Avatar: Fire And Ash (2025)
SHOULD I SEE IT?
YES
Pandora remains a technical marvel and James Cameron’s ambition continues to be on display.
There are moments of emotional gravity that try to break through the spectacle and make Fire and Ash a movie with deeper themes it tries to explore.
Oona Chaplin is a striking presence as Varang, the newly-minted villain of Fire and Ash.
NO
There is no discernible reason why this film needs to be 200 minutes in length.
For all of the visual innovation on display, the film’s use of High Frame Rate and a motion-smoothing aesthetic proves gravely distracting and reduces much of the film to looking like a video game.
Friends, I fear James Cameron has run out of ideas and concepts to make Pandora and Avatar
OUR REVIEW
Sometimes even the most brilliant of minds struggle to find their words. Visionaries can lose sight of what they once saw so clearly. And at times, the self-anointed smartest people in the room believe that if they just overwhelm with information, you will believe they know everything they are talking about.
Within the context of Avatar: Fire and Ash, these hypotheticals apply to James Cameron and his return to Pandora. His brilliance in understanding how audiences want to be entertained is clearly on display: make it big, bold, and unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. But his vision of Pandora, once expansive and full of curiosity, has stalled somewhat miserably. The third entry ultimately becomes a bloated spectacle, with occasional moments of cinematic impressiveness from a storyteller who has simply run out of things to say.
When the trailer dropped a few months ago, I took some heat from folks when I stated that nothing I saw there moved the needle in any direction. As it turns out, I was correct, but didn’t realize just how much so. Fire and Ash takes nearly 200 minutes to tell a massively boring story behind hundreds of millions of dollars of groundbreaking visual effects and several “how did they do that?” moments that can only engage for so long.
About one year removed from Avatar: The Way of Water in the storyline, the Sully family is still dealing with the emotional fallout of loss and grief, with Jake (Sam Worthington) trying to hold his family together. His wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) harbors great anger at the humans that have irreparably changed her world forever. Those different responses create new tensions, setting the stage for a family in crisis forced to navigate new challenges and fractured relationships.
Among those challenges: a vicious army of warriors known as the Mangkwan clan, led by the visually stunning Varang (Oona Chaplin), who seeks to overtake Pandora by aligning with human-based military forces who eventually want to colonize the moonscape. As Jake and Neytiri splinter over their grief, Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang), now fully in recombinant mode, not only sees the chance for a power grab in Pandora but also wants to re-establish a relationship with “Spider” (Jack Champion), his son who has been adopted by Jake and Neytiri.
Cameron shifts a lot of the story in Fire and Ash onto the younger performers and characters in his ensemble. Jake and his son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) drift apart leaving him to try and search for where he belongs. Daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) seeks a mythical and physical connection to Eywa, the spiritual consciousness and guiding force of Pandora. But Spider scores most of the screen time. The humans discover that Spider may have the ability to breathe Pandoran air and that sets in motion a power grab that has the film looking at themes of domain, acceptance, and the morality of the choices we make when faced with choosing violence or survival.
We have seen this all before. Distilled down to its most basic form, this Avatar seems to run through the same basic tropes: Protect your family. Protect your environment. Be brave. And for the dads in the theater, love your sons. Cameron, who wrote the screenplay with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, hammers everything so hard and on-the-nose, he might as well be playing the biggest bass drum ever created.
While even his most ardent fans will concede that Cameron is not necessarily one of the great writers of all time, Fire and Ash is a story lacking originality or anything interesting to say. While there are stunning and breathtaking visuals that flow seamlessly and look amazing, Cameron cannot resist tinkering with what he does best.
Much of Fire and Ash utilizes HFR, or High Frame Rate, giving the movie the look and feel of a video game. In other sequences, it resembles the “motion smoothing” effect that television manufacturers insist on enabling. That slick, hyper-polished aesthetic may work for some films, but here it is a constant distraction.
Someone asked me recently to sum up this new Avatar with one word. That word is frustrating.
Frustrating that this movie is 200 minutes long. Frustrating that it feels inauthentic. Frustrating that it rehashes full-on fight sequences and battles from previous films and absolutely aggravating that the film proves that James Cameron has run out of ideas for what to do with his Pandoran creation.
In the end, Avatar: Fire and Ash occasionally burns bright hot, but leaves you holding a ball of soot. Whatever the future holds for this franchise, it is clear we have clearly reached the point where Avatar is struggling to justify its relevance. And the one person capable of turning this back around feels as if he is unable to quite know how.
CAST & CREW
Starring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Jack Champion, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Oona Chaplin, Britain Dalton, Kate Winslet, Cliff Curtis, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Giovanni Ribisi, Edie Falco, Brendan Cowell, Jemaine Clement, David Thewlis, Trinity Jo-Li Bliss, Bailey Bliss, Dileep Rao, Wes Studi, Laz Alonso
Director: James Cameron
Written by: James Cameron, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver (screenplay); James Cameron, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Josh Friedman, Shane Salerno (story)
Based on characters created for the film “Avatar” by James Cameron
Release Date: December 19, 2025
20th Century Studios