Avatar: Fire & Ash

James Cameron has been very open about the future of the Avatar film franchise in the weeks before the release of Avatar: Fire and Ash, and he made one thing very clear: if this third film doesn't succeed at the box office, this will be the end for the franchise. Avatar 2 and 3 were shot at the same time; some parts of Avatar 4 and maybe 5 (who knows at this point) have already been shot, but most of the production (and costly post-production) is still to be made and paid for before their releases in 2029 and 2031. I really hope the audience responds, because if the worst were to happen, 'Avatar 3' would fall very short of a being a worthy ending for such an iconic movie franchise.

Cameron had also stated that Avatar: Fire & Ash marks the end of a mini-saga, and that the second movie (Avatar: The Way of Water) and the third one are in reality two parts of the same story. You could already feel it in the second film, which despite lasting over three hours, devoted most of the runtime to character introductions and had an abrupt third act with a very "to be continued" type of ending.

Avatar: Fire and Ash has different but related problems: the plot moves much faster, character archs are fulfilled and every member of the family, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and their three older children Lo'ak (Britain Dalton), Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) and Miles (Jack Champion) share almost equal screen time and protagonism, which is admirable. However, despite many strong moments (a scene in particular is one of the most emotional moments of the series, even if it ends up watered down by shockingly poor acting), the script is ultimately scared of making bold choices, and instead follows the same narrative blueprints from the previous two films, sometimes to an alarming degree.

In short, Avatar: Fire and Ash feels too similar to the previous movies and especially The Way of Water, with a constant feeling of déjà vu, both narratively and, what's more surprising, visually. While the 2022 movie got a mixed response from fans, those who enjoyed it really enjoyed because it transported viewers to a new land within the frontiers of Pandora, showed us a new tribe of Na'vi, new and beautiful locations and instantly iconic creatures like the Tulkuns (the whales) and the giant flying fishes that the Na'vi ride like horses (machine guns optional). It did not matter if the script wasn't the best, it was pure movie magic in a scale that very few films have come close to match recently: maybe only Dune has managed to create such a convincing and awe-inspiring fantasy world on the big screen.

Of course, Avatar: Fire and Ash is an spectacular movie, worth seeing in 3D. But if you are expecting Fire and Ash to take you on a similar trip further into Pandora's wonders and be blown away again by the imagination of Cameron and his art department, you may want to check your expectations...

Avatar: more smoke than fire

Most of the marketing of the movie has been devoted to the new "Ash" tribe living in a volcano and their ruthless leader Varang, played by Oona Chaplin. She is certainly one of the best things of the movie, with her sadistic rituals and psychic abilities, but she has much less weight in the plot and presence in the film than the Varang-centric trailers and posters have made us believe. Instead, everything still mostly revolves around the feud between Jake Sully and the reborn Na'vi marine Quaritch (Stephen Lang), in a back and forth that starts to get weary.

The franchise needed new blood and new ideas, now more than ever. If the second movie wasn't that exciting narratively, it still had a pass because it had been 13 years from the first movie (meaning there was a big nostalgic factor) and the underwater vistas were spectacular. The visuals in Fire and Ash are equally as beautiful, but they are mostly... the same. Even the action scenes, of which there are a ton, play out in mostly the same ways: same types of fights, same types of chases, same types of creatures killing each other... with most shots being indistinguishable from movie to movie.

To put it with a gaming metaphos, because you are reading Gamereactor after all, it's like playing {The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom} after playing {Breath of the Wild}: there are some new places here and there, but the map of Hyrule is the same, and you are unlikely to sense the same things that the first time you explored it. With a CGI-focused movie like this, I wouldn't be surprised if budgetary cost-saving reasons were a factor in the movie being so similar visually, so scared to move away from the Metkayina reefs, so uninterested in wowing us the same way the first two movies did.

For a film series that was born with the goal of pushing futuristic digital technology forward and to put things in the screen that nobody had been able to do before, to lose that wow factor is the biggest sin. But James Cameron's intentions are noble: he wants viewers to really care for the characters he's created, to give the films true depth beyond the 3D images.

And it's not like the movie isn't ambitious in that regard: while it lasts for 197 minutes (and you really feel every one of them), it sometimes feels like an 8-9 hour season of TV condensed into three hours. There are a lot of things happening at the same time, every character grows and has their moments to shine, and there are even some weird ellipsis of important things that sound cool and you'll probably wish they had stayed in the movie, even if the runtime is already disproportionate. However, many of the plot lines are direct repetitions from the previous movie without anything new to add (some plots should have really been solved in the previous movie to make room for something new), while the new characters (mainly Varang and the ash tribe) don't really matter to the main plot.

The result is a movie that, overall, is better paced than the second, is more entertaining, with more action, but far less surprising. The storylines move much faster and go further... but, really, not that much further. Certainly, not as far as they should have gone if this is to be a potential ending of the series.

Even as a supposed "part 2 of the part 2" of the whole Avatar series, the story doesn't take us anywhere new after three years and three hours, which is disappointing. We sense this is only one chapter inside a much larger and ambitious overarching story...because it has to be, right? If it's there, we don't get many clues here, and instead we get a perfectly serviceable but largely forgettable entry of a series that should really aspire to much more if they really want to frame each new release as a major cinematic event. If Cameron really fears that this could be the end of the franchise, I will start praying Eywa that he has a plan B to wrap up this thing in a more affordable but exciting way.