Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025) Movie Review: James Cameron’s Endless Mining Through the Riches of Pandora Finally Reaches Creative Bankruptcy

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Maybe I’ve been misreading the signs. Perhaps, whenever James Cameron emerges from the depths to unleash a new “Avatar” film upon us, and his most ardent supporters hit us with a triumphant “Big Jim has done it again!,” that assertion is meant less as a celebration and more as a warning. Perhaps “done it again” is, indeed, supposed to be taken literally, as if a sign from Eywa herself that Cameron has quite blatantly just made the same film, nearly beat-for-beat, all over again.

High On Films in collaboration with Avanté

If this much was clear enough when the long-belated “Way of Water” finally arrived only to proclaim itself as “Avatar: Splash Zone Edition,” then Cameron’s third expedition through the teeming flora and fauna of Pandora in “Fire and Ash” has all but solidified the money-printing action icon’s complete disinterest in finding any substantive motivation to keep dragging us back onto this planet.

The story moves along (the word “forward” doesn’t quite fit), but our reasons for caring enough to follow it stay far behind, destined to disappear in the overgrowth like ruins of a time when Cameron’s ego didn’t need a whole invented galaxy to call home. Fire is supposed to grow stronger the more it spreads, but “Fire and Ash” can barely muster the strength to cover up the uninspired tracks it’s been passively following from the moment Cameron assured us that “Avatar” wouldn’t be a one-and-done deal.

Picking up almost immediately where its predecessor left off, “Fire and Ash” finds the Sully clan reckoning with the aftermath of their stand against the newly minted reprint of their original would-be colonizers. Jake (Sam Worthington, still holding on for dear life as this franchise single-handedly supports his whole career) and his family are left to mourn the death of their eldest son, just as Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang, still having the time of his life) remains hot in their trail.

In an effort to stay ahead of the curve and send their vulnerable human adoptee Spider (Jake Champion) somewhere that his susceptibility to Pandora’s poisonous atmosphere can be only a minor inconvenience rather than a constant life-threatening reality, the family boards a flying blob-driven hot air balloon—the last vestiges of Cameron’s world-building capabilities, hanging by a thread—to return to their remaining human allies. Matters are complicated, however, when a new fire-obsessed clan enters the fray and intercepts this expedition, led by the sadistic (and, I guess, atheistic) Varang (Oona Chaplin).

Related: Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) Review

From this point on, as Cameron breaks this troupe up into smaller packs only to have them regroup and separate again ad nauseam, “Fire and Ash” plays less like “The Way of Water, Part 2” and more like “The Way of Water… Again!” Save for the introduction of a new villain (finally!), Cameron’s third “Avatar” film finds precious little to unearth in these unobtainium mines that he hasn’t found twice over now, let alone anything already there that he finds worth developing in any real capacity.

“Fire and Ash” may be a film where virtually nothing new happens, but a lot sure does happen regardless, as Cameron and his cowriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver break off way too many pieces of this family fortress and scatter them with glee across a plot that feels less like one cohesive film—or even the less cohesive back-half of a much longer film—and more like a few mid-season arcs of “Avatar: The Series” excised and presented as their own project.

It goes without saying that the cast Cameron assembled has come to fully inhabit the motion-captured physicality that never once lets the artifice of the Na’vi manifest where the film’s failures as a story manage to do so. Zoe Saldaña, as always, is great, when she has something to do. Sigourney Weaver is spunky, when she has something to do. Newcomer Oona Chaplin is formidable… when she has something to do. Kate Winslet is… well, we can assume that, because she’s Jate Winslet, she’s great, but the only indication we really have that she’s even in these past two “Avatar” films is their IMDb pages.

For once, the actors in one of Cameron’s post-“Titanic” features aren’t really forced to (or even slotted the chance to) shine in spite of his horrifically lobotomized grasp of dialogue; his perpetually ‘90s macho speak still notably goofy and wince-inducing, but its cringeworthiness is strangely muted in comparison to the greater structural calamity facing the film’s script. Even those who want to profess from the rooftops that Cameron is actually a good screenwriter because he “knows how to structure an action scene” will be hard-pressed to defend how often “Fire and Ash” burns itself out mid-sequence just as soon as it was beginning to fire itself up.

The dreadful pacing of yet another three+-hour Cameron quest becomes most noticeable once you come to grasp that these set-pieces really will be nothing more than carbon copies of what we saw three years ago. And while the James Cameron’s most preciously guarded franchise is ostensibly built upon the notion that a cloned copy of a wayward soul can still find fresh eyes with which to see the world, “Avatar: Fire and Ash” can only manage to sift through a few dimly lit embers and coat itself with the dusty remnants of a far more consequential journey into a reality that this grand architect had already mentally abandoned well before this flame has died out.