'Avatar: Fire and Ash' Review
- Tyler Strandberg
- Dec 16, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: Dec 23, 2025
Release Date: 12/19/25 [Cinemas]
Genre: Action. Adventure. Fantasy. SciFi. Thriller.
MPAA: Rated PG13.
Distributor: 20th Century Studios.
The Verdict: A Maybe
While thirteen years separated the release of Avatar and its sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, the wait between the franchise’s second and third chapters is far shorter. By filming the second and third installments back to back, James Cameron allowed post-production on both films to run concurrently, shrinking the gap between releases to just three years. Despite this renewed momentum, Avatar has long carried a reputation for leaving a surprisingly faint cultural imprint for a film that remains the highest-grossing of all time. By comparison, other box office giants like Avengers: Endgame and Cameron’s own Titanic didn’t just draw massive crowds, they seeped into the cultural bloodstream, their characters, moments, and themes becoming touchstones that matched their financial dominance.
It is this perceived lack of cultural weight that has placed the Avatar franchise under a familiar and relentless spotlight, one that follows nearly every sequel-heavy series. The question surfaces again and again: “why does this film need to exist?” While I instinctively push back against that mindset, often landing on the belief that entertainment alone can be a worthy justification, the question is not without merit. It invites a closer look at the creative responsibility that comes with extending a franchise across multiple installments. At its core, a sequel is expected to deepen, expand, or recontextualize the world that already exists in a way that feels meaningful. How far that expansion needs to go is subjective and will naturally vary from viewer to viewer, and Avatar: Fire and Ash is unlikely to escape that same debate.
Set one year after the events of The Way of Water, Fire and Ash returns to Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) as they continue building a life among the Metkayina, the water-dwelling Na’vi clan, while still carrying the emotional weight of what came before. Their uneasy sense of stability is threatened as Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) presses on with his relentless hunt for Jake. Along the way, he encounters a fierce and embittered Na’vi clan known as the Fire People, whose rage mirrors his own. Sensing opportunity, Quaritch looks to forge a dangerous alliance, hoping their shared hatred will finally lead him to his long-standing enemy.
Cameron’s strongest talent lies in the layered themes he builds into each story. Although the first Avatar was often reduced to “Dances with Wolves with aliens”, his work consistently reaches beyond the simplified critiques that follow it. His lifelong fascination with the ocean shaped The Way of Water through vivid currents of environmentalism and ocean conservation, motifs that have become defining pillars of the series. Fire and Ash continues that momentum by expanding themes already rooted in the world. Kiri’s mysteriously powerful and at times overwhelming spiritual connection to Eywa moves to the forefront, allowing the film to explore faith and mysticism with striking depth. As a result, religion becomes one of the most compelling and resonant threads running through this new chapter.
In his effort to broaden the scope of the story, Cameron weaves in new themes centered on conflict between Indigenous groups themselves. History offers many real-world parallels, particularly moments when Indigenous tribes allied with European colonists in attempts to eliminate rival tribes, only for those alliances to ultimately contribute to their own decline. Fire and Ash draws on this painful legacy with little subtlety, extending even to the Na’vi’s own brutal equivalent of scalping. The comparison is deliberate and unmistakable, grounding the film’s spectacle in a darker historical echo.
Ultimately, despite revisiting familiar themes and introducing a new tribe, Avatar: Fire and Ash struggles to carve out a reason for its own existence. What proves most surprising is not how ambitious the film looks, but how repetitive it feels. Scene after scene unfolds in near lockstep with The Way of Water, to the point where it becomes easy to predict each moment by recalling its counterpart from the previous film. The resemblance is so close that the comparisons feel unavoidable, and rarely in Fire and Ash’s favor. By the final stretch, the film appears to overstay its welcome by nearly forty five minutes, draining what momentum it has left. For all of Cameron’s efforts to dazzle with breathtaking visuals and expand the world of Pandora, the storytelling remains stubbornly static, repeating the same narrative rhythms rather than evolving beyond them.
Fresh off her Oscar win, Zoe Saldaña once again proves why she has been a cornerstone of the Avatar franchise. She has always been a standout in these films, and it still feels like a missed opportunity that her work in the original 2009 Avatar went unrewarded. Fire and Ash continues that streak, with Saldaña delivering a performance defined by restraint, emotional precision, and quiet intensity. After anchoring three of the highest-grossing films of all time, her status as a true box office force feels well earned. That said, Fire and Ash also introduces a scene-stealing presence in Oona Chaplin, who commands attention as the chilling, cult-like leader of the Fire People. Her performance radiates an unnerving coldness that borders on sociopathic, injecting the series with a level of menace and complexity not seen since Saldaña’s breakout turn in the original film.
Ultimately, when I walked away from Avatar: Fire and Ash, I found myself circling back to the sequel question I always dread. Does this film justify its existence? While some of the new thematic ideas briefly caught my interest, I kept returning to a simpler standard I tend to trust more. Was I entertained? The answer, unfortunately, was no. For all of Cameron’s efforts to keep me intellectually engaged and visually awed by the world of Pandora, the experience felt hollow. Watching the same story unfold for a third time drained any sense of momentum, leaving me disengaged and largely uninterested in where the franchise goes next.
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