Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025)

Watched 12/18/25 (theater)

I have trouble deciding on what the point of Avatar is. Yes it’s this obvious ecological sci-fi blockbuster designed to hide its vapid capitalistic streak in a movie featuring main characters defying corporate American greed. That’s ironic coming from Disney. Yes it’s also an amusement park ride designed for the ultimate immersive movie theater experience. And yes it’s a James Cameron pet project full of all the fizzy technological advancements he gets off on. I think this third identity has become more and more of the definitive takeaway, three movies in. I’m not even really mad about it, either.

While the original Avatar showed us some of the finest technology of its kind and got the most novel use of its jungle-set worldbuilding, the second movie blew away the old visuals and introduced us to a far more seamless, immersive seascape as the main characters went full H2O. That movie featured some character work that I remember thinking was average at best, in particular it focused on Jake Sully’s new family and the now-blue Colonel Quarritch. He was awesome then, he was awesome in the first movie, and he continues to be awesome.

The pacing is so whiplashed in this new Avatar that I felt I barely learned a thing from beginning to end. Not only do they retread the plot of 2, but it just moves insanely fast for 30 minutes and then you get the slowest most painstaking nothingness for the next 45. Over and over. It’s jarring and weird and worries me for rewatch value. You definitely feel the runtime and it hurts.

Anyways the plot literally just does some really similar chase-and-fight stuff to the second movie. That’s honestly all it is. You’ll laugh when you realize how similar it is to Way of Water. So yes I did chuckle in disbelief. But I also laughed in a good way because the action filmmaking here is just so complete. There are a few sequences that are absolutely breathtaking, and a few things that are overly familiar, and it’s all still a spectacle to behold. There’s nothing else this year that moves and sounds this way; Cameron clearly cares enough to spend the extra time and money calibrating for maximum impact.

About 30 minutes in, the main blue family take to the skies in these sort of jellyfish hot air balloons. It’s played for Spielbergian wonder and achieves it, with these aircrafts gliding through the sky in massive translucent glory. It’s an image I won’t soon forget, on par with some of the more iconic sci-fi visuals of the century. And it only gets better from there as it quickly descends into an ambush on one of the largest and most violent scales Cameron has ever done.

In tracking shots reminiscent of Titanic, firearm combat that shares more than a little DNA with Aliens, and music on par with some of the best Ridley Scott battle scores, this ambush was worth the theater trip alone. There are plenty of other rip-roaring moments throughout the film, but everything from the smoking sky-dragon tails to the introduction of villainess Varang (she was a hit), to the ultra-impressive ability of Cameron to give undersized human character Spider a completely credible fighting style when matched up against blue giants, this sequence and many other action beats are so expensively, expansively realized that I was happy to overlook this movie’s many, many flaws.

Also, I can’t praise Stephen Lang and Oona Chaplin’s chemistry enough. Some of my favorite movie moments of the year spawn from their odd-couple pairing. No notes there. Lots of notes with the franchise’s continued insistance on having the most awkward, leaden dialogue around. It has almost become endearing at this point.

7.75/10