Every trip to Pandora brings in a visually stunning new adventure and family drama with Jake Sully and Neytiri. The new Avatar: Fire and Ash doubles down on both, throwing the family into a firestorm of grief, resilience, and jaw-dropping world-building that keeps expanding Pandora in bold, unexpected directions. Unfortunately, despite being epic in scale and scope, the film’s lack of a compelling story frustrates, and its many setups lead to surprisingly few satisfying payoff.
Set after the events of The Way of Water, Fire and Ash finds the Sullys in a grief-stricken space, with Jake (Sam Worthington) thinking more like a soldier than a father and husband, and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) relying on her faith in Eywa to hold together what is left of their family.
Their children feel Neteyam’s absence in different ways: Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) carries an enormous emotional burden, convinced he is directly responsible for his brother’s death, while Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), and Miles “Spider” Socorro (Jack Champion) each grieve in ways that further distance them from parents who are trying — and often failing — to keep everyone moving forward while burying their own pain.
On paper, there is enough story in one three-hour and 17-minute span here to sustain multiple films. Between Kiri’s search for identity as a child with no clear origin she could comprehend, Spider’s fight to keep his place as a “pink skin” within a Na’vi community that may never fully accept him while also trying to survive on a breathing apparatus that is constantly on a low battery, Quaritch’s (Stephen Lang) renewed quest to finish the mission he failed in The Way of Water, and the Mangkwan clan — also called the Ash People — led by fiery tribe leader Varang (Oona Chaplin), who channels her resentment at feeling abandoned by Eywa into an alliance with Quaritch, Fire and Ash is bursting with ideas and conflicts that could be genuinely compelling if the film gave them enough time to breathe and let us fully connect with the characters on screen.
Instead, Cameron keeps sprinting from one thread to the next, sketching out rich emotional territory and then abandoning it in favor of the next battle, vision, or expanding upon the mythology. The result is a film that feels oddly overstuffed and underdeveloped at the same time. There is always something happening, which would be great for any other film that has far too many lulls, but far too few of these concepts fully land.
This kind of narrative sprawl is very much in Cameron’s wheelhouse. The Avatar films have always layered multiple themes and subplots, from colonialism and spirituality to ecology and family drama. When those elements are balanced, the result can be genuinely absorbing. Here, though, they are stacked on top of one another and repeatedly revisit beats from earlier films, making Fire and Ash feel less like a bold new chapter and more like an echo of Avatar‘s past.
The Spider subplot, the constant anxiety around battery-powered breathing masks, and the way he becomes a plot device for Quaritch, the mining corporation, and the military are all interesting seeds, especially because they tie directly into his search for a family and Kiri’s search for identity, deepening the film’s spiritual mythology. But ultimately, there is little to no payoff. These threads circle the same questions without ever arriving at a satisfying answer.
The shifting family dynamics suffer in a similar way. Jake and Neytiri’s stance toward Spider is so firm for so long that when the film suddenly asks us to believe a change of heart, it lands as abrupt rather than earned. Moments that should redefine what “family” means for the Sullys instead play like obligatory beats on the way to the next action sequence.
Together, these subplots start to feel like extra weight on a story that is already doing a lot. Cameron’s gift for dense, immersive world-building is undeniable, yet here it frequently feels like a priority over streamlined storytelling. For viewers who want a clearer emotional throughline to grab onto, all these additional layers play less like enrichment and more like distractions from the core journey of a family trying to survive their grief.
While the Sullys remain central to the film’s themes of family, the most unexpectedly compelling thread belongs to Quaritch and Varang, if only because their dynamic keeps threatening to turn into something messier and more human than the script is willing to acknowledge. There is a genuine charge between them. Long looks, clipped banter, a begrudging respect that reads as heated attraction, the film flirts with the idea of a fire-forged bond between a resurrected colonizer and a Na’vi leader who feels abandoned by her god. It is hot and horny, and it could have been a fascinating exploration of how power, survival, and desire intersect under occupation, but like so many of Fire and Ash’s best ideas, it is left at the level of suggestion rather than fully explored.
That dynamic gets even thornier once Quaritch starts arming Varang and her warriors, teaching them how to use human guns against their own kind, with Varang calling high-powered rifles “thunder.” On its face, it is a sharp illustration of how colonizers weaponize desperation, offering power and protection in exchange for allegiance, turning the people most harmed by occupation into blunt instruments of that same system.
But again, the film seems more interested in the cool visual of Na’vi firing assault rifles in ash-choked landscapes than in interrogating what it means for the franchise’s first morally gray Na’vi clan to be armed and guided by the same man who led the original invasion. There is a version of Fire and Ash that fully commits to that discomfort; this one mostly gestures at it and moves on.
Visually, at least, the Mangkwan make good on the promise of that title. Fire and Ash literalizes the dichotomy that has always been baked into Pandora where beauty and ruin share the same frame. Warm embers drift through the air even as forests burn and flaming arrows injure or kill, and ash settles over the landscape like a permanent bruise that reflects the Mangkwan’s anger toward Eywa for feeling abandoned. It is the first time the series truly leans into fire as an element, giving the franchise a harsher visual language to set alongside the bioluminescent jungle and sunlit reefs of the earlier films.
