Ready to rumble: Warrior Queen Varang (Oona Chaplin), the most interesting character in ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’.

AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH *** (197 minutes) M
Lovely to look at rather than think too deeply about, the third chapter of uber-producer/director James Cameron’s megalithic film series lands with an overwhelming, earth-shattering sense of adequacy.

With an estimated cost of $400 million and at a bladder-stressing running time of 197 minutes, Avatar: Fire and Ash is OK – just OK. 

As with the first two episodes, this instalment chimes in as another hood ornament of the Meh Blockbuster Era, an exclusively 21st-century phenomenon.

As usual, we head back to the beautiful, verdant planet of Pandora where mountains float gracefully in the sky and the tall, blue-coloured Na’vi peoples try to live peacefully while fending off the ever-present threat of colonization from money-loving corporate humans.

Now a fully transitioned Na’vi warrior, Jake Scully (Sam Worthington) is a family guy with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) looking after their blended brood. 

This includes adopted Spider (Jack Champion), the teenage offspring of Na’vi nemesis Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who has cheated death by also transferring his consciousness into a healthy Na’vi body. 

As well as dealing with Quaritch’s pursuit of him, Jake and his seaside tribe also have to deal with the Mangkwan, a rival war-loving tribe lead by the fiery, somewhat sexy warrior queen Varang (Oona Chaplin). 

This girl just loves fighting and, in forming an alliance with the military through Quaritch, becomes gleefully infatuated with the beauty and firepower of earthly weapons, with a particular penchant for flamethrowers.

Now, this is genuinely interesting stuff, with Varang turning out to be the most intriguing character in the film as she forms a relationship with Quaritch. 

So, too, is the morally messy discovery by Spider that he has two fathers, a theme familiar to fans of Oliver Stone who explored the concept in Platoon and Wall Street. 

Unfortunately, and as we are all wearily aware of by now, about 30% of every Avatar movie has to be devoted to swathes of eco-waffle about the majesty of nature, being at one with the creatures that fly and swim on Pandora and, of course, Eywa, the maternal guiding spirit who connects all living things. 

There’s lashings of it here and, frankly, it’s become tiresome, interrupting the more engaging stuff. Too much mythical mumbo-jumbo, not enough grit.

Also unfortunate is how the love for tight, coherent storytelling Cameron showed in his early films (Terminator 1&2, Aliens, True Lies, most of The Abyss) appears to have evaporated into the Pandorian ether.

Thus, the narrative of Avatar: Fire and Ash is pitted with the usual array of story holes and convenient leaps in logic we saw in the first Avatar. Too much of it is just plain sloppy and lazy, which is why thinking about what you’re watching will only end up hurting your brain.

To wit: one of the hugely annoying things about the story is how the prospect of colonization is automatically seen as a bad thing. 

With the welcome return of Giovanni Ribisi as the corporate guy, any influx of humans to Pandora would surely be done with great sensitivity to the environment given how the key economic driver of any human endeavour would be tourism.

Never mind hunting for whales or mining for unobtanium – a big deal in the first film, not a mention of it here – the place would be a veritable money machine as a destination for cashed-up interplanetary tourists. 

There are floating mountains, for Pete’s sake! Plus, they’ll need tour guides, and the best tour guides would be locals. So, the Na’vi would benefit, too. Win-win. Why the anxiety? 

As usual, the wall-to-wall visual effects are impressive, but only in their scale. For all the expense and work from armies of digital artists, the VFX work in Avatar 3 clock in as the latest example of craft over art. 

For all its big-screen heft, the creatures and contraptions are basically heightened versions of familiar things – seals, whales, birds, cuttlefish, tanks, helicopters and so on.

It’s same-same, offering nothing new or distinctive from the look of the previous films. Sorry to say, but at this point battles between high-tech armies and dragon-riding Na’vi warriors all look pretty much alike.

As for the motion capture technology, you certainly can’t fault it for so accurately transposing human facial features into the digital realm.

In one scene we’re introduced to Na’vi character Peylak, who commands the sky-borne Wind Traders. Tall and blue and covered in trinkets and netting, he utters one word and you instantly know that it’s British actor David Thewlis. That’s some accomplishment.

If you can be bothered, the film is also available in 3D, a format that never really took hold the way it was supposed to after the first film. As is almost always the case with a 3D film, you won’t miss a thing watching Avatar: Fire and Ash in good, old-fashioned 2D.

Blessed are we, for at least two more Avatars are promised, with a small amount of footage already shot for the next film.

Whether we see them, of course, depends on this one turning a sweet dollar because you can bet your bottom dollar that in some deep, dark corner of the production contract there no doubt sits a little clause clearly stating that if this Avatar doesn’t ring the bell like it’s supposed to, the saga of the blue people ends here.

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