‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ Review: The War for Peace in Pandora

There’s something deeply contradictory about Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third film in James Cameron’s blockbuster saga—something that makes the entire project even stranger and more intriguing than it already is. On paper—and this is one of the most fascinating aspects of Cameron’s philosophical blueprint—Avatar is essentially an ecological epic about caring for the planet (or in this case, a moon, though the distinction barely matters) and about the galactic equivalent of Indigenous peoples fighting to keep humans from stripping them of their natural resources. It also presents itself as a humanist, family-oriented, and in many ways pacifist fable about living in harmony with nature and appreciating the beauty of the universe and everything it holds.

When you actually watch it, however, for all the gleaming spectacle Cameron and his team have engineered to portray Pandora’s natural-fantastical landscapes—the moon, not a planet, where almost the entire saga unfolds—the most exciting and addicting moments are the action scenes: the violence, the collisions between species, whether human, avatar, animal, Na’vi, or anything in between. Whenever the Terminator filmmaker stages an action set-piece, the movie jolts to life and briefly abandons its eco-cultural tourism to return to the fundamentals that made Cameron famous: his knack for crafting and cutting together suspenseful, tightly wound sequences.

Fire and Ash thrives especially in moments of conflict—battles, high-stakes choices, and confrontations with the saga’s more aggressive creatures (including the newcomer Varang, who never stops baring her teeth and emitting something like a roar). It also leans into the parent-child dynamics that feel as though they were lifted from some kind of cosmic scripture published alongside the Bible we already know. What Cameron offers here is a string of clashes over the future of everything and everyone, fought not only by the living but by beings who inhabit a realm where spirits, ghosts, and nature itself coexist. Everyone may want peace, but first there’s a little matter that needs settling. And that, in all its contradictory yet compulsively watchable glory, is what this third film is ultimately about.

Avatar: Fire and Ashes does require a brief recap of how we got here—unless one is willing to spend half the movie (and half an Avatar movie is the length of a perfectly normal feature) trying to figure out who’s who, who is inside whom, and why the voice of that secondary character sounds suspiciously like a well-known actress. The story reunites us with the central family: Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), their sons Lo’ak and Tuk, their adopted daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), and their human half-brother Spider (Jack Champion), as they face a new set of threats and assorted complications.

As they journey into other territories in an effort to protect Spider—whom the humans are actively hunting—the protagonists encounter the Mangkwan tribe, an aggressive, violent, and not particularly likable community that appears to be striking its own deals with the military-industrial complex, to the detriment of its fellow Na’vi. Led by the feral Varang (Oona Chaplin), these warriors emerge as some of the film’s antagonists. Naturally, the humans remain the ultimate enemy, driven by their relentless need to plunder the planet’s natural resources by any means necessary. At the top of that hierarchy once again is the new incarnation of Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), whose physical form may have changed, but whose intentions—and brutality—most certainly have not.

Amid these increasingly virulent clashes, the family also grapples with internal disputes and unresolved grief, intensified since the death of their eldest son Neteyam (which occurred in the previous film, The Way of Water—no spoilers here) and the fact that Spider was the one who survived. Neytiri, in particular, looks at him with more hatred than doubt, more violence than discomfort. This is where the film’s most personal dramatic thread takes shape, one that inevitably connects with the larger narrative for reasons that are by now well known (and if they aren’t, they revolve around the question of who Spider’s real father is). Cameron stages these revelations during the film’s most extreme and emotionally charged moments—scenes that will almost certainly be described as “biblical,” for reasons that are not hard to imagine.

What ultimately matters in Fire and Ash isn’t the plot (convoluted), the visual effects (spectacular), or even Cameron’s expansive cosmogony. It’s the way all of that fades into the background once Cameron cuts the ropes, steps away from his more adult, contemplative self, and unleashes the eternal teenager inside him—the one who just wants to watch his creatures crash into each other and tear themselves apart for as long as necessary. In the film’s second half, Cameron is finally in his true element. And it’s not Pandora. It’s cinema. There, we all speak the same language, and everyone understands everyone else.