There is not a single line of dialogue from the first couple Avatar flicks that has permeated the zeitgeist: no “with great power comes great responsibility,” no “I’m always angry,” no “You shall not pass.” Etching spoken word into memory isn’t the only way to ensure a cultural imprint, but director James Cameron’s intergalactic adventure saga doesn’t even have a particularly beloved character to hang its hat on, the name of each player disappearing from the viewer’s mind the moment the credits start rolling. What they have had, up until this point, is novelty, the filmic equivalent of a circus that only comes to town every so often, peddling previously unseen wonders and delights for the whole family to enjoy. That sense of newness is most easily assigned to the 2009 original, where the technological advancements that brought  the forest moon of Pandora and its blue, humanoid inhabitants to life felt like the charting of a new cinematic path, but its sequel was no slouch in the revelation department. Released a whopping 13 years after its predecessor, The Way of Water benefitted from its status as a much-delayed curio, as well as its innovations in the titular, elemental space, dropping its audience into an oceanic fantasia that greeted the eyes as a ravishing stranger. Not every franchise could withstand such a prolonged absence, but Avatar has always buttered its bread with revelation, which is a hard feeling to conjure with only three holiday seasons between entries. 

To Cameron’s ill-fated credit, Fire and Ash doesn’t even pretend that another breakthrough is on the horizon, practically opening media res after the events of the prior installment. Still mourning the death of their son in Water’s climactic melee, Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) are glowering through daily life with the aquatic Metkayina clan, steeling themselves for the inevitable return of Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) and his merciless band of army brats. The Colonel’s revenge tour has a more interpersonal bent this time around, seeking to extract his own progeny, Spider (Jack Champion), from the Sully family into which the teen has been willingly subsumed. His antagonism is matched by the Mangkwan, a collective of Na’vi outsiders whose frenzied bloodlust comes affixed with a shade of Pandoran nihilism. War is soon waged, stranding the aforementioned combatants, as well as oh-so-many more participants, across disparate territories and plot lines, ever in search of peaceful reunion. And there are space whales.

That’s quite the logline when you see it in writing, but Fire and Ash’s innumerable moving parts are just haphazard adornments, pasted onto a vanishingly thin narrative whose only apparent goal is endless regeneration. What, exactly, is at stake in this go-around is impossible to parse, each scene existing to prompt the next across an interminable 197 minute runtime. Ongoing tumult is Cameron’s north star here, and while there are worse aims than bombarding the paying customer with kinetic spectacle, it’s hard to engage with a story whose primary agenda is to just keep going. Its yarn-spinning is asexual in nature, endlessly reproducing itself without even gesturing toward resolution. Where most movies of epic intent would keep their far-flung casts isolated, emotionally super-charging their eventually regathering in the process, Ash keeps crossing their paths before again dashing them across the map, inciting one rescue mission after another until your eyes start to ache.

Those pesky 3D glasses aren’t doing your corneas any favors, and while diving headlong into the flora and fauna of this series is never dull, Ash is the first Avatar film to fall victim to diminishing optical returns. Despite its eponymous promise of flame and destruction, the third installment is once again infatuated with maritime exploration, marking it as the first offering to only repackage previous triumphs. Same goes for the facial recognition technology, which took an astonishing leap forward between 2009 and 2022; the actors are still remarkably tactile in their 2025 digital rendering, but being impressed isn’t the same as being surprised. Even the irritating motion smoothing remains entrenched, and for all the wow moments that occur when cinematographer Russell Carpenter trains his lens on something steady, the more fluid passages still feel like they’re taking place on the centerpiece television at your local Costco.

Only the Mangkwan strike the palette with a fresh flavor, largely due to some heavy lifting on the part of Oona Chaplin. She’s a revelation as tribe leader Varang, a vivacious and alluring warlord who doubles the movie’s heart rate every time she’s on screen. Her leering expressivity gives the tribe an enviable face, though straying from the crunchy Na’vi monolith would have worked even without such a charismatic figurehead. Our cerulean heroes are just too pious to be genuinely involving, and allowing some villainy to drift from the pink-skinned invaders over to the neighboring phylum is Ash’s most inspired choice. They’re true brutes, choosing carnage at every pass, but you’ll have to accept some horrendous caricature to revel in their dastardly ways.

Mistaking their customs as anything other than African cosplay is a non-starter, another affront in Cameron’s storied history of cultural appropriation. Giving into these films has always required left-leaning viewers to check their ethical depiction cards at the door, though the Spider character is here to test their empty-headed resolve. Any white actor sporting a crown of flowing dreadlocks is sure to throw liberal viewers into a tizzy, but Ash compounds the offense with its full-throated capitulation to every white savior narrative under the sun, each visited with inconceivably terrible dialogue. Rooting for characters who shout things like “take that, buttholes,” at their enemies is no easy task, but Cameron has found a way through empathy. When Spider’s implicit insurgency is finally laid to rest, draped in the acceptance of a social order to which he has nothing to add, you can feel the director licking his chops. He’d love nothing more than to shed his anglophile exterior, but the guns aren’t helping his case.

Discharging early and often, the firepower here all but drowns out the return-to-the-earth niceties that have always been Avatar’s ham-fisted calling card. Perhaps it’s good that Cameron is being honest about his political leanings for once, but doing away with the previously established ethos outs the whole apparatus as a house of cards. Just about every film comes prepared with some lessons to teach, and Ash’s is here to instruct us about the necessity of automatic weapons, a woman’s true place as her husband’s unquestioning support system, the uniquely caucasian ability to defy racial expectations, and the real world’s inferiority to its computerized doppelgänger. None of this is new, but that doesn’t stop Cameron and crew from cramming it down your gullet for three straight hours, nary a modification in sight. That’s just how we do things here on Pandora; take it or leave it, buttholes.