Avatar: Fire and Ash review— Is the Avatar franchise burning out?
Movie review (contains spoilers)
Avatar: Fire and Ash has more of a story mesa than a story mountain…
James Cameron’s Avatar franchise has been his ongoing passion project over the last few years, much to the world’s surprise. Continuing on from what had seemed to be a fairly conclusive ending in the original film, Avatar: The Way of Water was a pleasant surprise. With gorgeous graphics and a believable plot, it made up for its exhausting runtime by scattering in callbacks to the original, and developing new and interesting ideas. Avatar: Fire and Ash, however… The speculative pentalogy might have burnt itself out with this one— pun absolutely intended. This movie struggles to justify itself for a few main reasons. Firstly, as mentioned above, it struggles with achieving an overarching narrative, and seems particularly allergic to set-up or catharsis.
Its story arc doesn’t work at all as a standalone, full of big action fights that served little narrative function, bloated the runtime with repetition, and cheapened the stakes and tone of the actual final battle. The whole RDA abduction and rescue sequence was the worst example. As far as I can tell, it was there firstly for Quaritch’s arc (but we’d kind of gotten the point by then, even by the ending of the previous movie). And secondly, as a motivation for Jake’s decision to go all Abraham-and-Isaac on Spider (which undoes itself two scenes later anyway and is itself only there to end Neytiri’s grieving era). Even still, the act fails to provide sufficient motivation anyway. When Jake decided to sacrifice Spider I was still confused and thrown for a loop, because…
The story of Avatar: Fire and Ash is disjointed. Continuing with this example, before Jake is rescued from the RDA, he spends his time in captivity brooding in a cage, and handing out inspirational one-liners.
There’s nothing to indicate he is struggling with a moral, Spider-related dilemma, or that he even sees Spider being tested on at all. At this stage, the last time we actually heard or saw Jake’s thoughts on anything, he was arguing directly against his wife, in favour of Spider’s life and place in the family, and that was about an hour of runtime ago. When they walked into the woods, I genuinely thought for a minute that Jake was conducting some cruel test of priorities on Neytiri!
The movie was trying to pull off an ensemble story of a kind, but the end result felt montage-like, not spending enough time with each plotline for me to become invested in any of them.
It actually starts out with VO narration from Lo’ak, who has all of 20 minutes maximum as the main character, before being firmly placed in the background again. But don’t worry! An hour and a half later, after we’ve switched perspectives five or so times, he’ll jumpscare you with another narration again, for some reason. Lil’ bro was not even in the same physical location as the other characters for half of the runtime. Why is he narrating, and why only at such odd intervals?
This instalment bit off more than it could chew when it came to character arcs and plotlines. It wanted Lo’ak to have a ‘proving myself to dad and the memory of my brother and the tribe elders’ arc. It wanted Neytiri to have an arc overcoming her grief and pain. It wanted Spider to be the McGuffin with a story focus. It wanted Kiri to have another spiritual awakening arc (but for real this time, we promise). It wanted to show the rising tensions between the human factions. It wanted Quaritch to have a doubting-the-human-way-and-becoming-a-dad arc. That one nearly worked well, if it only hadn’t been teased so many times that the actual payoff felt anticlimactic. In case you forgot, Jake Sully’s also the main character, so he’s just kind of taken wherever he needs to be by the plot in order to interact with these elements. He doesn’t have much of an arc himself; I feel like they haven’t known what to do with him since the first film ended. None of his beliefs or decisions are really challenged by this movie.
Finally, in order to justify this four elements thing they’ve got going on, the movie wants to introduce a whole new faction of Na’avi: Varang and her gang of extras.
Even with a 3 hour 15 minute runtime, it wasn’t enough for all of that. Especially in a series with a reputation as an action-packed sci-fi. This lack of cohesion also had the unfortunate effect of detracting from the film’s sense of time progression. I was struggling to understand the stakes of each huge story climax within the movie, because I couldn’t tell how much time had passed since character X had set out to rescue character Y, or since character A had gone off to fetch plot coupon B, or since evil guy J and H met up. In any normal film, you have a baseline assumption that consecutive scenes are either happening simultaneously or pretty much right after one another. But the actual time spent between perspectives in this movie makes the timescale seem so much longer.
Because of this, there is also a strange reprioritisation of emotional beats. In the final act, the deaths of some of the main characters from the last film are brushed over in favour of gratuitously rehashing the same story beats from last time. By the end of the movie, pretty much nothing has changed for anyone, except Varang, who, under observation, exists now.
Kiri’s only relevant in the last act, and has the exact same arc as last movie. Lo’ak is mostly relevant in the first act and has the same arc as last movie. Quaritch has the same arc as last movie. Spider becomes a new McGuffin that wasn’t necessary, and he started and ended as part of the family. The Metkayina clan are cast aside. The Ash People are cripplingly underdeveloped. Jake has no arc at all. Only Neytiri has decent growth, but I can’t even appreciate it, because I only get to see it for 10 minutes at a time.
The movie is still pretty to look at, of course, but not as pretty as The Way of Water was. They’re basically the same movie anyway, so best to just watch that one and imagine that some fire people were also there. You’ll be all caught up!
Uncertainty now grows as to the realisation of the last two Avatar films necessary to complete the collection of five that James Cameron reportedly had always intended for there to be. The director himself is working on other projects, such as the Terminator franchise, and has told press that he has “other stories to tell”. I have no doubt that he is still dedicated to seeing this series through, but it is understandable to want to move on to new things after this long. Especially after the heart-wrenching loss of Jon Landau, who was Cameron’s right hand man whilst making the first two Avatar films.
There seemed to be a lot resting on the success of Fire and Ash, but after a decent performance at the box office so far, It doesn’t seem like the Avatar franchise is disappearing any time soon. I hope the next instalment is able to improve on its predecessors, hopefully suffering less from this version of Middle Movie Syndrome
Avatar: Fire and Ash is available to view in cinemas as of Feburary 2026, and is expected to be available to stream on Disney+ later this year.
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