'Avatar: Fire and Ash': Worth the Price of an IMAX Ticket?

Getting lost in James Cameron's dreams one last time (?)

Over 20 years. That’s how long director James Cameron has been dreaming on Pandora — the planet at the heart of his sweeping, now three-film saga, Avatar.

I’m not sure anyone could have anticipated that would be Cameron’s next move after Titanic changed everything in 1997. It certainly wasn’t my first thought — maybe not even my first choice. The man who changed movies again and again with Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, and the aforementioned Titanic, is going to spend the twilight years of his career doing giant 3D movies about…. blue people?

I was one of the many skeptics back in 2009 when Avatar first came out, willfully contributing to the backlash hitting the movie before it even started playing in theaters (nothing new for Cameron. Titanic went through the same backlash before it even came out). I entered the AMC IMAX at Potomac Mills making jokes about what we were about to see. “Who’s ready for Fern Gully in space, guys?” “Do you think the blue girl is going to let discount Matt Damon die at the end like Rose let Jack?”

I walked out of that same theater, three hours later, a believer. Long live Avatar.

(Side note: I didn’t always hold this opinion. It became culturally uncool to be an Avatar fan in the 2010s. It took me about a decade to realize that cultural idea was stupid.)

This is all, of course, throat-clearing to setup the review of Cameron’s latest (and possibly last) Avatar movie, Fire and Ash. Cameron is back, just three years after The Way of Water (listen, it took thirteen years to get the first sequel — three years feels like a treat in comparison), ready to save the 2025 box office and try and nab another 2-billion-dollar movie. Only one director in history can lay claim to having three of the five biggest films of all time at the box office — including the #1 — and its Cameron. Your thoughts on the Avatar films may vary (we’ll get to that in a minute) but to bet against him ever? Foolish.

So, how’s the latest installment? To put it succinctly: if you liked the first two movies, you’ll like this one as well. If you didn’t, nothing in the 3 hours and 17 minutes in this one is going to sway you otherwise. Cameron is making gigantic, pulpy, incredibly sincere movies about blue people, colonialism, environmentalism, and things that glow and go boom (a lot). Not everything has ever worked in the Avatar films. But you can’t deny that Cameron is going for it in a way that so few Hollywood blockbusters are nowadays.

When you’re sitting in the darkened theater, 3D glasses on, watching Cameron’s creation in real time, it’s almost impossible not to get swept up in the “how is this POSSIBLE?” of it all. The creative mastery on display in every frame, in all of the CGI artwork (and it truly is artwork in the case of these films), is breathtaking.

What’s the story about this time? The Sully family (played by Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana at the forefront) is, once again, trying to protect their home from the human invaders that have been the antagonists from the start of the franchise. Aiding humanity in their quest to mine Pandora for all its worth is Stephen Lang’s, now very tall and very blue, Colonel Miles Quaritch, who this time is partnering up with a clan of angry, fiery Na’vi, with Oona Chaplin’s Varang the biggest new standout. There’s a lot of focus on the Sully children again, especially adopted son Spider (who’s the actual son of Quaritch — it’s complicated), and, of course, the characters you care most about after Way of Water — the whales.

Yes. The whales. Long live Payakan.

These movies are weird. Cameron loves them that way. All you can do, as a viewer, is throw on your 3D glasses and buckle up.

If the story sounds familiar, it is. These movies have never been about treading new narrative ground. Plot beats from previous movies come up again in this one. History repeats itself. Cameron gets a lot of forgiveness for these narrative decisions because, the moment something seems too familiar, he conjures up one of the most incredible things you’ve ever seen in a movie and throws it up on the screen. That grace only goes so far, however, especially in the final ten minutes of this one. No spoilers, but if you’ve seen The Way of Water, things aren’t too different once you reach the home stretch of Fire and Ash.

Has anyone ever gone to an Avatar movie for the narrative, though? Don’t get me wrong, narrative is crucially important to the filmgoing experience. Nothing in Avatar is head-scratchingly bad narratively — this isn’t Captain America: Brave New World here (sorry, Cap fans). You’ve just seen it before. The comfort that can come from being in a familiar story, though, means you get to luxuriate in everything else Cameron is doing that remains so propulsive. His pacing, his sense of scale, his worldbuilding, his editing, his obsession with every little detail that is on display in his movies. These reasons, more than his writing (which, he self-admits, is not his best quality, much like his peer, George Lucas), are why Cameron is regarded as highly as he is.

His work with actors should be highlighted briefly as well. More often than not, performance capture performances are regarded as lesser in Hollywood. Incredible performances — like Andy Serkis in The Lord of the Rings and the Planet of the Apes movies — aren’t taken seriously because of the CGI mask that covers them. Cameron has been making the rounds in the weeks leading up the release of Fire and Ash making the case, and rightfully so, that performance capture acting is just as legitimate as any other form of acting— in some cases, perhaps even more so. He gets the best out of his main trio of actors this go-around, with Worthington, Saldana, and Lang giving nuanced, complicated, and fully engaged performances that, more often than not, make you forget that you’re not looking at real people the entire time.

Cameron has been saying he has “other stories to tell” as Fire and Ash finally makes its way into theaters. If this is the end of his sci-fi saga, Cameron is leaving behind one of the definitive theatrical experiences of the 21^st century — if not ever. Very few moviegoing experiences can match the magic of putting on 3D glasses and seeing the first few frames of an Avatar movie.

You want to quibble about the narrative? Fine, I won’t stop you. But if you’ve never seen an Avatar in glorious IMAX 3D before, I can’t recommend the theme park ride-like experience enough. There are far worse things you could do this holiday season than spending a few hours getting lost in Cameron’s dreams.