Avatar: Fire and Ash

Has James Cameron been trapped in the metaverse longer than we have? The 71-year-old director reportedly spent over a decade working on what eventually became Avatar (2009), and has been involved in making its sequels Avatar: The Way of the Water (2022), the latest Avatar: Fire and Ash released on Friday (December 19), and another film in the making – making it a cumulative 30 years spent on four films, set on the faraway planet of Pandora.

Rarely have I seen so much used to achieve so very little. Unless you count the US invasion of Iraq — which, in the Avatar universe, would amount to cocky American soldiers looking for an excuse to plunder a mineral-rich planet after destroying their own. I want to say “empty spectacle”, but to be honest, Avatar: Fire and Ash is not much of a spectacle either. Spectacles do more than just look vast and technically proficient and convoluted and greedy in 2025; they do more than just go round and round and round in the painstaking and now-dated worlds they’ve built; they do more than employ disorienting 3D motion-smoothing effects to impress the fans rather than express the stakes; they do more than take two decades of technological advancements and old-fashioned originality only to end up feeling precisely like those superhero overkills they were once an antidote to; they do more than be a legacy of groundbreaking CGI; they do more than do more. James Cameron has made a career out of dreaming big and heavy, but with this third Avatar film, he’s a bit like that mad scientist who gets so obsessed with creating and reinventing that he bypasses the basic essence of the medium.

James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash picks up things where the second part, Avatar: The Way of Water, left us. Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), the second son of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), is ridden with the guilt of being the reason for the death of his elder brother Neteyam (Jamie Flatters). Even Sully seems to blame him for the loss; he even spells it out, giving the necessary redemption arc to Lo’ak, who continues to defy orders — just like his father from the first part.

When Avatar (2009) came 16 years ago, it broke new ground on many fronts, especially with the visual effects. Although it took some time for the sequel, The Way of Water (2022), to arrive, but because the story was set in a familiar world and technology had advanced sufficiently by then, it didn’t have the same appeal as the original.