Avatar: Fire And Ash

When a film is over three hours long it becomes difficult to review it concisely. There’s a lot going on in Avatar: Fire And Ash, and a lot that is worthy of comment, for good or ill. It would be all too easy to ramble – which, to his credit, is something James Cameron largely avoids. There are issues early on with one subplot which is important to the whole but not very interesting in its own right, and the story falls apart towards the end, but that’s not a disaster, as the action takes over. For the most part, the story is well paced and navigates its various twists and turns in a way that makes it surprisingly easy to stick with despite the running time.

This is, of course, a sequel to Avatar: The Way of Water, and it picks up directly from where that film ended, with extensive focus on the death of Neteyam and its effects on other characters. This means that if you’re new to the story, it may take you some time to find your feet. No effort is made to explain who is who for newcomers. The central themes, however, are obvious enough. There is a focus on relationships between parents and children, complicated by the fact that some of those parents are in fact humans (‘sky people’) mentally inhabiting bodies of the blue Na’vi people in order to interact with them in their environment.

Connected to this are issues around identity and belonging. This is a particular issue for Spider (Jack Champion), a human boy (whose white skin and dreadlocks speak volumes), who has been adopted by original avatar Jake (Sam Worthington) and his Na’vi partner Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña). He’s about to undergo a transformation which could change the colonial possibilities of the whole world, which obviously makes him important. Unfortunately, he’s also one of the most boring characters, speaking in a teen argot usually associated with boyfriends from the wrong side of the tracks, in lieu of a properly developed personality.

Because the story is ongoing, greedy colonial opportunist General Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who also inhabits a Na’vi body (with specially sculpted square jaw) remains the main villain, but we also get a new one in the form of the ferocious and charismatic Varang (Oona Chaplin), the leader of a tribe of Na’vi who reject Gaea-style goddess Eywa and are presented cutting off the braids of their enemies, whooping and dancing around, in scenes which would be considered archetypally racist but are apparently acceptable because they’re blue-skinned and other Na’vi are allowed to be heroes.

Wanting this tribe as allies, Quaritch sets out to win over Varang. He’s so relentlessly misogynistic that one keeps waiting for it to backfire – after all, Varang has not grown up in a culture which has conditioned her to accept this – and that it does not is one of the film’s greatest disappointments, especially given Cameron’s historic role in creating female characters who take no shit. “I am the fire!” screams Varang at the start, and although she remains one of the most interesting characters for much of the first half, by the end she is at most a weakly glowing ember, outshone by a man who still fails to convince as the brighter of the two.

Where the story stumbles, the film is carried forward by action. This is visually spectacular, as one would expect from Cameron, with the carefully constructed landscapes and movement through them delivering the most impressive thrills. He’s notable more at ease in water, with the movement through air not always as convincing as it should be; in and beneath the waves, it’s a lot more satisfying. One should note, however, that a lot of this is basically repetition of what was seen in the previous film, so it will work for fans who want more of the same but it doesn’t offer many surprises. There are some very similar plot elements as well.

An additional problem is the way that the apparent death of a character early on turns out to be a mistake. He’s hardly the first character to miraculously turn out to be alive after all (in this case one might think of The Abyss), but doing this so early has the effect of undermining all the subsequent action scenes, as one can’t take the risks that characters face seriously anymore.

The film’s biggest problem is its dialogue, which, in places, makes it hard to take anything seriously. Cameron is famously a fan of generative AI, and one might almost believe that the dialogue has been written that way, because practically every line is the most obvious possible set of words for a character in that situation. It is, in places, tailored to archetype, but never to personality. Particularly embarrassing are the great motivational speeches which sound as though they have been approved by an overpromoted office middle manager after watching too many Marvel blockbusters.

The film , like its predecessors, is ultimately about heroic indigenous resistance to colonisation, but it falls a little flat because this dialogue, and the decision-making that goes along with it, suggests that the Na’vi have already been thoroughly colonised at a cultural level. In a film which always sidesteps real moral quandaries and substitutes jargon for any genuinely different way of thinking, even this disappointment is predictable. It leaves a story which had the potential to grow in interesting ways as ultimately just more of the same. People chase each other around. Things explode. There is some nice scenery, but otherwise it’s just more grist for the Hollywood mill. We don’t really get to feel like we’re touching down on another world at all.

Reviewed on: 27 Dec 2025