Movie Review – Avatar: Fire & Ash
Principal Cast : Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Oona Chaplin, Kate Winslet, Cliff Curtis, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Edie Falco, Brendan Cowell, Jemaine Clement, Giovanni Ribisi, David Thewlis, Britain Dalton, Jack Champion, Trinity Jo-Li Bliss, Jamie Flatters, Bailey Bass, Filip Geljo.
Synopsis: Jake and Neytiri’s family grapples with grief, encountering a new, aggressive Na’vi tribe, the Ash People, who are led by the fiery Varang, as the conflict on Pandora escalates and a new moral focus emerges.
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Let’s just say it again: never bet against James Cameron. The only filmmaker with three of the top four box-office earners of all time to his name, Cameron’s continued fascination with all-digital storytelling through the Avatar franchise keeps printing money around the globe. At the time of writing, Avatar: Fire & Ash, the third instalment in the series launched with 2009’s Avatar and continued with 2022’s The Way of Water, has grossed a hugely profitable one and a half billion dollars worldwide and now sits at number eighteen on the all-time highest-grossing films list — not bad for a property routinely dismissed by critics as having “no pop culture impact whatsoever”. As I admitted in my review of The Way of Water, I was among the sceptics who doubted Avatar could propagate beyond the lightning-in-a-bottle phenomenon of the first film, only to be thoroughly humbled by both its effortless entertainment value and its frankly absurd box-office performance.
Fire & Ash sees Cameron return to Pandora with the intent of placing a convincing capstone on this trilogy so far, having gone on public record to say that if this third entry were to be the last, it needed to emotionally connect and resolve lingering narrative threads in a satisfying way. To his credit, the film mostly succeeds on that front. At the same time, the underpinning story is beginning to show signs of fatigue, and familiar character dynamics no longer feel as nuanced or as carefully modulated as they once did. Fire & Ash has a great deal of exposition and narrative heavy lifting to manage, and despite its three-hour runtime even Cameron’s formidable ability to carve complexity from spectacle finds itself in murkier, shallower waters this time around.
The film once again centres on former human Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), Na’vi warrior Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and their sprawling family as they grapple with grief, shifting loyalties and rising conflict across Pandora’s many biomes. The emergence of a fractured new Na’vi faction known as the Ash People, led with ferocious conviction by Varang (Oona Chaplin), ignites unrest and forges uneasy alliances with returning antagonist Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang). As tensions escalate, the Sullys and their allies — including the Metkayina — are forced to navigate internal division and existential threat. Amid this upheaval, Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) and the next generation, including Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) and the adopted human Spider (Jack Champion), are drawn further into the struggle for Pandora’s future, testing not only their resolve but the spiritual bond tying their people to Eywa as fire and ash consume both land and belief.
Reuniting with co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, Cameron expands the world of Avatar even further, often to bursting point. The sheer number of narrative subplots and overlapping character arcs can make the experience exhausting, with entire stretches passing without certain characters appearing at all, only for them to re-emerge later and jolt the viewer from intimate family drama into full-tilt action spectacle. While Cameron has long been a master of cross-cutting multiple threads, here he feels like he’s juggling too many balls at once. From a purely narrative perspective, Fire & Ash is a dense, overstuffed film, and Jake and Neytiri — once the emotional anchors of the franchise — are now pushed close to the margins as Cameron commits himself to servicing the interpersonal relationships of nearly a dozen other characters. The widened scope and scale that worked so well in The Way of Water feels less controlled here.
Among the most compelling threads is the tripartite dynamic between Spider and his two proxy father figures, Jake and Quaritch, despite the latter spending much of the film actively trying to kill the boy. There’s genuine dramatic tension in this triangle, even if it occasionally strains credibility. Kiri’s deepening relationship with Eywa — and her inability to commune with the planetary force without severe physical consequences — is another intriguing subplot, though it’s handled with an oddly half-committed tone, as though Cameron is holding it in reserve as a deus ex machina for the third act. The eventual payoff is heavily telegraphed, the heroism laid on thick enough that its impact feels dulled rather than transcendent. The third major relationship of note is between Quaritch and Varang, a dynamic imbued with distinctly unsettling energy, as expected, but the motivations of the Ash People themselves are harder to grasp amid the relentless barrage of explosions, screeching beasts and large-scale brawls. Chaplin brings an impressive intensity to Varang and her visual design is undeniably striking, yet in attempting to render her sympathetic the film dilutes what should be a sharper central conflict. The Ash People ultimately come across less as a fully realised culture and more as a functional “bad guy” archetype, lost in the surrounding narrative noise.
