Two & a Half Hours into "Avatar: Fire & Ash"
It is going how it is going.,..
I came for the cowboys-&-indians movie with the evil Comanche warrior queen crossed with “Apocalypse Now” <https://braddelong.substack.com/publish/post/182676675>, lampshaded in the movie by General Ardmore’s snarky calling Colonel Quarrick “Cochise”.
I must admit, however, I was not then expecting to be confronted with the sacrifice of Isaac, a mega-Moby-Dick with not one but thousands of angry whales, a high-tech AI-driven military with no ability to identify whether its IFF tags are being carried by soldiers with the proper biometric markers that decides to build its major base in the middle of the galaxy’s most gigantic petroleum refinery ever, plus elements from every single other story ever made, all in a package a clear hour shorter than the Extended Edition version of “Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King”.
On the other hand, the Odyssey trailer they showed seemed to me to be very skillfully handled: It simply tells the story of the Trojan Horse and then cuts off—compelling, with a realistic-looking Late Bronze Age Anatolia, and genuine dramatic tension that also paints Odysseus as, clearly, a villain: a very complicated man indeed.