‘Avatar: Fire And Ash’ Is More Of The Same – Do With That What You Will

The criteria for whether you’ll enjoy James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash – the latest entry in the visually sumptuous, somewhat problematic yet undoubtedly entertaining blockbuster franchise – is pleasingly simple. Did you like the original 2009 film or, in particular, 2022’s The Way of Water? Then you’ll probably like Fire and Ash, but it’s a film unlikely to make new converts.

Because ultimately, this latest Avatar movie feels like a third film in the franchise… for better and worse. Yes, it still has some of the most mind-bogglingly beautiful computer-rendered graphics of any film ever released, plenty of interesting ideas, and incredible action. But even though I rather enjoyed it, Fire and Ash is perhaps the first time in his career that it feels like Cameron is treading water rather than riding a wave.

Avatar: Fire and Ash picks up right after The Way of Water, where the Na’vi Sully family are grieving the death of their son Neteyam, particularly Lo’ak (Britain Dalton). Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) soon decide to send their adopted human son Spider (Jack Champion) to live elsewhere due to danger to his life, but when he’s unexpectedly blessed by Eywa, he becomes a hot ticket to study for the human colonisers of Pandora.

Meanwhile, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) continues on the warpath. Determined to bring Jake in and win over his biological son Spider, he turns to Varang (Oona Chaplin), the leader of the Ash Na’vi, who’s intent on watching the world burn. Thus, the fire of hate will soon create the ash of grief…

An extremely confident threequel

Fire and Ash takes full advantage of its status as a threequel to waste very little time introducing its characters. At this point, I’m fully on board with Sam Worthington’s surprisingly excellent portrayal of Jake Sully as a determined yet surly father figure, Neytiri’s struggles with grief and hate as shown by Zoe Saldaña, and the freaky stuff that Miles Quaritch is getting up to in a delightful performance from Stephen Lang.

These characters lay the foundation to introduce a handful of delightful new characters, particularly Oona Chaplin’s Varang. The Ash Na’vi show a very different side to the absurdly tall aliens who form the crux of this franchise, a tribe driven by cruelty and chaos rather than unity in the face of potential human extinction. Varang is a fantastic character in Chaplin’s hands, and the weird psychosexual relationship she has with Quaritch is a real highlight of the film.

This new group of Na’vi also inject the chaotic element of fire into the action of Avatar: Fire and Ash, which results in some genuinely thrilling setpieces. It’s one thing to have the CGI look this good, but only a director like James Cameron could utilise it to this extent to create so many action scenes with a genuine sense of craft, tension, and genuine mise-en-scene.

Avatar: Fire and Ash undoubtedly retreads some old ground

Yet despite the fantastic direction and a story that genuinely did move me at times, I found that Fire and Ash shared a lot of similarities with The Way of Water. The action this time around has even higher stakes than the second film, but the broad strokes of some setpieces feel genuinely repetitive. Act three particularly suffers in this way, even if the specific way that it delivers the action is genuinely thrilling stuff.

Then there’s also the kinda odd stuff in all the Avatar movies that comes from being films about colonial resistance told by a 70-year old Canadian guy. Fire and Ash does have particularly interesting musings on the role of violence in fighting your oppressors, but I found that the overt Christianisation of the Na’vi culture and religion (based heavily on real-world indigenous cultures) continues in this movie. Kiri, a young girl played by the immutable Sigourney Weaver, is basically Na’vi Jesus at this point, and I’m not sure how I feel about it!

Alas, the formula is simple – I mark myself as a fan of the first two Avatar films, and so I had a pretty good time watching Fire and Ash. It’s big and sentimental in a way that so few blockbusters are these days, and truly feels like a Big Movie (both scale and timewise) that sincerely does deserve to be seen in the best theatre possible – if you liked the previous films, anyway.

★★★½

Avatar: Fire and Ash is in cinemas now.