Film Review - Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025)

Avatar Fire and Ash is the third in the Avatar series and is again directed by James Cameron, the story takes place almost immediately after the events of 2022’s The Way of Water as Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and Lo’ak (Britian Dalton) are mourning the loss of Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) at the end of the last movie but Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) is still on their trail and this time he has a powerful and dangerous new ally in Varang (Oona Chaplin) head of the Mangkwan clan.

I have been looking forward to this movie all year as I am a big Avatar fan, the first two movies I go back to fairly often especially the Way of Water and everything I’ve seen of this movie in the previews for it looked even better but could this burn bright be another pile of ash like so many third movies in a series.

Happily the Fire burns bright here as this is a fantastic cinematic experience, I barely felt the 197 minute runtime except maybe towards the end and I sat there having a great time on Pandora once more, Cameron’s direction is as confident and assured as ever and the action sequences he creates here are just amazing to behold, 2 in particular are some of the best action scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie and reminded me more than once of Return of the Jedi.

Speaking of Return of the Jedi, this movie is very much the Jedi of the Avatar series and I do not mean this as a knock against the movie I mean it in the sense that like Jedi it repeats a lot of beats from the first two films and it still delivered a great time at the movies with a fantastic new villain, terrific action sequences and a storyline that wraps up the main story beats well enough to make me happy.

Something that also made me happy was the quality of the villains, Lang is as good as ever while Chaplin is mesmerizing as Varang with the way she moves, the way she walks and the way she uses the eyes of the character to hypnotize you and her use of the fire is very memorable, Edie Falco gets more to do here and is also very good with every line out of her mouth sounding almost venomous at times while Brendan Cowell is good also as the whale hunting captain.

And lastly the 3D here is sensational, I’m normally not a big fan of 3D because of the glasses and wearing those glasses over my own which makes my eyes hurt but here it felt so immersive I may as well have been wearing a VR headset because the depth of the image was amazing and the dimensions felt properly 3rd dimensional and very very rarely did I want to take the glasses off, this is quite simply the best use of 3D in a movie I’ve ever seen.

And so that was Avatar Fire and Ash and while it does repeat a few beats this is a cinema experience unlike any you’ll ever see, nobody does it like James Cameron and I wish we had more like him making movies, 4 and a half out of 5.