Receiving comparatively less screen time — though burdened with extensive voice-over narration — is Britain Dalton’s Lo’ak, Jake and Neytiri’s grieving son still consumed by guilt over his brother’s death in The Way of Water. Guilt is a powerful motivator, and the intention behind this arc is clear, with Dalton delivering a genuinely affecting performance. Unfortunately, his subplot is repeatedly sidelined by competing narrative demands. There’s a faint Cats in the Cradle quality to the Jake and Lo’ak relationship that cries out for deeper exploration, but instead the film detours into an extended, hallucinogenic interlude involving Quaritch and Varang, leaving Lo’ak’s emotional journey frustratingly underdeveloped. In the end, Fire & Ash is so laden with plot developments and overlapping storylines that even its considerable runtime struggles to carry the weight. As with many Cameron films, the dialogue frequently lands with a thud — most egregiously among the younger Na’vi, who deploy the word “bro” with eyebrow-raising frequency — and several contrived motivational twists feel engineered solely to manufacture additional conflict.
On a macro level, the central narrative of humans returning to Pandora to colonise, exploit and eradicate the Na’vi largely retreads ground already covered in The Way of Water. Rather than pushing the story into genuinely new territory, Fire & Ash effectively replays that film’s final act almost beat for beat, which proves disappointing despite the lush, immaculate visuals. Characters die, survive, fall into fire or are dragged into the depths by an array of deadly sea creatures, yet the human antagonists appear to have learned precisely nothing from previous disasters. Stupid humans making stupid decisions may be the franchise’s default setting, but by this point Miles Quaritch’s single-minded quest for vengeance feels well past its use-by date, his arc stretched thin across too many films.
And yet, for all its narrative familiarity, Cameron’s polished direction and Wētā FX’s astonishing world-building remain powerful draws. Fire & Ash is a visual triumph, as immersive and convincing as any live-action film despite not a frame being shot in a real landscape. The water effects, the flora and fauna of Pandora, the texture of skin, soil and air — everything glistens with an almost unsettling realism. At no point does the illusion falter; the viewer remains fully invested in the fate of a planet that exists entirely in pixels and graphics cards housed in a New Zealand effects facility. The production design is staggering, not just here but across the entire Avatar trilogy, with every millimetre of Pandora constructed as a living, breathing ecosystem. The sound design is equally enveloping, highlighted by a Council Of Elrond-style sequence in which Jake and his family plead with colossal, whale-like beings to aid them against the humans, the water trembling with low-frequency resonance each time these creatures communicate. Coupled with a crackling Dolby Atmos mix, these carefully considered details do enormous work in selling the fantasy.
If you’ve come this far with Avatar, there’s little point pretending this film won’t work for you. Fire & Ash delivers more of Cameron’s passion project: immense spectacle, overwrought emotion and a cluttered constellation of secondary characters and subplots. Its chief failing is that it retreads territory so effectively covered by The Way of Water, expanding character arcs while simultaneously overloading the narrative with new ones that never fully cohere. It’s undeniably beautiful and absolutely worth the price of admission on a purely visual level, but the overarching purpose of Avatar is beginning to fray. Despite sincere writing and committed performances across the board, Fire & Ash offers little that feels genuinely new. The same villains, the same extractive-colonialism plot, the same internal family conflicts — much of it feels like a relitigation of ideas Cameron explored more successfully just a few years ago. A tighter edit and a willingness to excise or condense material might have gone a long way toward restoring focus.
Still, for three hours you’re invited to sit inside a fully realised fantasy world, soak in a first-rate soundtrack and an occasionally overbearing score, and marvel at what hundreds of millions of dollars can buy in terms of design and craft. Avatar remains a box-office behemoth, even if the creeping sense of familiarity now threatens to dull its impact. See it on the biggest screen you can — just don’t be surprised if the cracks are starting to show.
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