By John Serba
Published April 2, 2026, 4:15 p.m. ET
Avatar: Fire and Ash (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) proved that the world may be getting a touch weary of James Cameron’s megablockbuster franchise. Sure, we don’t mind another opportunity to immerse ourselves in the singular spectacle of this vibrant alien world rendered with motion-capture tech and an impressively ambitious CGI palette, but it’s all feeling like a bit too much – and even Cameron himself sounded a bit weary upon the completion of this, the third of a proposed five films. Creatively, Fire and Ash shows some signs of repetitive wear, and the repeat business that often balloons numbers into the stratosphere apparently suffered in turn; the movie “only” grossed $1.5 billion theatrically worldwide, which won’t have anyone boo-hooing for the bankers. But that’s roughly half what the first Avatar earned in 2009, a significant dropoff made even more so when accounting for inflation, and a keen indicator of waning audience interest. Now let’s get into why we’re ready to acknowledge a job reasonably well done, and move on.
AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Narratively, not much time has passed since the grand explosive splashy kerfuffle at the conclusion of Avatar: The Way of Water. Na’vi couple Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) mourn the death of their son Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) differently – he gets to work foraging guns from the ocean depths while she quietly prays and seethes with grief and rage. Meanwhile, their son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) uses a plantlike organism connected to Eywa, the Mother Nature entity they worship, to visit his brother in the afterlife; daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) struggles to wrap her head around her budding shamanesque ability to commune with Eywa; and adopted human son Spider (Jack Champion) runs around enthusiastically like his nicknamesake, Monkey Boy. The family has settled in with the seafaring Metkayina clan, led by Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and his pregnant wife Ronal (Kate Winslet), but a dwindling supply of oxygen for Spider forces them to hitch a ride to Jake’s former human base camp, with a Na’vi clan of traders who travel via massive airships strung to dirigible-like floating jellyfish creatures.
As our tall, longtailed blue protags go for a scenic float, we drop in on the antags, led by Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang), whose mind now exists permanently inside a Na’vi avatar. He’s still bent on capturing Jake Sully for reasons that probably should have been dropped long ago, because Quaritch’s grudge – he sees Jake, a former Marine, as a traitor and the main roadblock to human “progress” on the planet of Pandora, namely, destroying everything for the sake of colonization and profit – is currently fueling a third three-hour movie. Dude needs psychotherapy. He’s really holding onto things, isn’t he? As he plots and plans and argues with the increasingly impatient-with-Quaritch general (Edie Falco), a nasty Na’vi clan dubbed the Ash People assault Jake and fam and the wind riders. Not everyone native to this planet is a bunch of peace-seeking hippies at heart, and this faction is led by the fearsome Varang (Oona Chaplin), a wildly charismatic pyromaniac with all the telltale characteristics of a cult leader. How charismatic is she? Well, she inspires some of her followers to light themselves on fire while riding a flying dinosaur, and kamikaze themselves right into the giant sky-jellyfish. Yipes.
This is the first of approximately 19 dozen scuffles of varying magnitude that comprise most of the remaining 19 dozen hours of the movie, with the dramatic connective tissue consisting of angsty, melodramatic hand-wringing, fretting and arguing among our Na’vi heroes, who’ve endured so very much already, and they’re not done. Quaritch angles to capture Jake and reunite with his biological son Spider; he also finds ideological common ground with Varang, and begins a friends-with-benefits thing with her (yipes?). Lo’ak continues to stump for his whale pal Payakan, still exiled from his kind, who the Na’vi desperately need in the battle against the humans and all their boats and ships and missiles. And perhaps most importantly, Kiri initiates a link between Eywa and Spider, allowing him to ditch the O2 mask and breathe Pandora’s air – something that could be a boon to the humans who want to raze everything and put up condos and Olive Gardens or whatever. This, of course, just can’t freaking happen.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Well, it’s a little too similar to Avatar: The Way of Water. And even though Fire and Ash ain’t that bad, I’d currently rank it as the least of Cameron’s filmography – since Piranha II: The Spawning, of course.
Performance Worth Watching: Chaplin – granddaughter of Charlie Chaplin – lit a fire exactly when this franchise needed some heat. It’s not her fault that Cameron dumps water on her Zippo here, but for the duration of Varang’s screen time, the actress keeps our eyes wide and our ears perked.
Sex And Skin: None beyond a brief scene of Quaritch/Varang afterglow.
Our Take: I don’t know about you, but I’m here for the whale politics. Give me all the whale politics! It’s about as scintillating as the discussion of taxation and trade routes in the Star Wars prequels. And we get even more whale politics in Fire and Ash than the previous Avatar, as the leader whales and the lesser whales debate whether they should participate in a war between Iran and the United Sta- er, I mean, humans and Na’vi. It’s not like they’re NOT going to support our heroes in the end by breaching their armored bodies out of the water and landing atop human warships with mighty kabooms, right? What kind of movie would it be if they didn’t deliver such insane spectacle? A more complex one, instead of the relentlessly complicated one it is, and yes, there’s a difference, “complexity” meaning thematic depth and “complicated” implying a general busyness that results in movies wearily slogging past the three-hour mark.
I feel like I could cut and paste large chunks of my Way of Water review, tone down some of the superlatives and call it good. For Fire and Ash, Cameron arranges familiar pieces on the chessboard, adds a few new ones, then reverts to an all-too-familiar strategy: Humans, Na’vi and whales engage in violent conflict for the final hour of the film, which adheres to the usual tantric-sex narrative structure requiring 35 minutes of climaxes before the credits roll. It’s a curious decision, considering a good portion of the movie establishes Varang and her cohort as a wild card in this conflict and adds nuance to the development of gung-ho villain Quaritch. Cameron sidelines the fire-obsessed demon-lady, squandering the potential to change the complexion of the story, resulting in a far less compelling movie than it could have been.
The primary question here is, how much pizza can you eat? By personal doctrine, Cameron never skimps or cuts corners, and the visual splendor he’s created in all three Avatars is as sublimely immersive as ever. The usual arguments apply – lousy dialogue, melodrama that flirts with telenovela-level tones, Champion playing Spider like a teenager lifted from an ’80s sitcom, etc. And as ever, the Na’vis’ relationship with Aywa is as simple and obvious metaphor for how Earthlings – you and I included of course – should have a more genteel relationship with our environment. And as ever as ever, Cameron’s blend of hippielike musings and hoo-rah fetishism of military hardware and violence presents a fascinating ideological tug-of-war that’s become his signature across his filmography.
Consistency isn’t the filmmaker’s issue, until it comes to our emotional involvement with these characters, who increasingly inspire diminishing returns. The only wrinkle here is the fact of Spider’s paternity, and where he fits in with his adopted family, which leads to difficult decisions that might bear more dramatic weight if they didn’t hinge on the least appealing character in the entire movie. But once again, Cameron bulldozes us with grand, sweaty action sequences, compelling us to overlook the silliest elements of a story about goofy-looking blue aliens who moan and mingle and meditate in cringeworthy ways, and exist in an alarmingly overcooked vat of bathos soup. Which is to say, it’s still easy to feel invested in what happens in Fire and Ash, especially within Cameron’s fully formed, conceptualized and executed vision. But enough may be enough.
Our Call: I saw Fire and Ash once in theaters and again at home, and once was plenty. Keep that in mind when you STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
