Avatar: Fire and Ash Review
The latest Avatar is the worst of the bunch, a disappointment after the excellent The Way of Water.
Avatar: Fire and Ash. Credit: 20th Century Studios
James Cameron has been working on Avatar in some form since 1994, when he wrote the film's first treatment. Slated to be his next project after the colossal success of Titanic, he put the project on hold because he felt the technology wasn’t ready. Principal photography finally began in 2007 after years of pre-production. Avatar premiered in 2009, Cameron’s first non-documentary feature since 1997. Since then, he’s directed two Avatar sequels, the latest of which is Avatar: Fire and Ash. He’ll be in the Avatar business for the foreseeable future, with two more sequels planned. I wish he’d make something else, and this latest entry in the series makes me want that more than ever.
Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) grapple with loss after the events of The Way of Water. Human forces continue to threaten Pandora, including the resurrected Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who is still dead-set on capturing Sully at any cost.
Avatar: Fire and Ash. Credit: 20th Century Studios
The Sullys decide to return their adopted human son, Spider (Jack Champion), back to his own people, but on the way, the floating sky caravan they’re riding is destroyed by an attack from the Ash People, a violent Na’vi clan led by the bloodthirsty Varang (Oona Chaplin). Quaritch forms an alliance with her and her people by offering them human weapons.
The movie explores themes of belonging and identity amid the struggle for survival. Spider, along with other characters—Quaritch and human/Na’vi clone Kiri (Sigourney Weaver)—exist in a space where they struggle with who they are, who they were, and where they belong. The problem is that this all gets dulled and lost amid the movie’s incredibly bloated 3-hour, 25-minute runtime. There could be a good movie in here somewhere. Instead, we get an overindulgent mess that plays like James Cameron writing fanfiction of his own work, thanks to how much it rehashes the previous film, The Way of Water, only bigger.
Avatar: Fire and Ash. Credit: 20th Century Studios
Rather than the complex depiction of the other Na’vi clans we meet, Varang and her people are presented as bloodthirsty savages to an almost cartoonishly offensive degree. Their motivations for wanting to conquer and kill everyone are covered in a snippet of expository dialogue, and that’s it. This isn’t how you develop compelling villains. As an aside, I immediately saw a resemblance in Varang’s design to Rufio from Steven Spielberg’s Hook, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. Now you see it, too. You’re welcome.
The visual effects still impress. I saw the movie on a Dolby Cinema screen in 3D, and it’s bright and beautiful. Pandora feels alive, and the actors' motion-captured performances are seamlessly integrated into the lifelike CG characters.
Avatar: Fire and Ash. Credit: 20th Century Studios
I have mixed feelings about the film’s mixing of framerates—24 fps for dialogue, 48 fps for action. The 48 fps bits look better than other instances I’ve seen since the horrid motion in Peter Jackson’s high-framerate experiment in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, somehow avoiding that soap opera look, but I found the shifts between 24 and 48 fps jarring.
James Cameron desperately needs someone to tell him “no.” Avatar: Fire and Ash could have worked as a leaner film, but instead it feels like Cameron wasn’t capable of trimming the excess fat, indulgently leaving everything in. Sometimes limitations produce brilliant films, and this isn’t one of those.
Avatar: The Way of Water opens in theaters on December 19, 2025.
