‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ review: Not exactly a hot take

James Cameron’s eye-popping war epic doubles down on dynasty. But will Avatar: Fire and Ash find its audience already burnt out?

By now, the Avatar movies have stopped pretending they need converts. You either accept James Cameron’s blue-skinned eco-saga as a singular, maximalist strain of blockbuster cinema, or you bounce off of it entirely. Avatar: Fire and Ash doesn’t try to bridge that divide. Instead, it commits harder than ever to what these films are: Sprawling, punishing, emotionally sincere, and unapologetically exhausting. And, in doing all that, this third film finds surer dramatic footing than The Way of Water, even as it replays many of that film’s beats with greater urgency and tension.

Set only weeks after the devastating finale of The Way of Water, Fire and Ash opens in grief rather than awe. The Sully family is fractured by the loss of Neteyam, and Cameron wisely resists the temptation to rush past that trauma in favor of spectacle (though he serves some up pretty quickly just as well). Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), once again defaulting to the instincts of a soldier, mistakes forward momentum for healing. Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), meanwhile, is barely holding herself together. Her faith, her rage, and her grief collide in ways that make her the film’s most volatile and compelling force. This is weirdly Avatar at its most emotionally legible, as it’s a blockbuster willing to sit with the psychic toll of endless war, even as it engineers ever-larger battlefields on which to stage it.

“The world of Pandora will change forever.”

That tension between intimacy and enormity defines Fire and Ash at its best. Cameron introduces two new clans: the nomadic Wind Traders and the volcanic Ash People who are more like raiders. The latter serves more than merely a worldbuilding flex (though they certainly function that way), but as an ideological mirror to the Sullys’ own fractured sense of purpose. The Wind Traders embody motion, adaptation, and compromise. The Ash People, led by a chilling Oona Chaplin (granddaughter of Charlie Chaplin) as Varang, represent the spiritual cost of devastation taken to its logical extreme.

Where other Na’vi cultures cling to balance, the Ash People have rejected Eywa entirely, their faith calcined along with their homeland. It’s one of the franchise’s smartest conceptual turns and narrative departures from what we’ve seen so far. And it’s also a reminder that even Cameron’s mythic binaries allow room for moral corrosion from time to time.

The film’s central relationship between Jake and his son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) sharpens that idea further. Cameron frames them as reflections rather than opposites: Lo’ak inheriting not just Jake’s courage, but his recklessness, his guilt, and his capacity for violence. Worthington gives his most grounded performance since the beginning of the franchise, playing Jake as a man out of his own body (literally but not spiritually) whose authority has curdled into control. Cameron has always been fascinated by warriors who don’t know how to stop fighting. Here, that fixation finally finds some emotional consequence it skipped over between movies one and two.

“My people cried for help but Eywa did not come.”

None of this is subtle, but subtlety has never been Avatar’s currency. What Fire and Ash does better than The Way of Water is sustain tension and consistently surprise with its swerving structure and bingeworthy appetites. Where its predecessor often paused to marvel at its own aquatic splendor, this film moves with bruising momentum, stacking crises atop one another until the sheer accumulation becomes the theme. It’s exhausting in a way that feels earned at least most of the time, the kind of cinematic fatigue that mirrors the characters’ own. You leave wrung out, not numbed.

That said, the film is undeniably a redux. Cameron returns again to familiar rhythms of displacement, assimilation, colonial violence, retaliatory escalation, and that’s just the synopsis. The RDA remains a blunt instrument of corporate militarism. Quaritch (Stephen Lang), still compelling in his relentlessness, circles the same vendetta with incremental evolution. The will-he-won’t-he of Miles (Jack Champion) continues to spin its wheels. Albeit with some new proverbial weight thanks to his growing bond with Kiri, who continues to the be the film’s resident goddess-ex-machina. Even the film’s most striking imagery — fire-scoured landscapes, airborne migrations, ritualized grief — echoes moments we’ve already seen refracted through new elements. Even the whales—sorry, the greatest cinematic whales in decades—are pretty much just extensions of what we’ve seen before, only more inflated.

But if Fire and Ash is repetition, it’s purposeful repetition. Cameron isn’t chasing novelty so much as refinement, sanding his themes into something harder and sharper to sustain a legacy that almost aloof at times with its own box office success. This is an Avatar movie that knows exactly what it is and refuses to apologize for it. It’s too long, too loud, and too emotionally earnest for its own good. And yet, it earns its excess through sheer conviction and commitment.

“You said you could protect this family.”

And yes, visually, Fire and Ash is nothing short of astonishing, even by Avatar standards. Cameron and his collaborators at Wētā once again turn Pandora into a place that feels less designed than discovered, each new biome governed by its own physical logic. The Wind Traders’ aerial routes carve invisible highways through the sky, their massive Medusoids drifting like living weather systems, while the Ash People’s territory is all scorched geometry and suffocating grays. It’s a version of Pandora where color itself seems to have been burned away.

What’s striking isn’t just the detail, but the coherence. These environments don’t exist to be admired in isolation, but to express ideology, grief, and survival. Pandora remains one of the few digital worlds in blockbuster cinema that truly feels inhabited rather than rendered. It’s one of the rare times I want the 3D effect because I want to be as immersed as impossible, not to just gape at some illusion of depth.

What’s perhaps most impressive, though, is how expressive the imagery has become on a purely human level. The performance capture has evolved to the point where micro-expressions (such as the tightening of a jaw, the flicker of doubt in an eye, the weight of exhaustion in a posture) register with startling clarity through layers of CG. It’s one thing to make these Na’vi come to life so consistently on their own. It’s another to watch them flourish in these ever-changing visual palettes so seamlessly and without diminishing returns.

The bottom line.

Cameron stages quiet, intimate moments with the same care as his largest set pieces, letting grief and resentment play out in close-ups that would collapse under lesser technology. The spectacle is overwhelming, yes, but it’s never empty. Every explosion of fire or sweep of ash is tethered to an emotional climax. Few filmmakers can still sell scale as meaning. Cameron remains one of the rare ones who can.

You don’t have to love Avatar to recognize what Cameron is doing here. But you do have to accept the terms or your movie ticket. If you’re not already sold on these films as a singular cinematic project somewhere between operatic sci-fi, ecological parable, and war memoir, then Fire and Ash won’t change your mind. For everyone else, it’s a punishing, engrossing, and ultimately worthwhile chapter that feels every minute of its runtime and justifies a majority of them.

And in an era of frictionless, disposable blockbusters, that alone feels like a minor victory in a new world where the existence of these sorts of movies and how we get to experience them are more in danger than ever.

Avatar: Fire and Ash opens in theaters on December 19. Watch the trailer here.

Images courtesy of 20th Century Studios. Read more articles by Jon Negroni here.