Avatar: Fire and Ash

Pandora has always been a place where James Cameron wanted to make the impossible look as natural as possible. In Avatar: Fire and Ash, this naturalness has now become both a curse and a strength. Fire, floating rocks, alien creatures, and entire landscapes move with a visual realism that other blockbusters would reserve for their biggest climactic moments. Cameron can still stage this world in an overwhelming way. But something else has become more difficult: convincing us that we’re seeing it for the first time.

In the wake of the events of The Way of Water, the Sully family remains reeling from their loss. Jake (Sam Worthington) tries to keep his family together, while Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) is much more directly consumed by grief and anger. Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) is also deeply weighed down by what has happened. Cameron begins the film at an unusually quiet moment for a movie of this scale. The focus isn’t initially on the next battle, but on a family that, while it has survived, cannot simply pick up where it left off.

This grief would actually be the material for a significantly darker Avatar film. Fire and Ash returns to it time and again, but doesn’t linger on it long enough to make it the emotional centerpiece that the opening promises. There’s already too much else going on in Pandora: Spider (Jack Champion) is becoming increasingly important to both humans and the Na’vi, Quaritch (Stephen Lang) remains a threat, and with the Mangkwan, Cameron introduces a group of Na’vi that could—at least in theory—complicate the series’ previously relatively clear moral worldview.

They are led by Varang (Oona Chaplin), a character whose very presence makes it clear that Cameron doesn’t simply want to introduce yet another clan with a different landscape and different customs this time around. The Mangkwan represent a side of Pandora that fits less harmoniously into the existing conception of nature, community, and Eywa. This is an interesting shift. The first two films were able to frame their conflict very clearly as a struggle between a threatened natural world and human exploitation. Fire and Ash suggests that violence, power, and fanaticism are not brought to Pandora exclusively from the outside.

Varang should therefore actually be one of the film’s most important characters. Oona Chaplin imbues her with enough physical authority and unpredictability to raise this expectation. However, Cameron only partially exploits this potential. The more the film returns to its familiar lines of conflict, the more the new character loses the independence that her introduction promised. This is symptomatic of Fire and Ash: The film has several ideas that could pull the franchise in a new direction, but in the end, it relies conspicuously often on what Cameron has long known works.

The same applies to Quaritch. Stephen Lang has turned the former colonel into a surprisingly enduring character, precisely because his crude military directness clashes so well with the spiritual world of Pandora. But after three films, the question increasingly arises as to how often the same antagonist can be repositioned before persistence turns into repetition. Fire and Ash finds new constellations for him, but not always a truly new function.

The film is stronger where these familiar conflicts play out through the Sully family. Zoe Saldaña plays Neytiri with a toughness that bears little resemblance to the lightness of earlier moments. Her performance thrives on the sense that grief can turn into aggression at any moment. That’s precisely why Neytiri remains interesting, even if the film doesn’t consistently give her the space this development deserves. Sam Worthington, on the other hand, plays Jake with more restraint. He is no longer the wide-eyed stranger from the first film but rather a father and leader who must make decisions under the weight of their potential consequences.

Sigourney Weaver, as Kiri, remains one of the more unusual characters in the series. Through her, Cameron connects the family’s history with the spiritual dimension of Pandora without having to fully explain this connection. At the same time, Jack Champion’s Spider assumes an increasingly important position between the worlds. The fact that both characters, in different ways, don’t fully belong anywhere is one of the film’s more interesting ideas. Fire and Ash thus actually has enough emotional and thematic conflicts for a major family drama. But these constantly compete with a blockbuster that eventually wants to fly, fight, hunt, and explode again.

And as soon as Cameron unleashes this blockbuster, it becomes clear why hardly anyone directs such films quite like he does.

Despite its digital nature, the action possesses an astonishing sense of space and movement. Cameron rarely loses track of where characters are, where they’re going, and what lies between them and their destination. Flight sequences through vast landscapes remain easy to follow, battles have spatial consequences, and even completely fantastical creatures don’t look like effects that were added to a scene afterward. The technical perfection almost becomes a problem of perception: things that would have been considered impossible twenty years ago are accepted here as the norm after just a few minutes.

This is precisely what sets Fire and Ash apart from its predecessors. In 2009, Avatar was able to amaze audiences simply through the existence of Pandora. Thirteen years later, The Way of Water once again created a new visual sensation with its underwater worlds. The third film has a harder time. Fire and ash alter colors, landscapes, and atmosphere, but they don’t create the same fundamental impression of experiencing something never before seen on film.

Cameron responds to this by offering more: more locations, more creatures, more conflicts, more action. With a runtime of over three hours, this leads to a strange contradiction. Fire and Ash is massive and, at the same time, sometimes surprisingly familiar. Individual sequences are spectacular, while the overall narrative structure repeatedly evokes memories of The Way of Water. The film expands Pandora without expanding its narrative to the same extent.

Perhaps that has now become the real challenge of this franchise. Cameron has created a world whose technical possibilities seem nearly limitless. But limitless possibilities do not automatically generate limitless surprise. At some point, even Pandora needs more than just a new landscape.

Fire and Ash therefore remains a fascinating blockbuster with an unusual problem: Its visuals can still be overwhelming, but the sense of wonder they evoke is no longer a given. After three trips to Pandora, it’s no longer enough to simply make this world bigger. Now it must change.