Avatar: Fire and Ash Review – James Cameron’s Shallow Spectacle Still Earns Your Money

There is a moment early in Avatar: Fire and Ash where the copious and three-dimensional CG vistas of James Cameron’s Pandora are not picture perfect. It is after an action sequence in which one group of renegade Na’vi firebomb another tribe. Our heroes are thus blasted out of the sky and laid low along a heavily forested jungle floor. It is in this precise breath, or perhaps a blink that occurs between breaths, where a bioluminescent vine reaches out for the children of Jake Sully and Neytiri, that I clocked it: an incongruity; a computer-generated image which does not look quite photorealistic. As it turns out, even gods bleed.

Pointing this out, of course, is the definition of nitpickery. When so much else of Avatar 3 is as gorgeously realized and methodical as this third trip to Pandora tends to be, it can admittedly be jarring to catch imperfections out of the corner of one’s eye. But like a microscopic flaw in a jewel, it is only worthy of commentary to a point. The thing still shimmers in its king’s scepter when he waves it around declaring himself ruler of the world. In fact, there might be more visual inconsistencies that my feasting, 3D-bespectacled eyes simply missed while being overwhelmed. If there are any aesthetic quibbles to be had, though, they vanish like mist beneath a neon-tinged sunrise in a movie this uniformly rapturous across its gargantuan 197-minute runtime.

Whatever else you make of Avatar: Fire and Ash’s narrative cul-de-sacs about blue aliens once again rising up against the ravages of the human race, the threequel remains an aesthetic triumph and simultaneous indictment of so much else churned out of the Hollywood blockbuster machine. Why can’t the plains of Minecraft, or the wastelands of Deadpool and Wolverine’s Void look this eye-poppingly wondrous?

Then again, I am left to also wonder why I take it all for granted—so much so that I get distracted by the most trivial of blemishes when considering what to write about a movie with a running time longer than Oppenheimer and a stone’s throw away from Return of the King. It might be because while this has the scale of an epic, it frustratingly maintains the thematic depth and complexity of a children’s fairytale picture, and Disney’s Pocahontas to be specific.

To be absolutely clear, Fire and Ash is a good movie. It is also a step up from second film The Way of Water, which in many respects felt more like a showcase on a tech convention’s floor of what James Cameron’s digital innovations can now do with H20. One of the most damning critiques I’ve heard from colleagues about Fire and Ash is that it is The Way of Water all over again, but if so, it is a better iteration of the same story. This time we have some semblance of narrative momentum due to the travails of the only Sully child with any dimensionality: the adopted child Spider (Jack Champion).

Fire and Ash is genuinely Spider’s movie since he is the impetus upon which the entire plot pivots. After the events of The Way of Water, where the eldest son of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) died during a replay of Titanic, Neytiri has come to despise their humanoid “Sky Person” son, Spider. Also unable and unwilling to return to his Homo sapien heritage in the “civilization” corner of land that’s been deforested into a Blade Runner-esque hellscape, young Spider is effectively being banished by all sides to live with distant Na’vi relations. That is until the Sully clan’s floating transport is attacked by Varang (Oona Chaplin), a witchy Na’vi whose Mangkwan clan worships the flames of war and nihilism after a volcano wiped out their homes and neighbors some years ago.

It is this crossing of the paths which leads to the Christlike member of the Sully kin, Kiri (Sigourney Weaver, still bizarrely cast as a teenager), to call on Eywa to save Spider’s life after his oxygen mask is broken. Enter those aforementioned glowy vines and some New Age mysticism which turn this young man into an—ahem—half-breed who resembles a human but physiologically mirrors a Na’vi. It also captures the attention of Spider’s dastardly biological father, the returning sourpuss Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who continues to insist on his hatred for all things Pandora and Na’vi. But after so many years spent trapped inside a Na’vi avatar’s body, the crusty army man is starting to protest too much as he finds a soulmate in Chaplin’s Varang. The pair turn out to have a lot of the same interests in common: sweet nothings like genocide, no-quarter battle tactics, and maybe a dabble of blood stuff in the bedroom.

