In Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third chapter of James Cameron’s epic saga, Jake Sully and Neytiri’s family struggles with profound grief following the death of their eldest son, Neteyam. As they fight to protect Pandora from returning human forces led by the relentless Colonel Quaritch, a dangerous new threat emerges: the Ash People, a fierce and aggressive Na’vi clan from volcanic lands, ruled by the ruthless leader Varang, who forges uneasy alliances that blur the lines between friend and foe.

Avatar: Fire and Ash Review (3D)

The first Avatar was a technical marvel wrapped around a mind-numbingly dumb and generic movie. The second added a dash of heart that carried most of the film. While both made fortunes that exceeded the GDPs of half the nations on Earth, neither managed to thread its way into the cultural zeitgeist. As The Critical Drinker rightly pointed out in a recent YouTube video, nobody talks about these movies. There are no famous lines quoted ad infinitum. It’s been almost 100 years since Dorothy said, “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” and I just heard it on a brand new program a couple of days ago. Kids aren’t going crazy for the toys, t-shirts, and video games. Do you know anyone who wears Avatar apparel? A few weeks ago, when I was updating the site, I realized that I couldn’t even remember the main characters’ names.

To put it bluntly, the Avatar series is one of the most creatively bankrupt and narratively lethargic film franchises this side of Disney… oh wait, that’s right, Disney owns it now too. Square peg, meet square hole.

This third and, if there’s any justice in the world, final chapter about the ten-foot-tall blue cats and the white military who hate them doesn’t just maintain the status quo; James Cameron and crew have managed to make the previous installments look like Citizen Kane by comparison.

Avatar: Fire and Ash is a never-ending, trite, and melodramatic three hours of endless useless characters filling time with rehashed plot points until Cameron can justify yet another hollow action sequence ripped from one of the earlier films, fed a diet of anabolic steroids, and lobotomized. The evil Na’vi that feature most prominently in most of the film’s advertisements? They’re barely in the movie and serve absolutely no narrative purpose other than almost literally to herd the protagonists toward the next plot point. Colonel Quartich? He’s there, except when he’s not.

Quaritch isn’t alone. Characters simply show up when and where needed for a Formula One pitstop before veering off in a new direction. There is no sense of the passage of time, geography, or distance. In the last film, it took the Sullys what seemed like weeks to travel from the forest to their new beach home. In Fire & Ash, it appears that they can make a round trip before noon. Watching this mess is like being inside the mind of someone with ADHD—ideas, subplots, and characters crash together like hummingbirds mating, coming together for a few seconds for a quick setup or resolution, only to part once again for some new idea that Cameron had to cram in.

The cast is enormous, bloated with characters from past films no one remembers or cares about, filling time that would have been better spent on the core characters. Things set up in the last two films—character subplots made to feel like they were important and building to something—get resolutions that feel like afterthoughts, tossed in as if Cameron suddenly remembered them midway through editing.

Visually, the film may fare better in a standard presentation, but my only option was 3D, and the result was consistently distracting. Nearly every scene looked like a high-end video game cutscene rather than a cinematic experience. While the imagery may qualify as a technical achievement in isolation, its impact within the film itself was effectively nil. The 3D adds nothing beyond a shallow sense of depth and, in some moments, actively undermines immersion. Save your money—this is not a movie worth seeing in 3D.

Performances across the board are serviceable at best, with Zoe Saldaña delivering the only turn that carries genuine emotional weight. Sam Worthington remains as stiff and inert as ever, bringing all the charisma of a wooden plank despite the layers of billion-dollar motion capture. Stephen Lang is reliably committed, but his character serves no meaningful purpose, drifting through the film like a plot device on life support. Jack Champion fares slightly better than in the previous installment. Still, in a movie generated almost entirely inside a computer, his performance stands out as the most artificial of all.

In the end, Avatar: Fire and Ash feels less like the culmination of a grand cinematic vision and more like a bloated obligation, dragged across the finish line by sheer technical momentum. Whatever awe might have once surrounded Cameron’s world has calcified into repetition, spectacle divorced from meaning, and characters treated as movable parts rather than people. For all its money, manpower, and computing power, the film leaves behind nothing lasting—no moments to quote, no images to cherish, no ideas to wrestle with—only the lingering sense that a franchise built on limitless resources has finally run out of anything worth saying, if it ever had it in the first place.

WOKE REPORT

Same Old, But So Toothless, Who Cares?

• At this point, you can’t unbake Cameron’s go-to “white-military-bad, indigenous-nobel-savage-good” trope out of Avatar. However, this entry feels far less pointed than the last two. Rather, thanks to a truly horribly written script and overall hackneyed and lazy storytelling, the military/corporate presence is little more than a plot device, a mindless dragon to be slain rather than something with its own unique point of view or subtextual messaging to share.
• With the exception of the Scythians (900-200 BC), from whom the myth of the Amazonian warriors likely sprang, there haven’t been many preindustrial groups in which women were as likely to be warriors as men, and for excellent biological reasons. Since the Avatar films have always portrayed the Na’vi as mirroring human biology’s tendency to make men bigger and more muscular than women, it’s always been silly how prominent the blue ladies have been on the Pandoran battlefields. However, last time Cameron and crew doubled down on it with the head of the Aqua-Na’vi’s obnoxious wife. If you remember, she refused not to fight on the front lines while almost full-term in her pregnancy. It represented some uber-dumb girl-power nonsense, and it carries over into the sequel.
  • That said, Fire and Ash picks up almost immediately after the events of the last one. So, continuity dictates that she still be pregnant. However, in this, her character has perhaps five lines in the entire film. Hence, I didn’t ding the Woke-O-Meter hard for it.
  • A strong and fierce woman leads the evil Na’vi, but if you’re wondering why the Woke-O-Meter isn’t marked down more for her, it’s because she and her tribe are almost entirely inconsequential. She has a handful of lines and, more importantly,
    Spoiler

    is brought to heel by Quaritch’s big swinging tswin.