In 2009, James Cameron revolutionized computer generated imagery (CGI) and performance capture with his visually stunning science fiction movie known as “Avatar.” The film still stands to this day as the highest grossing movie of all time with a whopping $2.92 billion.
In 2022, thirteen years later, the sequel, “Avatar: The Way of Water” was released and also rose to the top of the box office charts with over $2.32 billion.
And in 2025, the third installment to the Avatar franchise, “Avatar: Fire and Ash” released and, at the time of writing this article, has made over $1.23 billion worldwide. Now, is the movie any good? That’s extremely debatable.
The film follows Jake Sully, played by Sam Worthington, and his family as they navigate Pandora and have to face off against Miles Quaritch, played by Stephen Lang, once again but this time with the help of the fire tribe led by Varang, played by Oona Chaplin.
To be positive for a moment, the action scenes are cool and visually stunning of course but after a while they become repetitive and stale, especially the final battle in the third act. The CGI and visual effects are breathtaking and you end up so immersed that you forget most of this movie is made with CGI and all of the stuff the human actors are seeing aren’t in fact there. But other than that the movie is extremely hit or miss for me, mostly misses.
First of all, the movie is extremely long with a runtime of three hours and fifteen minutes. Normally this wouldn’t bother me as I feel art shouldn’t be strangled and movies can be as long as they need to be, but that’s the issue, Avatar 3 didn’t need to be three hours at all. Most, if not every, story beat in this movie is exactly the same as the last Avatar movie. The status quo in the universe didn’t really change, the characters all ended up in almost the exact situations they started with and only one minor character died.
The movie is also quite boring. In the third act, you think the story is going to end multiple times, and then the movie just keeps chugging along, making you groan thinking you had a chance to leave the theater. Do you realize how frustrating it is to watch a movie cut to black multiple times in the third act when the film hasn’t done that before, only for that cut to black to not lead to the credits? I’ll answer that for you, it’s extremely frustrating!
The most interesting plot elements this movie has is anything having to do with Miles Quaritch, the overarching antagonist from the previous two films, and the new Na’vi fire tribe leader ‘Varang.’ These two characters have this really interesting romantic relationship which sort of mirrors the relationship Jake Sully and Neytiri have from the first movie. Unfortunately though, the movie barely focuses on that relationship for more than a few scenes, even though it was one of the most marketed aspects from the movie.
In fact, for a movie called “Fire and Ash,” the movie barely focuses on the fire tribe in the grand scheme of things. Sure, they move the plot along by being antagonists that chase our heroes down but we barely learn anything about the tribe and really why they’re evil at all.
Overall, the movie isn’t anything you haven’t seen from this series before and if anything, I’d say wait until it comes to Disney Plus. The movie just really isn’t worth your immediate time and I wouldn’t recommend buying a theater ticket for this movie in particular. I haven’t seen it yet but I’ve heard “Marty Supreme” is excellent and well worth your time.
Do I want to see James Cameron’s artistic vision die? No of course not, but this movie does however make me question how James Cameron is gonna pull off doing four more of these movies if he can’t even make the 3rd installment something new and exciting. We’ll just have to wait and see.
