‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ Movie Review: James Cameron’s Beautiful Return to a World That No Longer Surprises

James Cameron’s Avatar saga has always moved with the confidence of a creation myth, repeating itself because myths, by nature, do. Still, repetition has a way of turning revelation into ritual. Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third instalment in Cameron’s ever-expanding Pandora cosmology, finds itself caught between those two impulses: the desire to deepen a world already painstakingly imagined, and the nagging sense that we have, by now, walked these paths before.

With Fire and Ash, repetition finally begins to feel less like ritual and more like inertia. The film is not short on conviction or craft. What it lacks is surprise.

Human “Sky People” continue to invade Pandora, still intoxicated by extraction and entitlement. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), once a Marine and now fully Na’vi, remains their most unforgivable defector. His nemesis, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), dead and resurrected as a Na’vi avatar, still pursues revenge with the dedication of a man who has nothing else left. The original sin of Avatar — imperial greed disguised as progress — has not been absolved. Cameron has never been subtle about colonial allegory, nor should he be. The problem is that the argument has stopped evolving.

A still from 'Avatar: Fire and Ash'

Jake, Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), and their family are now settled among the ocean-dwelling Metkayina clan, led by Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and the steel-spined Ronal (Kate Winslet). But the saltwater refuge offers little balm for wounds that have not healed. The death of the Sullys’ firstborn son Neteyam still haunts the family, most acutely his younger brother Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), whose impulsiveness is sharpened by survivor’s guilt. His siblings — tween Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss) and the adopted Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), the mysterious offspring of Grace Augustine’s avatar — grapple with their own coming-of-age dilemmas. Kiri, in particular, possesses an unsettlingly intimate connection to Eywa, Pandora’s all-mother deity, but her connection feels like a burden she cannot yet command.

Spider (Jack Champion), Quaritch’s human son, complicates matters further. Raised alongside the Sully children, he has rejected his father and thrown his lot in with the Na’vi. When a group of traders known as the Wind Traders arrive in their bulbous flying ships, Jake makes the decision to send Spider back with them to a human science facility. Kiri is devastated. Neytiri, whose grief has curdled into hatred for humanity, insists the boy never truly belonged among them. The fractured lines between ideology, family, and survival are drawn (once again) and then, inevitably, set ablaze.

Fire and Ash introduces its most nihilistic faction yet: the Mangkwan clan, also known as the Ash People. Led by Varang (Oona Chaplin), a ferocious, almost operatic presence, they inhabit a volcanic wasteland and have turned their backs on Eywa after a cataclysm reduced their homeland to cinders. “A weak mother for weak children,” Varang declares, rejecting spiritual communion in favour of domination and annihilation. Quaritch, recognising a kindred brutality, arms her with human weapons, forging an alliance rooted in mutual hatred and lust — there’s a very strange post-coital scene, but we mustn’t digress.

A still from 'Avatar: Fire and Ash'

Within this sprawling narrative, Fire and Ash wrestles earnestly with grief, survivor’s guilt, and moral compromise. It argues, with increasing bluntness, that survival may demand the use of the enemy’s own language. Metal poisons the heart and weapons corrupt the soul. And yet, when faced with extinction, pacifism becomes a luxury. Even the Tulkun, those majestic, sentient sea beings, are pushed toward retaliation. Kiri’s bond with Eywa grows more fraught. Spider’s biology becomes a resource to be protected from exploitation. Neytiri’s rage threatens to calcify before it bends, almost reluctantly, toward mercy.

These are serious ideas and Cameron remains a sincere, even obsessive, world-builder, attentive to emotional detail as much as spectacle. Saldaña’s performance is full of small, piercing moments: Neytiri’s eyes flooding as she confesses her discomfort with her children’s human hands. Ronal carries Winslet’s familiar facial mole, rendered with loving precision. Fire crackles with menace. Water moves with uncanny grace. The camera lingers on suffering when it counts, especially when the Tulkun are hunted. Cameron understands emotional leverage as well as he ever has.

A still from 'Avatar: Fire and Ash'

And yet. For all its thematic weight and visual splendour, Fire and Ash cannot escape the feeling of déjà vu. So much of it looks, moves, and resolves like the films that came before. The narrative beats land where you expect them to. The moral arguments circle familiar ground. By its third hour, the film begins to feel like a reiteration. You know this story. You know how it argues. You know how it mourns and how it rallies. 

Once, Avatar felt radical because it asked audiences to look at their own world sideways, through alien eyes. Now it mostly asks us to remember how that felt. The message about conservation, resistance, and humility before nature remains urgent. But urgency alone cannot substitute for invention.

Avatar: Fire and Ash is spectacular, sincere, and increasingly self-referential. It dazzles the eye while treading water, then ignites the screen but only manages to scatter the same old embers. Pandora still burns beautifully. The trouble is, we already know how this fire spreads.