James Cameron experiences growing pains with the still-spectacular Avatar: Fire And Ash

There’s more plot than that, too, some of which more closely rehashes material from the first two films—Water in particular, to the point where it’s easy to wonder whether some sequel material was dragged and dropped from the second movie into the third during their lengthy gestation period. The large cast, multiple Na’vi tribes, and tripled bad guys (the regular “sky people”—the humans who still want to ravage Pandora for its various natural resources—are also still hanging around) deviate Fire And Ash from the counterintuitive but highly effective structure of the first two movies. In both of those, Cameron spends a surprising amount of time luxuriating in the exploration of new fantasy environments, just as he explores so much of the Titanic well before the ship his the iceberg. The new movie parcels out action sequences at a more typical epic-blockbuster clip. This oddly makes the expansive runtime feel longer than the other two, even though it only exceeds them by a matter of minutes and may be the most purely action-packed of the three.

Then again, it’s hard to complain that Cameron serves up slam-bang set pieces at regular intervals. That early airship attack does the neat trick of introducing the fearsome, red-painted Varang through action so dynamic and excitingly choreographed that it should send the airship-fixated Kevin Feige into the fetal position. Even the most familiar of later sequences, a massive mash-up of the air battle from the first movie and the sea battle from the second, adds great new details: majestically murderous new sea creatures, or a smaller-scale fight scene that knocks its participants from floating rock to floating rock.

As is usually the case with Cameron, all of this potentially cacophonous action is easy to follow. It’s a little trickier to track all of the major characters’ emotional journeys, especially with the irrepressible Spider elbowing his way into the family. As Fire And Ash goes on, it feels increasingly unsure of just how much of a wrap-up this will be—or even what’s on the table for story threads that can be wrapped up, versus what will be left as the kind of dangling (or are they frayed?) threads that, until the Avatar sequels, rarely had a place in Cameron’s fantastical worlds. As a result, some of the most intriguing new wrinkles in this film, primarily involving Quaritch’s unlikely and sometimes downright hallucinatory alliance with Varang, fail to develop into full-fledged subplots. Quaritch’s Dark Sully act in particular feels like it could be excavated further, especially in a series that sometimes wants to have its colonialism and vanquish it, too.

In a sense, Cameron is a victim of his own success. The Avatar movies are so lushly overgrown with visual detail, and draw such surprisingly nuanced and sensitive motion-capture performances from its human cast, that any momentary storytelling hiccup can feel like a glitch in the machine. Fire And Ash is terrific entertainment that occasionally gives the impression of well-appointed vamping; it’s almost enough to wonder if all the meticulous writer’s-room blueprinting of two-to-four Avatar sequels might have done as much harm as good. Viewers who just long for more time in Pandora are in luck: Cameron may not see a way out himself.

Director: James Cameron
Writers: James Cameron, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver
Starring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Jack Champion, Britain Dalton, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Oona Chaplin, Kate Winslet
Release Date: December 19, 2025