The latest in the sci-fi adventure series is the longest and worst yet

The third installment in James Cameron’s hugely successful franchise is “197 minutes of screensaver graphics, heavy-handed dialogue, loose plotting, and New Age hippie spirituality.”

Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water are two of the highest-grossing films of all time, so you can’t blame James Cameron for continuing his sci-fi adventure series. But the third episode, Avatar: Fire and Ash, strongly suggests that he should quit while he’s still ahead. Every Avatar movie to date has been longer and worse than the last, and this one — a full half-hour longer than the 2009 original — is 197 minutes of screensaver graphics, hackneyed dialogue, loose plotting, and hippie New Age spirituality. It’s terrifying to think that Cameron still has two more sequences scheduled. How much more time and self-indulgence could they have?

The most insulting part is that even with this ridiculous and exciting time trial, Avatar: Fire and Ash doesn’t work as a standalone movie with a beginning, middle, and end. Cameron makes no concessions to any viewer who isn’t a fan of the series, and assumes that we’re already so deeply invested in the characters, their relationships, and their surroundings, that a full, driving story is surplus to requirements.

It feels like we’re a zillion light years away from the excitement of the first film. The idea was that the human race had made such a mess of planet Earth that they decided to exploit the mineral resources of an unpolluted moon of Eden called Pandora. This plan was not popular with the blue-skinned Na’vi inhabitants of Pandora, but a human marine, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) has his mind zapped into the Na’vi-human hybrid’s body, so he can get closer to the locals. He then fell in love with the Na’vi princess, Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), and fought alongside her tribe members against invaders from Earth. In short, Avatar was Pocahontas meets the Smurfs in space, a scenario filled with conflict and environmental issues.

The situation now is that the Na’vi are still fighting against the human army, but Cameron seems to have lost interest in Jake and Neytiri, and now prefers to hang out with their teenage children. It’s deadly mistake. Worthington may not be the most charismatic actor in the world, but at least his character was distinct, while it’s sometimes hard to tell which of Jake and Neytiri’s half-naked offspring is which – and they’re all equally annoying. Every now and then there will be a big battle, or we will see some human scientists who haven’t been in the movie for a long time. Sometimes we have to sit through long and reverent discussions about Na’vi beliefs. And at times we’ll have tantalizing glimpses of the harsh Empire vs. Rebel environmental thriller that the film could have been. But, basically, Avatar: Fire and Ash is a California TV series in which various paddleboard surf guys ride dragons and shout lines like, “That was crazy, bro” and “That’s sick, ’cause it’s sick!”