Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025) – Film Review
Director: James Cameron
Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver
Certificate: 12A
By Roger Crow
Watching the comedy reboot of Anaconda straight after the new Avatar movie was an interesting experience. A 45-minute joke stretched to twice the length, much of it is set in the Brazilian jungle. But it’s a murky jungle, where the leaves are all a bit dull, the foliage washed out and there’s just no sense of vibrancy. And yet some of Anaconda’s is real, some set in a studio. Jungles, despite their glorious majesty, are just a bit boring on film when you’ve spent more than three hours on the CG world of Pandora.
Yes, James Cameron’s third fantasy adventure featuring giant blue, skinny aliens and the mostly evil ‘sky people’ (colonising Earth folks) feels like being on holiday. Every blade of grass just pops; the waters are lush, the perfect shade of blue to ease those winter blues. Cameron knows what the public want, visually and emotionally. If film one was ‘save the rainforest’, films two and three have been ‘save the whales’, even if they are alien whales with multiple eyes who communicate with humans – subtitles in Papyrus font – all the rage 30 years ago.
As ever with James Cameron movies, the action scenes are phenomenal. The guy has been pushing the cinematic adrenaline envelope for decades, and here all the stops are pulled out for Jake Sully (Sam Worthington). He was the marine who was in a wheelchair, then fully ‘downloaded’ into the giant blue body grown for him so he could infiltrate an alien race, and therefore make it easy to exploit the most precious commodity in the universe. No, not ‘spice’. Wrong franchise. But ‘Unobtanium’, which is a real term for a precious thing that was laughed at by many in 2009 when film one was released. That may be why there’s no mention of it here.
“Side quests”
Sully has an ever-expanding blended family, including adopted human son Spider. I’d love to think Cameron took inspiration from the namesake tree-hugging hippy character in Coronation Street, but who knows?
Mourning the loss of his other son, he and wife (Zoe Saldaña) are on the verge of splitting up because she’s turned a bit xenophobic, suggesting Spider should be cast out. Given the fact he uses a mask 24/7 to breathe on Pandora, his own battery problems force the issue. Luckily, a bunch of nice ‘sky people’ arrive, and the fact David Thewlis plays their leader filled me with joy. Sadly, no chance to launch into one of his epic speeches from Mike Leigh’s masterpiece Naked, which remains one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen in a cinema. But he is in there somewhere. I had a harder job recognising Kate Winslet from film two, who still gave a fabulous turn, and I won’t labour the point, but her pregnancy dominates part of the movie.
There are assorted side quests that pay off at the end, and a weird dynamic between Sigourney Weaver’s reborn young character and Spider, who develops an ability which attracts the attention of the evil colonising humans.
“To the limits”
Arguably the best of all is Oona Chaplin’s evil witch queen antagonist, who is won over by the Na’avi avatar of dead psycho Earth military bloke (Stephen Lang).
She drugs him with some sort of alien peyote, and naturally his impressive firepower catches her attention. So before you can say: “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?”, they are an item, and planning to wipe out the nice blue aliens. There’s so much going on in Fire and Ash, it feels like three or for films in one. And yes, there are too many characters, and yes, some of the moments, including the last five minutes, are cheesier than an overripe Camembert. But contrary to what some privileged critics will tell you, this is a terrific experience which pushes cinema to the limits of what movies can be.
It sweeps, it soars, it plunges to new depths, in a good way, and there’s even a good old prison breakout, and Weaver’s not-so-subtle homage to the most memorable line in Aliens.
Okay, I could have done without the alien whale subtitles, more humour, and less terrible dialogue, but blimey, what an experience.
“Big, beautiful”
Given the fact I was almost put off from seeing Avatar 3 on the big screen because of some sniffy critics, I’m glad I ignored them on a very cold December day.
Sorry Jack Black and Paul Rudd. As fun as your Anaconda movie was, it was a half-baked advert for Sony, and a franchise most people had forgotten, with just a really dull jungle.
At a time when cinema is in danger of becoming extinct, we need big, beautiful epics like Avatar: Fire and Ash to keep them alive. And as another couple of Avatar movies have been mooted, it looks like this isn’t the last trip we’ll have to Pandora.
As ever, see it on the big screen if you can before TV robs the film of 80 per cent of the dreamy effect.
Adopted Yorkshireman Roger Crow developed a passion for film and TV in the 1970s and 1980s. He has been a published film and TV reviewer since the 1990s; a world travel and restaurant critic since the noughties, and for the past decade has assessed the pros and cons of live gigs and theatre productions around the UK. His ideal day would involve reviewing a performance of Bat Out of Hell, followed by a Pad Thai while being serenaded by Texas on a cruise around Europe.
crowsfeat.com; nostalgiahhh film podcast
