that just I enjoy.

I enjoy, I appreciate.

I'm glad to be doing this.

I'm happy to be doing this job.

I don't feel like I'm waiting for someone to give me an opportunity.

I'm taking the opportunity that I have been given to continue to put out this content for y'all.

If that's something that means something to you, If you appreciate this labor of love but still labor, go to patreon dot com slash oh It's Big Ron help us out, or go to the link in our show notes.

Show art from Heather Wilder.

Theme music by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder.

For more information about Avatar, Fire and Ash, check out our show notes.

You can follow me on Instagram, Blue Sky, TikTok, threads, or letterbox at Owitz Big Ron.

That's at h I T S B I g r N.

You find out more about this show and other O It's Big Ron Studio shows by following us on Instagram at Owitz Big Ron Studios.

Leaving the theater will be back soon.

Thanks for listening.

I'm Ronald Young Junior, and I'm too much dip on the chip in the worst of ways,