Director James Cameron is back with a third installment of his AVATAR franchise, which continues to deliver astounding visual effects and world-creation at the highest level. In the first film, a human expedition looking for resources to extract is sent to world called Pandora, a place with an un-breathable atmosphere and inhabited by tall, blue, technologically less-advanced people, dispatches a Marine, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), in the form of an avatar that looks like the forest-living Na’vi people, to learn more about them. But after falling in love with a Na’vi warrior woman, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), Jake switches sides and leads a rebellion against the humans. The second film takes place some 15 years later, as Jake, wife Neytiri and their kids hide out from the human among some beach-dwelling peoples, pursued by Jake’s nemesis and fellow Marine, Quaritch (Stephen Lang). This third one, AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH, takes place shortly after that second film.
The main reason to see AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH, are the spectacular visual effects and it’s breathtaking world-building. The 3D visual effects are immersive and beautiful, with one breathtaking vista after another. AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH continues to astonish with innovative visual effects that combine motion-capture and digital effects, like the first film, and now including 3D like the second one, but the effects are even more fully integrated, allowing one to entirely be enveloped by its imaginary world. The impressive effects even continue in the scenes with regular non-CGI or motion-capture actor, creating a seamlessly believable world.
Since the outstanding visual effects are the major reason to see this film, the best way to do that is in a theater, on a big screen with 3D capability. If you watch it on a small screen at home or on a phone, you will be missing out most of the reason to see it at all.
The reason why that matters so much is, despite all that visual effect artistry and technical dazzle, the characters and story do not reach that same high level, remaining familiar figures from a classic hero’s tale, with the addition of a historical tale of a colonial or corporate power moving in on a less-technological indigenous one. These indigenous people are aided greatly by that fellow who switched sides, which sets up a David and Goliath / underdog tale.
Action is plentiful and looks great but the story adds more and more characters without expanding on the ones already there. The main characters remain underdeveloped, being either noble good guys or evil bad ones. The story focuses on battles and those breathtaking new vistas but that can hold audience interest forever.
The effects are 3D but the characters remain 2D. It is not the fault of the cast, but the writer. The characters are written to be simple: Worthington’s Jake is noble and brave, Saldana’s Neytiri is emotional and protective, Stephen Lang as Jake’s enemy is relentless, while Giovanni Ribisi’s corporate boss is greedy and heartless. If the story is familiar, the audience has to care about the people in the story to maintain interest, and that means making them more real, more rounded and full-developed.
This story introduces new peoples on Pandora, with peaceful trading peoples who travel through the air in ships attached to blip-like floating creatures. There is another, less peaceful group too, the raiders/pirates known as the Ash People, who prey on the traders and others less warlike folk.
Quaritch, now also using an avatar body, sets out to make contact the war-like Ash People, with the aim of forming an alliance. He hits it off with the Ash People’s fierce, fearless, blood-thirsty queen Varang (a splendid Oona Chaplin, granddaughter of Charlie Chaplin), and a deal is struck.
Meanwhile, Jake struggles with getting the Na’vi and water-based Metkayina Clan to consider using human weapons that he retrieved from the water after the last battle, rather than just bows and arrows. Jake and Neytiri, in addition to their own kids, have adopted two more: Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), the Na’vi child of the avatar of the scientist played by Sigourney Weaver in the first AVATAR, and a human boy nicknamed Spider (Jack Champion), the biological son of Jake’s enemy Quaritch, who needs a special mask to breath the air, a mask that has to be continually replenished to keep him alive.
Stephen Lang’s Quaritch and Oona Chaplin’s Ash queen are by far the most interesting in this one, but if left undeveloped, will just join the crowd of cookie-cutter characters. The story is packed with action and battles and so full of twists (and new characters) that there isn’t much time to do much with this growing cast of characters anyway. But failing to develop the characters beyond the two-dimensional means that maintaining interest in the familiar tropes of this tale will become increasingly challenging.
Reportedly, director/writer James Cameron has two more of these visual effects extravaganzas in the planning stage but unless he starts creating depth to this characters to sustain this hero tale, he is likely to see waning audience interest, something already underway. It can’t just be pretty pictures.
AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH opens in theaters on Friday, Dec. 19, 2025.
RATING: 2.5 out of 4 stars
