Pan and Slam

Movie Review: Avatar: Fire and Ash

PG-13 3h 17m

• Director
  • James Cameron
• Stars
  • Sam Worthington
  • Zoe Saldaña
  • Sigourney Weaver

by Jason Koenigsberg

Well here we are, Sixteen years and three and a half hours later the third Avatar film comes to a close. Was it worth the wait? Does anything with Avatar even matter anymore? The answers are no and not really. With Avatar: Fire and Ash James Cameron really had a chance to do something different and redefine the world of Pandora and establish interesting characters with new arcs like he did in the previous sequels he directed Aliens (1986) and Terminator 2 (1991). Instead all the Avatar sequels have shown is that they are too little, too late, and way too long. With Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) he basically just made the same movie but set in Bora Bora instead of a rainforest. Now with Avatar: Fire and Ash it is just more action. There is nothing about this film that stands out or demands to be seen, it is just more of the same. Nothing feels complete. The Avatar films have had no significant cultural impact on our society other than making huge sums of money at the box office. In fact, its lead star Sam Worthington can probably still walk around and not be hassled by fans since nobody knows what he looks like outside of these movies with him in layers of blue effects. Avatar has left no indelible mark and it is highly unlikely this third film will change things. If they came out sooner to the first picture then maybe the situation would be different. The world was in a very different place between Avatar one in 2009 and its first sequel thirteen years later. 20th Century Fox no longer exists as a movie studio, it was bought by Disney, and the COVID pandemic and Netflix have severely shifted moviegoing habits for the masses that make these movies seem even more irrelevant but perhaps more necessary to try and get audiences out of the house and into cinemas. Avatar: Fire and Ash probably will not be the Christmas release to save the theatrical experience even though it will surely billions at the box office. After all is said and done and it is streaming on Disney+ a few months from now, nobody will care.

The opening shot contains floating islands in the sky and then blue people ride onto the screen on these pterodactyl looking creatures. They are cheering and playfully dueling with each other and we are back in the Avatar world. All of the special effects of Avatar: Fire and Ash are state of the art as to be expected from this series and from any James Cameron film. The mo-cap make up effects stand out where we can tell which characters are certain actors like Kate Winslet and Cliff Curtis stand out underneath all of the effects. But it is tough to keep up with who is who in this movie other than a few standouts since all of the characters are blue except for one main character. If someone is planning on seeing this movie then they absolutely should do so in 3D IMAX or on the biggest screen possible. No home theater will do this picture justice which can also be said for the previous two entries. So unless the viewer really wants to see Avatar: Fire and Ash to complete the trilogy, out of pure curiosity, or because they love the other films so much, there is no real reason to sit through all three plus hours of this.

The middle hour really dragged on and felt like forever until it was saved by an arbitrary plot contrivance involving a marine biologist who is introduced out of nowhere and saves the day. The third hour has some standout action sequences that redeem a lot of the superfluous parts but it is still not worthy of earning its epic runtime. If this movie was two and a half hours and they trimmed out a lot of the fat then Avatar: Fire and Ash may be worth a recommendation. But like everything else nowadays it suffers from being too bloated and even its biggest defenders will concede that it is unnecessarily too long.