Avatar is probably one of the strangest franchises of all time. The films come in and dominate the box office and make over 2 billion dollars, but months after they are released, they are entirely forgotten about. If you ask the public if you have seen Avatar, they assume you are talking about Avatar: The Last Airbender, and not James Cameron’s Avatar. For their box office dominance, the films have no legacy to them outside of its technological achievements. For me I have always viewed this franchise as “style over substance”. While visually stunning, its narrative, characters, and themes are woefully shallow, one-noted, and bland with familiar. Cameron, deep down, probably knows this as this is the most common criticism of this franchise. So I was hoping with Avatar: Fire and Ash, he will finally shake it up a bit and give this world more nuance and complexity. Regrettably, while Cameron does introduce some interesting elements, he cowardly pulls them back as he creates another one-noted and forgettable Dances with Wolves meets Pocahontas in space.
Jake (Sam Worthington), Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), and their children grapple with the death of their son. However, they have no time to grieve as they encounter an aggressive Na’vi tribe, the Ash People led by the fiery Varang (Oona Chaplin). Soon Varang forms an alliance with Quaritch (Stephen Lang) and humans as the war for Pandora is about to begin.
Before I bog down the room too much, let me at least explain where Avatar: Fire and Ash went right. As expected Fire and Ash is a visual spectacle. The visual effects, sound design, and action pieces throw you right into the heart of Pandora. At many moments I found myself wondering where the practical sets ended and the digital work began as the integration was that seamless. While the high-frame rate does feel unnatural, like a video-game cutscene, and will make some audience members sick, like myself, there is no denying that Cameron knows how to make a visual spectacle.
However, once you move past the visual feast, Avatar: Fire and Ash is woefully bland and stubbornly one-noted. Cameron gestures towards deep, more nuanced moral questions and even flirts with the idea of genuine consequences, only for him to retreat yet again back to the same simplistic thematic ground the series already occupies. The Ash People, led by the film’s clear standout Oona Chaplin as Varang, are on paper an intriguing antagonist. A Na’vi clan that has severed their connection to Eywa after a devastating natural disaster could have served as a compelling foil to the other tribes, suggesting how a single catastrophe might turn a people against nature itself. Instead, they are reduced to a familiar and uncomfortable caricature. Just as the Na’vi as a whole lean heavily into the “noble savage” trope, the Ash People fall into the equally racist “savage” archetype long popularized by Westerners. They are treated as one-note villains who exist solely to watch the world burn.
Elsewhere, the film introduces potentially rich narrative threads only to abandon them. Jake and Neytiri are faced with a genuinely difficult choice regarding Spider (Jack Champion), a human child they raised who can now breathe Pandora’s air, a development that could dramatically alter the course of the war. Should they kill the child to protect Pandora, or spare him and attempt to shield him from humanity? The setup echoes the story of Abraham and Isaac from the Old Testament, yet Cameron once again refuses to follow the implications through, opting instead for the safest possible resolution.
The same applies to Quaritch, a dead human consciousness trapped in a Na’vi body, condemned to never be seen as human again. It’s a fascinating existential hook that ultimately goes nowhere, capped off with a Scooby-Doo level villain exit. And then there is Kiri (Sigourne Weaver), effectively Pandora’s Jesus, a concept that still makes little sense and pushes the series into a level of supernatural abstraction that it cannot support. Individually, these ideas are compelling. Together, they could have formed something genuinely interesting and challenging. But Cameron’s persistent fear of ambiguity and his refusals to fully commit to any of these threads renders them useless.
What further holds Avatar: Fire and Ash back is how aggressively it recycles the narrative beats of the previous films. The final act is, for all intents and purposes, a rerun of The Way of Water: humanity hunts whales to extract a valuable brain serum, the Na’vi ally with the animals, and a climactic battle ensues. The only real difference this time is scale. Jake once again unites the Na’vi under a single banner, echoing the first Avatar, and once again nearly fails when his family is captured, yet another beat lifted straight from The Way of Water. Inevitably, humanity is defeated, again At this point, we are three films into this franchise, and Cameron is still playing it painfully safe. He leans entirely on the overwhelming spectacle of Pandora to distract from the hollowness of the narrative, the shallow thematic engagement, and the genuinely godawful dialogue.
Ultimately, Avatar: Fire and Ash stands as yet another showcase of style triumphing over substance. For all its technical wizardry, the film is undone by a thin narrative, underdeveloped themes, and characters trapped in a cycle of repetition where none of which come close to justifying its bloated three-and-a-half-hour runtime. So long as Cameron continues to prioritize safety over ambition, these films will remain culturally hollow: admired for their technological breakthroughs, forgotten for everything else. Avatar may be the highest-grossing franchise in cinema history, but it is also, paradoxically, one of the most forgettable.
My Rating: C
Now in theaters nationwide.
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