Their union is what truly endangers the waterbending tribes within which the Sullys now live, leading inevitably to another climactic battle between the technologically advanced Sky People, now with their own Na’vi death cult providing air support, and the virtuous aquatic tribes and their space whale bestie battalions.

It is an often remarked critique that the Avatar movies seem to generally lack the same lasting relevancy of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings in the cultural imagination, despite Cameron’s films making more money (at least when you do not account for inflation). But the density of Reddit posts and fan art notwithstanding, the charms of Avatar: Fire and Ash are obvious to anyone with eyes.

The CG worlds are sumptuous, even without the three-dimensional gimmicks added on. In an age where tentpole spectacles dominate the multiplex, here is a vision that honestly invites the audience to inhabit its daydream for maybe a quarter of your waking day. It’s a steep time investment, but its lack of self-awareness or self-effacement remains as novel and refreshing in 2025 as it did at the dawn of irony-drenched blockbuster “comedies” in 2009. It’s just a pleasure to visit Oz once in a while.

If the movies lack staying power in the imagination, it is probably because the screenplays that Cameron co-writes for this wonderland never match his visual inventiveness. Sixteen years since its inception, the Avatar films remain a pastiche of colonialist and white savior fantasies in the Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, and literal O.G. Pocahontas legend vein, the latter fanned by English soldier of fortune, John Smith.  But those derivative roots do not mean you cannot do interesting things with the fantasy, problematic though it might be.

In the case of Fire and Ash, Cameron and co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver introduce a variety of interesting wrinkles that would seem to channel real, troubling histories between European explorers/conquerors and Indigenous peoples in North and Central America. The villainous temptress Varang and her followers flirt with being a metaphor for the complicity and/or cooperation of some Native tribes and nations siding against their longstanding enemies during colonial inflection points. Think of the rival communities who sided with Cortez and the Spanish against the Aztec (mind you, in actual history it was the standalone Aztecs who did blood sacrifices, as opposed to their native enemies). Similarly, the potential tragedy of Spider, a young person caught between two worlds and civilizations that both reject him, is one of the most poignant narratives of frontier history. Look to the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, or for that matter, the real historical Pocahontas.

Avatar: Fire and Ash flirts with some substantively big ideas that could undergird its visual splendor. However, as with most Cameron screenplays, any dramatic or historically knotty idea is mostly straightened out or glossed over in favor of the commercial beats that he knows how to play to the hilt: star-crossed lovers on a doomed vessel! A grieving mother renewing her maternal instincts with a surrogate daughter! And yes, another iteration of the proud and noble Indigenous people, led by their own adopted white man, calling on mother nature herself to defeat the technologically advanced white devils who run the world.

Cameron plays those well-worn, and lucrative, beats incredibly well again, it’s just the novelty has worn a bit thin after a third bite at the apple. That isn’t to say it’s poorly done. It is, again, superior to The Way of Water if for no other reason than Chaplin’s evil sorceress Na’vi matches Lang’s scenery-chewing as Quaritch, and the two have some diabolical fun as Quaritch begins going native enough to be redressed by his superiors a la Lawrence of Arabia. The climactic battle is also more satisfying this time around since all of Pandora’s ecosystems get in on the anti-human action, suggesting that when the time finally comes, Cameron will definitely side with the orcas in their anti-yacht uprising.

Some of the audience-servicing still seems a little forced to a critic’s brain—especially the addition of another star-crossed young romance that this time involves one half of the coupling being played by a septuagenarian—but for family audiences looking for a visual distraction this holiday season, it will matter naught.

This thing is meant to be admired, consumed, and then like holiday lights forgotten about in a box until roughly the same time next Avatar season. One can be a grinch and wish for more—or, like a certain holiday movie classic, grouch that a few of those little lights are not twinkling—but such petty qualifications in the face of this million-watts-light-show leads to pedantry. Fire and Ash is more of the same, and in some areas better. Overwhelm your senses and then go back to forgetting about the blue people until Cameron and 20th Century Studios need to collect a couple more billion dollars from us in three to 20 years.

Avatar: Fire and Ash opens on Friday, Dec. 19.