Avatar: Fire and Ash Review: Bigger, Hotter, Wetter, Longer

It’s a running joke in certain more arch circles of cinema that no one can remember the name of the hero of the Avatar films. It’s Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), but that never really mattered, since James Cameron was never really that interested in having some singular figure save the day. He’s talked about these films being an intergenerational epic, and that becomes more obvious than ever with the opening of the third film in the series, Avatar: Fire and Ash. Sully’s Na’vi son, Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), now narrates the story, because this is about more than one man.

A defining aspect of Cameron’s work is that change is possible. Not just possible, but necessary. Even the Terminator can develop emotions, and in Fire and Ash Cameron makes the once inviolable lines between the humans of dying Earth and the Na’vi of alien world Pandora lacier than ever. First, there was the Avatar program that put crippled Marine Sully into the body of a Pandoran warrior. Then Dr. Grace Augustine’s Avatar gave birth to a Na’vi child, Kiri (Sigourney Weaver in both parts), who is being raised by Sully and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) as part of their extended family, alongside their own children, Lo’ak and Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss). But then there’s orphan Spider (Jack Champion), the human teen who has rejected his pink and squishy terrestrial heritage.

Yet Fire and Ash – which is written by Cameron with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, as was 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water – makes a major change in the war for Pandora’s natural resources. It’s already been established that there are many humans who oppose this ravaging, but now there are Na’vi who are quite happy to see it all burn down. The returning Avatar of the previously very dead Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) has, as he would put it in his sneering colonialist tones, gone native and teamed up with the volcano-dwelling Mangkwan clan, led by the merciless Varang (Oona Chaplin). Of course, there’s symmetry between Sully and Neytiri, and Quaritch and Varang as their shadow-selves, and while Lang brings a new moral conflict to the sadistic killer he’s perfectly matched by Chaplin. Where Neytiri is catlike, Chaplin writhes like a cobra ready to strike, and when Quaritch gives this pyromaniac a flamethrower, the world will burn.

Cameron’s other big obsession, of course, is his terror and wonder at the military-industrial complex. No one films tools of war like Cameron, and no other mainstream filmmaker is quite as blunt about his raw hatred of untrammeled capitalism. Neither Edie Falco as base commander General Frances Ardmore nor Giovanni Ribisi returning as corporate stooge Parker Selfridge get much screen time, but they don’t need it. Instead, they point to how Cameron tells stories and develops characters. He doesn’t use archetypes but rather operates at Jung-meets-Barthes level, worldbuilding through raw totemic symbolism that bypasses logic and relies on emotional response. Nature good (if dangerous), ecosystem-wrecking industrialization bad. Obvious, yes, but it’s not like it’s any less true here than in the first film.

And just like the first film and The Way of Water, Fire and Ash is a technological marvel. The closing battle between the Na’vi and their wildlife allies, the flying banshees and the whale-like Tulkun, and the corporate humans (including Brendan Cowell as the Ahab-esque Captain Mick Scoresby) will wreck your sense of distance from the screen, surrounding you in sea-spray and shrapnel.

Yet while Fire and Ash feels like it wraps up a trilogy, it also seems like a middle chapter. Emerging themes of rival messiahs, with Jake, Kiri, and Spider all wrapped up in fates and futures, planted in the earlier films still have to bear fruit. But if future films deliver similar spectacle and true, epic filmmaking, then this lengthy sequel can afford to be a prelude.

This article appears in December 19 • 2025.