It’s a little-known fact that James Cameron has never made a threequel,and that remains true, despite Avatar: Fire and Ash being the third entry in the heavily mythologized franchise.
That’s because the film and its predecessor, Avatar: The Way of Water, technically share one script, so big that they were split in half. Apparently, even the mighty James Cameron won’t seat audiences for a six-hour ride). The seams are impossible to miss: Fire and Ash opens directly where The Way of Water ends.
This is a lengthy way of saying that Avatar: Fire and Ash plays out pretty much like the previous film, although it takes a while to notice thanks to Cameron’s never-waning penchant for visuals, painted over a not-so-surprising 197-minute runtime.
You’d find the same colonialist and white-savior fantasies persisting, joined by the increasingly tiresome revenge crusade of Stephen Lang’s Miles Quaritch.
It goes without saying that audiences need to be privy to the events of the first two installments to fully appreciate anything appreciable in Avatar: Fire and Ash. Not that there’s much.
But hey, two new Na’vi tribes join the party, both on opposite ends of Pandora’s visual and moral spectrum.
First are the nomadic Tlalim clan—the Wind Traders—led by Peylak (David Thewlis). They drift across the skies in basket-like airships, hauled by giant jellyfish-like creatures. Their narrative function is to ferry Spider (Jack Champion), whose human physiology prevents him from breathing Pandora’s air, to a human outpost at Jake Sully’s (Sam Worthington) request.
The entire Sully family is on this hitchhike. Still living with the Metkayina, Jake is still on the edge, reasonably so after the loss of his first-born, Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), which he still reluctantly blames his second-born Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) for. As he would soon find out mid-hitchhike, there are more things on Pandora to worry about than Quaritch or the RDA.
That extra headache presents itself in the form of our second new Na’vi tribe, the barbarian Mangkwan. It’s another case of everyone living in harmony until the Fire Nation… sorry, the Ash People in this case, attacked. The Mangkwan are portrayed as godless warmongers, having turned their backs on Eywa after a volcanic eruption reduced their homeland to lifeless ash.
Their leader, Varang (Oona Chaplin) is all tempestuous fury, riding into battle atop an Ikran named Nightwraith and demanding the humans to teach her the art of making “thunder”—her term for guns and firepower.
Neither this ferocity nor her ill-conceived romantic entanglement with Quaritch does much to shake the feeling that this is all familiar ground. Her “some people just want to watch the world burn” ethos only deepens the sense of repetition.
There are attempts at fresh ideas in Avatar: Fire and Ash, though many feel less like evolution than familiar lines traced from the same page (again).
As the character around whom the entire narrative pivots, this is, at its core, Spider’s (Jack Champion) film. Don’t be excited just yet: it’s merely another take on the well-worn insistence that “we’re all the same inside.” Cameron also returns to his enduring faith that traditions and respect for nature will always gain the upper hand against human technology.
It’s a strange moment for cinema when a James Cameron film feels like something already consumed earlier in the day. Fire and Ash not only lacks the narrative freshness of the original Avatar, it also struggles to match its sense of spectacle (Zoe Saldaña’s Neytiri aside, as she cuts through clouds of ash and blue-and-orange hues).
Cameron no longer has the advantage of an 13-year gap or visuals that redefine the medium. This time, spectacle alone isn’t enough. He’d have to do more than that to get audiences on board for the next trip to Pandora.
Release date: December 19, 2025.
Runtime: 3 hours and 17 minutes
Streaming Service: No, Cinematic
Directed by: James Cameron
Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Oona Chaplin, Kate Winslet, Cliff Curtis, Joe David Moore, CCH Pounder, Edie Falco, David Thewlis, Jemaine Clement, Giovanni Ribisi, Britain Dalton, Jamie Flatters, Trinity Jo-Li Bliss, Jack Champion, Brendan Cowell, Bailey Bass, Filip Geljo, Duane Evans Jr.