[EXPRESSO] Avatar: Fire And Ash (2025) | Cigarette Butts

Here we are again.

Somehow “disappointed”.

Sound silly, i know, the second one was admittedly a bit better than i expected and had some surprises in there… this one having a new Nav’i tribe of brutal savages (just short of being cannibals) isn’t enough to stave off boredom, but then again plot comes third or fourth more than usual this time around, taking a backset for just repeating almost verbatim the same plot beats of Way Of The Water, with some extra piles of new stuff that conveniently happens just because the script needs to -once again – free from capture these dumbass characters.

It’s pointless to be angry about an Avatar movie being another pile of shallow, utter nonsense, but this time around is even more boring dull nonsense that goes for a 3 hours equivalent of jiggling keys to infants, and it has framerate issues, which i don’t remember being a thing when i watched Way Of The Water in theathers just 3 years ago.

Maybe i got lucky back then, but regardless of how it looks that way, it’s distracting since it often fluctuates from looking like a big budget cutscene of a videogame, looking like we’re a HD camera feed from the set, looking actually cinematic, and so on.

It’s just insanely distracting and the added motion smoothing almost gave me a headache, and mind you, this was for a 2D screening.

I was reminded of something actually borderline unwatchable, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, but the sentiment is there, as i wonder why Cameron keeps making tech demo movies for proven tech (or telling a worthwhile plot with this astounding technological prowess), or he just doesn’t go make videogames instead.

Not that anything of this matters, as people will go see this on droves anyway.

The Return/Itaka: The Return (2024) | ♫ Odyssey, Ya See ♫

Premiered at TIFF in 2024, The Return, here called Itaka: The Return, to make more clear this is indeed about The Odyssey, that one from Homer.

Directed by Uberto Pasolini (uncle of cinema maestro Luchino Visconti and mostly know for producing the 1997 Peter Cattaneo directed cult comedy The Full Monty), The Return is a retelling of the last chapters of the epic, with Odysseus washing up naked to Itaka, the island he once ruled before getting involved in the Trojan War, only for it see having been overtaken by arrogant sultors to the queen Penelope, whom she keeps rejecting, buying time with the loom scheme, but their son, Telemachus is also facing death as the sultors see him as a treat to their ambitions.

So Odysseus, posing as a vagrant, visits the city, and despite being traumatized by the horrors of the war, he eventually rises up to the challenge in his characteristically crafty fashion.

We know the story. This retelling opts to focus on the “Journey To Ithaka Arc” and eskew any mythology, doing away with gods, magic and monsters to center of the familial and human drama of a father coming home to see it defaced by strangers, a king his kingdom brought to ruin, his relationships with the son he never saw before already compromised, and his reluttance to shed blood (even for justice) as we focus on him suffering basically from PTSD.

This is where i say there’s a “small” issue that ultimately undercuts the whole idea… but actually no, the more realistic-gritty tone works without defacing or changing the events chosen to be retold this way, even if the pacing suffers a bit it sticks to the canon, the acting by Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche in particular are terrific, making for absorbing drama.

Arslan: The Warriors Of Legend PS4 [REVIEW] | #musoumay

One of these musou anime crossovers/collaborations that i feel it’s kinda underrated or overlooked, as it does tackle a historical setting that actually does fit perfectly with the Warriors style and formula: ancient Persia. Sure it’s all doubly filtered by being based on an the anime series, based on a manga by Hiromu Harakawa (of Full Metal Alchemist and Silver Spoon fame), itself being a modern adaptation of a light novel series, The Heroic Legend Of Arslan…and that in turn being loosely based on the Persian epic Amir Arsalan.

Still, it’s nice to see a Persian/middle-east setting in a musou game, even if it’s an anime licensed game and an incredible example of transformative iteration of historical epics.

And you will be remembered of this being based on the anime series more than the Hiromu Harukawa manga because, akin to the Berserk Musou, this uses clips from the anime’s first season to cheap out in making more cutscenes with the in-game engine, though this time it’s less the recyclefest (comparatively the Berserk musou had almost an hour – or a ridiculous amount either way – of footage from the Golden Age film trilogy they made some years prior).

And fittingly the game covers the story of the first anime season, starting when the king of Pars, Andragoras III, is betrayed in battle by one of his generals in cohoots with the Lusitatians, obsessed with their religious cult and the extermination of the infidels. Having followed the father in battle, the young, naive and unprepared prince Arslan is forced to flee with his vassal Daryun, grow up fast so to form a new band of warriors to drive back the invaders (led by a mysterious man with a mask) bent on conquering the capital, Ectabana, and reclaim his crown as the 19^th king of Pars.

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