Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025)
With this third Avatar movie, Avatar: Fire and Ash, repetition is starting to set in. Like the first two movies, it all builds up to an epic, overlong battle between the good guys, the Na'vi of the planet Pandora, and the bad humans from Earth who want to pillage Pandora. At first, in all three movies, it seems the villains have the upper hand, but then the Na'vi get help from the planet's mystical creatures, but then the bad guys get the upper hand again, and then the good guys do, and then the bad guys again, and so on. The fact that the big finale in Fire and Ash just goes on and on can be said about any current action/science fiction/comic book movie, except most of these movies aren't directed by James Cameron.
Cameron created these performance capture Avatar movies, and he also made The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, and True Lies, so he knows how to choreograph and shoot dazzling action scenes. Yes, Fire and Ash is familiar stuff at this point, but it's still entertaining as hell.
Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), the human transformed into a Na'vi, and his Na'vi family are still grieving the loss of their son, Neteyam. Sully's mate, Neytiri (Zoë Saldaña), is taking it the hardest and wants revenge by killing any and all humans. Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), another human turned Na'vi, is still out to get Sully, whom he considers a traitor. Thrown into the mix is a hostile Na'vi tribe known as the Mangkwan, led by the savage Varang (Oona Chaplin, granddaughter of filmmaker and actor Charlie Chaplin and the great granddaughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill).
Varang is an exceptional villain as she is scary because of her own fearlessness. You never know what she is about to do. The film's other bad guy, Quaritch, has the best one-liners, and his character has some tough dilemmas to consider.
Cameron is planning at least two more movie
Avatar films, but we are already getting that feeling of too many trips to the
well. These probably should have been just a trilogy and that would have been
it. Still, you have to give it to Cameron and his cast. They are able to engage
us with the drama of these blue, silly looking digital aliens, even in this
third time around.
