Avatar: Fire and Ash could be the film that reconciles the global audience with movie theaters, in a year where so many titles have disappointed. The third chapter of James Cameron's saga is another breathtaking visual adventure, designed to appeal to a general audience.
Returning to Pandora, facing a new threat
Avatar: Fire and Ash is the third chapter of a very particular franchise, both modern and ancient at the same time. It all began back in 2009, with a 3D film that broke all box office records, the result of a long, indeed very long, project – a visionary project for many, crazy for others, signed by James Cameron. The second chapter, released two years ago, Avatar: The Way of Water, was another box office hit, even against all post-pandemic predictions, and this third one now picks up where we left off.
We all remember the death of Neteyam, the eldest son of Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), who fell valiantly while trying to save his family from the clutches of the resurrected Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang). A year has passed since that event, and Jake, Neytiri, along with Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), Lo'ak (Britain Dalton), Tsireya (Bailey Bess), and Spider (Jack Champion), have now integrated with the Metkayina coral reef clan, led by Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and Ronal (Kate Winslet). They, too, are now in perfect symbiosis with the creatures of the sea, just as Neytiri's original tribe was with the creatures of the sky.
But for the Toruk Makto and his family, many things have changed. Neteyam's death is a burden that weighs on everyone, especially on Lo'ak, who feels guilty. Spider, effectively Quaritch's son, begins to experience increasingly heavy difficulties due to the atmosphere of Pandora and the poorly concealed hostility of Neytiri, who is becoming more and more withdrawn. Jake has also become more somber; for him, the survival of his family and his people is a true military operation.
Quaritch, determined to take revenge on Jake, does not hesitate to recruit the fearsome tribe of raiders of the Ash People, led by the aggressive and treacherous priestess Varang (Oona Chaplin). Once again, the fate of Pandora and its inhabitants will hang by a thread. From this opening, it's clear that Avatar: Fire and Ash, from a narrative point of view, is nothing more than a kind of synthesis of the first two chapters, and if you're surprised by all this, well, then perhaps you don't know James Cameron well enough.
From the very beginning, the Canadian filmmaker has always operated according to a simple but effective principle: the average viewer demands a lot in terms of atmosphere, visual novelty, and spectacle. At the same time, they want something based on immediate, simple, and easily accessible narrative structures (which doesn't mean banal or superficial, mind you) and universally appealing. It's safe to say that those who go to the theater for this third chapter of the saga already know this, and it will be very difficult for them to be disappointed by the result. From an aesthetic point of view, this chapter is by far the best.
If you remove the surprise effect that the first film of 2009 generated, the result created by James Cameron from 2017 to 2020 was something incredible. More than a director, perhaps Cameron has always been, first and foremost, the best technician and theorist of the visual dimension of the cinematic medium. The result in Avatar: Fire and Ash is another absolutely exceptional chromatic and sonic adventure, with a budget of 400 million serving as its backbone. Kudos to Lightstorm Entertainment and Joe Letteri, but this doesn't mean the film is without flaws.
A great spectacle, but the plot goes in circles a bit
For James Cameron, what matters is always and only his semantics, which is based (as is well known) on a very complex social, historical, and anthropological vision, in which New Age philosophy, spiritualism, pacifism, and environmentalism go hand in hand. Avatar: Fire and Ash once again speaks to us of resistance to colonialism and capitalist imperialism, something that in times like these will lead to obvious (and intended) comparisons with the current geopolitical reality. Armed with 3D glasses, viewers around the world will inevitably get lost in this magnificent new adventure, between sea, sky, and land, where the elements of nature unite as never before in the saga.
The ecosystem that Cameron created in 2009 expands and is explored in such detail that it leaves one astonished. But Avatar: Fire and Ash will perhaps also be more digestible for those who, in the second chapter, found the whole thing too long-winded, full of explanations and dialogues that were not very surprising, and very limited narrative twists. Here, between this new villain and Quaritch, who is back in action like in the good old days, there's enough going on, at least until three-quarters of the way through the film.
But then, continuing to wink at the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves, or Silverstein's A Man Called Horse, the derivative nature of Cameron's creation explodes. The last quarter of the film is spectacular but predictable; everything becomes very tame, and at times sentimentality and rhetoric overwhelm the visual composition itself. All very mainstream and easily digestible. On December 7, 1990, Tim Burton's masterpiece arrived in theaters, a wonderful gothic fairy tale that became a cinematic legend.
It must be said that Avatar: Fire and Ash also touches upon media manipulation, right-wing militarism, and evokes the "divide and conquer" strategy that the United States used against Native Americans and during the Vietnam War. It's a shame that James Cameron doesn't fully explore this evolution, as well as the ambiguous journey of Jake and Neytiri, which could have led to much more interesting developments than Spider and his situation caught between two fathers and two worlds. But this Avatar: Fire and Ash, a gigantic three-hour-plus blockbuster, is what the public wants in 2025, what they're willing to pay to see in theaters.
Great directors and great actors are important, but they're not enough, as seen with films like "A Battle After Another" or "The Smashing Machine." To go to the cinema, which is becoming increasingly expensive, the 2025 audience wants guarantees in terms of entertainment and special effects (something the MCU, for example, no longer delivers); they want an event that is marketed and conceived as unique and epoch-making. Of course, it's difficult to predict how much Avatar: Fire and Ash will gross; the Canadian director has said that if it's a flop, the two subsequent chapters planned for the saga will never see the light of day.
A clever marketing ploy? Perhaps. James Cameron knows his audience very well; it's unlikely they'll resist the appeal of a franchise that guarantees such an exaggerated and, ultimately, undemanding pyrotechnic spectacle. There are about twenty minutes too many, as usual, but it's a kind of clinical contraindication, like those found on medication labels, that the public has decided to ignore. Not everyone who asks us to sit in a theater for three hours can offer the spectacle of Avatar: Fire and Ash. Unfortunately, or fortunately.