Avatar: Fire and Ash Review: Pandora’s Visually Thrilling Return

I’ll be honest: I knew the runtime for Avatar: Fire and Ash before walking into the theater and started mentally preparing for a 197 minute endurance test. Three hours and change in an era where I sometimes struggle to commit to a two-hour film without glancing at my watch felt like a lot to ask. And then something strange happened. The lights went down, the film started, and I didn’t look at my watch once—not once—until the credits rolled and I genuinely couldn’t believe that much time had passed.

Whatever James Cameron is doing with Avatar: Fire and Ash, whatever sorcery he’s conjured across sixteen years of development and a budget north of $400 million, the man has figured out how to make three hours disappear into thin air.

To understand where we are, it helps to remember where we’ve been.

The first Avatar made $2.9 billion worldwide back in 2009, a number so absurd it redefined what blockbusters could achieve, and then The Way of Water pulled in another $2.3 billion in 2022, proving the doubters wrong about whether audiences still cared. That’s over five billion dollars combined, making this one of the most successful franchises in cinema history, and Cameron has been working on this third chapter since 2017, filming it simultaneously with the second film across a grueling three-year shoot in New Zealand that wrapped in December 2020. Five years in post-production. Thousands of artists at Weta Digital refining every frame. When Cameron says he needs every second to get it right, he means it, but the results absolutely justify the obsession.

The story picks up with Jake Sully (Sam Worthington, Relay) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña, Emilia Pérez) still carrying the weight of their son Neteyam’s death from the previous film, a grief that colors everything they do and every choice they make. When circumstances force the family to transport the human-raised Spider (Jack Champion, Scream VI) back to the Omatikaya stronghold, they accept passage with the Wind Traders, a nomadic clan sailing the skies in massive airships tethered to jellyfish-like creatures that drift through Pandora’s atmosphere.

David Thewlis (Enola Holmes 2) voices their leader Peylak, and these sequences alone showcase the kind of world-building that Cameron excels at—except peace doesn’t last, it never does, and soon the Ash People descend. This is a Na’vi tribe led by the terrifying Varang (Oona Chaplin, The Longest Ride), warriors who forsook their faith after a volcanic eruption destroyed their homeland and who soon align with Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang, Barron’s Cove) in a conflict that threatens to consume everything.

Before the screening, Cameron appeared in a short video message explaining something I hadn’t fully appreciated until he said it out loud: these actors didn’t just hand over their likenesses and let computers do the rest. They were on set every day, wearing performance capture suits, acting out every scene with equipment strapped to their bodies, undergoing rigorous training in underwater breathing techniques that pushed them to physical limits.

The result shows in ways that sneak up on you, because despite watching tall, blue, computer-generated creatures for three hours, there’s a humanity that breaks through the digital artifice—Worthington continuing to do his best work with Cameron after building Jake into a genuinely layered character across three films, newly-crowned Oscar winner Saldaña dialing back Neytiri’s intensity from The Way of Water while making the grief underneath feel absolutely palpable, and Sigourney Weaver (Dust Bunny) remaining excellent as the mysterious Kiri, her voice carrying an ethereal quality that suits the character’s spiritual connection to Pandora.

But we need to talk about Chaplin, because she’s the revelation this franchise has been waiting for. Cameron described Varang as someone hardened by incredible hardship, willing to do terrible things to protect her people, and Chaplin plays her with the kind of ferocious commitment that makes every scene she’s in crackle with unpredictable menace. There’s a relish to the performance, a gleefulness in the villainy that never tips into camp, and it helps that her motivations feel rooted in genuine trauma rather than the corporate greed that drove previous antagonists.

For better or (many say) worse, Champion’s Spider also gets moved to the forefront of the story, his complicated relationship to biological father Quaritch reaching a crisis point that changes the direction of everything, and Britain Dalton’s (Dark Harvest) Lo’ak provides the emotional spine that carries us through the darker stretches.

Here’s where a little honesty matters. Cameron’s screenwriting has never been his strongest suit—going all the way back to Piranha II: The Spawning in 1982, his gifts have always lived in visual storytelling and technical innovation rather than dialogue.  Structurally, Fire and Ash follows a pattern we’ve seen before: the Sullys rally a separate Na’vi clan to fight against an enemy, relationships form, allegiances shift, and everything builds toward an extended climax that tests survival on multiple fronts.

Critics looking for narrative innovation will find ammunition here, as they did with The Way of Water, and I won’t pretend the familiar architecture of the plot didn’t register. But here’s the thing: when the execution reaches this level, when cinematographer Russell Carpenter and the army at Weta have created images this immersive and downright astonishing, when the motion capture achieves seamlessness that borders on magic, when the Dolby 3D presentation rewards every premium format surcharge, I’m willing to accept familiar structure in exchange for what I’m seeing. The final fifteen minutes deliver a collision of Na’vi tribes, military forces, and ocean creatures that ranks among the most exhilarating sequences I’ve experienced in a theater this year, and I left with my skin genuinely buzzing.

Cameron titled this film Fire and Ash for a reason he explained in interviews: fire represents hatred, anger, violence, and ash is what remains afterward—grief, loss, the hollow space where something used to be. And from those ashes comes more violence, more anger, more hatred, a vicious cycle that the film doesn’t pretend to resolve. It’s darker than The Way of Water, more willing to sit in uncomfortable places, and with two more sequels already in various stages of production for 2029 and 2031, Cameron is clearly playing a long game with a multi-generational story he’s been planning since 2006.

Whether the narrative ultimately justifies that scope remains to be seen, but as a technical achievement, as pure cinema projected onto the largest possible screen, Avatar: Fire and Ash might be the most accomplished blockbuster ever made. Find the biggest screen you can, see it in IMAX or Dolby if at all possible, and remember why we started going to movie theaters in the first place.  Or at least why we’ve trusted Cameron with billions of ticket sales.