There is also a sharper spiritual contrast buried in Fire and Ash that the film never fully commits to. Neytiri, whose entire arc across the series has been rooted in unshakable faith in Eywa, now feels like someone quietly, painfully losing trust in a deity that keeps asking her to sacrifice everything. Compound that with a soldier who does not share the same faith, and it is all the more reason for Neytiri to question everything.
Varang, by contrast, is what it looks like when that loss of faith calcifies into open resentment. She does not simply feel ignored; she feels abandoned, and Quaritch slips neatly into that wound, offering her the kind of power and direction Eywa no longer seems to provide. His fascination with her is not just physical or tactical. It is the gaze of a colonizer who recognizes how useful a disillusioned leader can be, nudging her anger and grief toward the targets that benefit him most.
For all the characters’ fierce devotion to one another, to their family, their tribe, Pandora, and Eywa, the story is so scattered with concepts and setups and offers so little payoff that, even though the characters are clearly expressing emotions, it does not necessarily land with the audience. You can see the various pains that the Sullys are going through and how they process or grieve differently, but because much of that is buried by those aforementioned scattered ideas, it is difficult to get emotionally invested in these characters.
It was only a matter of time before Cameron turned his lens toward faith versus doubt and cast a new Na’vi tribe as the antagonist. With the forest Na’vi drawing heavily from Native American and various African cultures, while the sea-dwelling Metkayina are built on Polynesian and Maori foundations, the Ash People, also known as the Mangkwan clan, took their inspiration from Rabaul in Papua New Guinea and the fire ceremonies of the Baining.
Though the imagery is powerful, the cultural inspirations serve more as creative choices than as meaningful engagement with the peoples and histories they borrow from. As such, the film continues to center a white man, even as it draws on actors from those communities. While Jake earned the respect of the Na’vi by taming Toruk and thus becoming the Toruk Makto in the first film, and used that reputation to learn the Metkayina’s ways and adapt to their ocean-centric lifestyle in Way of Water, in Fire and Ash he once again moves through another distinctly coded Indigenous culture as the primary point of identification for the audience. The Na’vi’s function in the story is largely to refract Jake’s arc back to us. They become another stage on which he can learn, doubt, suffer, and ultimately reaffirm his heroism. Their rituals, histories, and cosmologies rarely exist for their own sake.
This is where the film’s appropriation feels most glaring. The Mangkwan may be visually striking with burn scars, ash-smeared skin, red war paint, hardened armor, and a palette of smoke and ember that reconfigures Pandora into a landscape of permanent aftermath. Their trauma and spirituality are rendered as powerful images. However, they are depicted as “angry Indigenous” who harbor hatred toward those who have faith in Eywa.
Varang’s reverent way of calling guns “thunder” hints at a leader who has started to confuse human firepower with divine will. As such, the film treats that as another cool detail rather than digging into what it means for a colonized people to mythologize the weapons being handed to them. It is derivative and something we have seen before when colonizers introduce high tech weaponry to a world that uses arrows and spears as weapons.
On a technical level, there is no question that Cameron and his team are still operating on a different plane. Pandora remains so meticulously rendered that you almost forget you are looking at visual effects. It is all in the way light plays across skin, how the ash is caked on bodies, the way that water splashes on surfaces, and how the RDA’s industrialization and militarization contrast the natural beauty of Pandora. All of that is often breathtaking.
The action, while intense and visually stunning, is hampered by edits and quick cuts. When there is so much going on at once, and there are multiple characters to follow, the film finds itself juggling aerial assaults, ground skirmishes, and even prison escapes. And if they are not doing that, there are spiritual connections that are ethereal or restorative. When all of these are in three dimensions, the presentation is immersive rather than gimmicky, and the sound design makes every crackle of fire and roar of machinery, or every chorus of nature, feel real while also highlighting the dichotomy of the film’s joyous and darker tones.
The problem is not how Fire and Ash looks or sounds. It is that the film so often lets immaculate craft stand in for actual narrative momentum. The film pushes the technical boundaries in unimaginable ways, but at three hours and seventeen minutes, you feel the weight of its runtime not because the world of Pandora is not worth visiting, but because the movie keeps circling the same emotional beats instead of pushing them somewhere new.
In the end, Avatar: Fire and Ash is a contradiction. On one hand, it’s a towering achievement in digital filmmaking. On the other hand, it cannot quite decide what story it wants to tell with all that power. Fans who are already invested in Pandora and the Sullys will find enough here to justify another trip, since there are images, performances, and stray emotional beats that linger after the credits roll. But as a chapter in an ongoing saga about the cost of war, family, faith, and colonization, it feels less like a bold third installment and more like very expensive connective tissue, repeating past moves while saving its biggest swings for a movie that has not been made yet.
7/10
