Like the Na’vi, Critics Are Split on Avatar: Fire and Ash

Just as Jake Sully and his family and Metkayina clan (those are the water people, including but not limited to the Kate Winslet Na’vi) find themselves in conflict with the Ash People, a.k.a. the Mangkwan clan, in Avatar: Fire and Ash, critics are divided over whether or not James Cameron’s latest alien epic is a bizarro upgrade or a tired rehash of what’s come before. While the film is currently at a plum 71 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, just about every critic has pointed out that this new film is weirdly quite similar to the old one. “At least Cameron is still stealing from the best: himself,” wrote our critic Bilge Ebiri.

While there was quite a significant time jump between the first Avatar and The Way of Water, Fire and Ash picks up where the 2022 film left off, as Jake Sully and Neytiri hunker down for safety on the coast with the water Na’vi. A new threat, however, emerges: a clan of warrior Na’vi led by the ferocious (and frankly iconic) Varang (Oona Chaplin) who has teamed up with the army on Pandora in exchange for firepower. It’s all out war in Fire and Ash, and no one — not even the critics — get to sit this one out.

“If Cameron lets his freak flag fly in Fire and Ash, it’s just a measure of how much this made-up world of a million pixels has liberated him. The freewheeling earnestness of the Avatar films redeems their derivativeness, their potboiler plots and simple-minded dialogue; the director and his cast have clearly bought into all of it, and they believe everything they’re saying. Just as he did with Way of Water, Cameron remixes a lot of his favorite motifs in Fire and Ash: There’s bits of Aliens, Terminator: Judgment Day, and The Abyss in here, and a whole lot of Titanic (again). There’s also quite a bit of Way of Water in here, too, which may feel to some like a franchise cannibalizing itself, but at least Cameron is still stealing from the best: himself. Plus, it’s all so expertly realized — so beautifully shot and suspensefully put together — that it never feels manufactured, lazy, or cheap. And when Kiri finally gets to yell a variation of Weaver’s famous “Get away from her, you bitch!” from Aliens, it elicits cheers, not groans.” —Bilge Ebiri, Vulture

“An Avatar movie with lots of moving parts, fueled by overt technical prowess, could sound like ‘just more Avatar.’ But Cameron, Jaffa, and Silver seem determined to make the script really count this time around. Neytiri and Jake each spend a good chunk of the movie debating whether to kill Spider to keep their family and other Na’vi safe, with Saldaña always on the verge of tears, and Worthington honestly giving a performance that would be Oscar-worthy in a year where Leonardo DiCaprio wasn’t also playing a sad dad. Hallucinogenic sequences in which Kiri walks the alien version of Garden of Gethsemane lead into an entire subplot with the tulkun that culminates in a mini courtroom drama with our boy Payakan on trial for insubordination. You know Fire and Ash was produced by a human brain, because half of Champion’s lines as Spider sound like cut scenes from Tommy Wiseau in The Room — you can’t manufacture that.” —Matt Patches, Polygon

“This is what they used to call in Hollywood a true epic, taking place in the sky, water and land in a visual knockout like you rarely see on this level these days. Its secret sauce however is our emotional connection through the Sully family. They are again the hook, and Cameron and co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (along with Josh Friedman & Shane Salerno who join with Story By credits) know you have to deliver a compelling family story to keep this all from drowning in too much fire and water. It is a credit to the actors, most having to do performance capture and somehow making us feel for them throughout. Led by exceptional turns again from Worthington and Saldaña, along with standouts Dalton and Champion, plus of course Weaver (convincing even as a 14 year old), there is also room for greater character development than before from Lang, who masters the villainry of Colonel Quaritch in his new guise, but also manages a three-dimensional relationship with Spider that feels authentic. Edie Falco, Jemaine Clement and Giovanni Ribisi also get their moments on the human side of things.” —Pete Hammond, Deadline

“My one hangup about Fire and Ash, if you can even call it that, is that it gave me a sense of déjà vu. Some of the visuals and story beats tread very close to those in the previous films, to the point that it almost felt like deleted scenes or alternate takes intercut with new material. But, looking at Cameron’s past work, it’s safe to assume this is a feature and not a bug. George Lucas once described the Star Wars prequel trilogy’s relationship to the original by saying, ‘it’s like poetry, they rhyme.’ I would argue that Cameron’s sequels have a tendency to amplify and echo; rather than taking a familiar concept, theme, or visual and presenting it as a flipped mirror image, his sequels take something we know and present a grander, more operatic version. ‘Once more, with feeling,’ as the saying goes. Fire and Ash is the first ‘Part 3’ he’s ever done, so I wasn’t sure how it’d shake out. Does it get louder? Does it rhyme? Does it do something completely different?” —Max Scoville, IGN

“Not only does the third installment of the ‘Avatar’ saga lack the unprecedented spectacle of its predecessors (the second of which was somehow even more jaw-dropping than the first), it also lacks the relative newness of their storytelling. Whereas the first movie effectively camouflaged its cliches amid the uncharted planet of Pandora, and the second extrapolated the franchise’s settler-adoption space fantasy into a hyper-emotive aquatic fable about the destructive nature of humanity’s survival instinct, ‘Fire and Ash’ largely devotes itself to sifting through the ruins of a world that Cameron seems half-ready to leave behind and sitting with the fallout of the series’ previous battles. That wouldn’t be a weakness in and of itself, but his archetypical characters weren’t built to carry a ‘Lawrence of Arabia’-sized epic that hinges on the nuances of their love, grief, and neuroses. Spider doesn’t even have a shirt, let alone the layers required for us to care about his daddy issues.” —David Ehrlich, IndieWire

“It feels as if we’re a zillion light years from the excitement of the first film. The idea of that one was that the human race had made such a mess of the planet Earth that they decided to exploit the mineral resources of an Edenic, unspoilt moon named Pandora. This plan wasn’t popular with Pandora’s blue-skinned humanoid inhabitants, the Na’vi, but a human Marine, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) had his mind zapped into the body of a Na’vi-human hybrid, so that he could cosy up to the locals. He then fell in love with a Na’vi princess, Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), and fought alongside her tribespeople against the invaders from Earth. In short, Avatar was Pocahontas meets the Smurfs in space – a scenario ripe with conflicts and environmental issues.” —Nicholas Barber, BBC

“Still, this is about the most spectacular spectacle you could ever ask for — utterly transportive, technically masterful. It’s near-unfathomable that barely anything on screen actually exists; so photo-real, you never even think about it. And it’s all in service to mythmaking at the highest level, Cameron and crew weaving entire new tapestries with unparalleled imagination. Who else out there is giving us space-whale politics, mystical mycelial networks, and children questing to witness the face of God? Flaws and all, it’s a privilege to witness. Bring on Avatar 4 and 5, as Cameron’s overall sequel plan enters part two. He’s pretty good at those.” —Ben Travis, Empire

“In the first two films, the sincerity, respect and sheer wonderment with which Cameron captured the Avatar world — and the faith that Indigenous traditions and the purity, spirituality and balance of nature could prevail over rampaging human destruction and military technology — was transporting enough to overcome the dumb dialogue. Here, it all starts to sound like empty bluster, retreading the same ground with just one new face that makes an impression. There’s certainly nothing in the story to justify the bloated run time.” —David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter