The Screen Scribe

The big Christmas event. The Disney flag pole film of the year that they desperately hoped would save them. Granted, it made the dosh, clocking in over one billion dollars, but critically? It left a lot to be desired. Fire and Ash was, ironically, a perfect title. Not because it captures anything profound about Pandora, but because it unintentionally sums up the Avatar franchise itself. A lot of heat, absolutely no nourishment. What was once sold as the future of cinema all the way back in 2009) has become a glossy, overlong monument to creative inertia. Watching Avatar 3 feels less like attending an event and more like fulfilling an obligation.

We return to the lush planet / moon? (I honestly can’t remember now) of Pandora, and the next step in the journey of Sully family after the climactic battle in The Way of Water. We catch up with Jake and family, reeling from their losses in the previous film and struggling to come to terms with them. The solution? A family adventure into dangerous territory that goes just about as well as one might imagine. From there, familiar story beats play out that will leave anyone with half a brain asking are they watching the correct Avatar film.

By now, returning to Pandora should feel familiar in a comforting way. Instead, it feels weary. The film once again runs through the same story beats Cameron has been recycling since 2009. A noble indigenous culture. Invasive militaristic outsiders. Family drama framed as epic tragedy. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. At over three hours long, Fire and Ash offers nothing narratively or thematically that the previous two films have not already covered, and covered better. By the two-hour mark, I was beyond not invested, I was actively bored. Nothing excited me. Nothing surprised me.

Emotional moments arrived exactly when expected and landed with the weight of damp paper. Action sequences blurred together into visual noise and repeated visual cues from the previous two films. I struggled to remember character names, not because I wasn’t paying attention, but because Cameron still refuses to meaningfully distinguish them. They look similar. They act similar. They exist to move plot rather than to live within it.

What is the purpose of Sigourney Weavers weird surrogate daughter child that she voices? Two films in and we still have little to no answers. Weaver voicing the daughter remains a creative choice that remains deeply strange and distracting. It never settles into something natural. Every time she speaks, the illusion cracks. Instead of immersion, you’re reminded that this is an actor doing vocal gymnastics in a motion-capture booth for a character fifty years her junior. It’s emblematic of the film as a whole. Technically impressive. Creatively misguided.

And yet, the frustrating thing is this. Visually, Fire and Ash is stunning. Cameron still operates on a technical level few filmmakers can reach. In an era where visual effects are actively regressing, rushed out and half-rendered, Avatar remains the benchmark. The fire imagery, the environmental destruction, the sheer scale of the environments are breathtaking. If this were a tech demo, it would be unparalleled. But films are not tech demos. Spectacle alone cannot sustain a three-hour runtime. Without compelling characters or evolving ideas, the visuals become hollow. The environmental messaging feels hollow. The emotional stakes feel manufactured. This is a franchise repeating itself because it can, not because it has anything left to say.

Which brings me to the most honest part of this review. The real reason I went to see Avatar 3 had nothing to do with Pandora. I went for the Avengers: Doomsday trailer, which I genuinely wanted to see more than the film itself. That was the moment of genuine anticipation in the cinema. When the highlight of your experience is an unrelated trailer, the film itself has already failed. That in itself, is a scathing indictment of not only Avatar, but Hollywood as a whole as it stands.

James Cameron is a technical pioneer, but Fire and Ash proves that innovation without restraint becomes indulgence. This is not a disaster. It is something worse. A film so convinced of its own importance that it never questions whether it still earns it. A visually immaculate, creatively exhausted vanity project. Avatar has become the very Hollywood excess it once claimed to transcend.

2 / 5 ✨ from the Screen Scribe.

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