For the first time in over thirty years, the release of a new James Cameron film has been met with a decidedly mixed reception. While his three prior films—1997’s Titanic, 2009’s Avatar, and 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water—each experienced their own respective backlashes and pushback in the years that followed, they were all greeted with overwhelmingly positive reviews upon release and were each nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. In stark contrast, Cameron’s new film, Avatar: Fire and Ash, has been met with far less praise, with many prognosticators even predicting it will be Cameron’s first film since True Lies in 1994 to not receive a Best Picture nomination.

I tried to ignore all of this ahead of my screening last week, but it proved nearly impossible and raised a fascinating question in my mind: had I ever even considered the possibility that Avatar: Fire and Ash might be a disappointment before this moment? The answer was a definitive no. As someone who saw Avatar in a preview screening back in 2009 and genuinely enjoyed it, then flat-out loved The Way of Water in 2022, the idea that this third installment could be a letdown felt unfathomable. And yet, as I walked into the IMAX 3D theater the other night, it was a thought I couldn’t completely shake.

To my absurd delight, all of that concern turned out to be for nothing. It is genuinely beyond my comprehension what the mixed early reception was about, because Avatar: Fire and Ash is not only my favorite Avatar film to date, but also one of the most distinct, idiosyncratic, and absolutely batshit gonzo blockbusters of the past decade.

TOP 5 THINGS ABOUT “AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH”

5. Training Wheels Off

One of the biggest hurdles any new high-concept original film faces is getting audiences fully onboard with its story, world, and characters. That hurdle was especially daunting for the first Avatar, which had the unenviable task of convincing audiences whose last experience with James Cameron was Titanic to show up and care about giant blue, cat-eared aliens known as the Na’vi. Cameron handled this challenge with remarkable grace, grounding viewers through a surrogate protagonist in Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington) and allowing audiences to experience this bold new world alongside him for the very first time.

For the second film, arriving more than a decade later, Cameron and company made the smart decision to take their time reintroducing viewers to Pandora. The Way of Water eases audiences back in, patiently rebuilding familiarity with the world and characters before fully ramping things up again.

With Avatar: Fire and Ash, however, Cameron rips the training wheels clean off the metaphorical bike, throwing audiences directly into the thick of the action from the opening moments. This third installment is, by far, the most inside-baseball the franchise has ever been, but crucially, it’s all in service of the story. The first film established the world, the second deepened the characters—Jake, Neytiri (played by Zoe Saldaña), and the entire Sully family—and Fire and Ash uses that foundation as a launching pad. The result is a film that confidently builds on what came before and rises to remarkable new heights.

4. The Existential Themes

For many filmmakers, aging brings with it a shift toward more reflective themes, with existentialism often moving to the center of their work. You can see clear modern examples of this in filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Ridley Scott, all of whom have delivered phenomenal late-career films that foreground ideas of time, humanity, and the finite nature of both. Interestingly, though, James Cameron had never truly seemed to engage with these ideas in his work. For so long, he was singularly focused on getting the Avatar saga off the ground, relentlessly pushing forward, that it felt as though there was little room for introspection or reflection.

Amazingly and unexpectedly, Avatar: Fire and Ash completely upends that assumption. Cameron essentially delivers a Disney-produced, multi-billion-dollar blockbuster centered on a family grappling with faith, loss, and the question of God in the aftermath of tragedy. Narratively, one of the film’s driving questions is whether Eywa still exists and, if so, why she allows terrible things to happen.

On a metatextual level, Cameron pushes this even further, using the sheer scale of the film to wrestle with enormous philosophical and thematic questions. Despite years of criticism aimed at the franchise’s sometimes on-the-nose messaging around conservation, Fire and Ash reframes those ideas into something far more nuanced. The result is a beautiful, poignant meditation on faith, humanity, and responsibility that feels remarkably prescient in today’s world.

3. Obscenely Human Performances

Inevitably, when people talk about the Avatar films, the conversation turns to visual effects. Cameron and his collaborators have spent literal decades reinventing the wheel in this area, resulting in gobsmackingly tactile digital creations and groundbreaking performance-capture techniques. But what risks getting lost in that discussion, despite Cameron’s best efforts to prevent it, is the genuine humanity at the core of the franchise. The performances in Avatar: Fire and Ash are nothing short of spectacular, with each of the series’ mainstays rising to new heights and delivering their best work to date.

Stephen Lang has never been better as the conflicted antagonist Quaritch, while newcomer Oona Chaplin’s manic charisma practically leaps off the screen as Varang. Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldaña, meanwhile, somehow continue to refine and deepen the volatile, palpable passion that defines the Sully family dynamic. Their chemistry feels more lived-in and emotionally charged than ever.

Throughout the film, there are numerous tightly focused, interpersonal scenes where the actors are given room to engage with genuinely meaty material, and they seize the opportunity every time. One standout moment centers on Jake and Neytiri feeling cornered and forced to make an excruciating decision involving a member of their extended family. The authenticity and emotional weight they bring to the scene cuts straight through the layers of technology, transforming it into something purely human and eliciting a deeply human response in return.

2. Jaw-Dropping Spectacle

James Cameron is a legend of action cinema. This is the filmmaker behind Aliens, Terminator 2, True Lies, and so much more; he understands action set pieces on a level few can match. One of the great pleasures of the Avatar films thus far has been watching Cameron operate within such a vast creative sandbox, where cutting-edge technology allows him to bring virtually anything he can imagine to life. That freedom has already produced several standout sequences across the first two films, but Avatar: Fire and Ash finds Cameron pushing himself even further, delivering some of the most astounding, gripping, and white-knuckle action of his entire career.

These sequences are so imaginative, multi-layered, and meticulously constructed that entire masterclasses could be built around them individually. The film is packed with moments like this, each one executed with remarkable clarity and precision. Cameron structures the action so it remains endlessly legible and fluid, while still hitting with overwhelming visceral impact.

Watching Fire and Ash feels like seeing a filmmaker repeatedly go all in, bet everything on black, win, and then immediately double down again. He sustains this audacious momentum across the film’s three-hour-plus runtime, creating a delirious, adrenaline-fueled high that’s genuinely staggering to experience in real time.

1. James Cameron’s Insane Vision

There are a million other things to say about this film, but I’ll leave you with this: for decades, James Cameron has been rightfully celebrated as the architect behind some of the greatest sequels in blockbuster history. With Aliens, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and Avatar: The Way of Water, he proved himself remarkably adept at expanding the scope of a story while simultaneously digging deeper into the emotional and psychological roots of its characters. Think of Ellen Ripley in Aliens, Sarah Connor in Terminator 2, or the Sully family in The Way of Water. Each of these films challenges its characters in unprecedented ways and, in doing so, uncovers greater truths about who they are.

Avatar: Fire and Ash sees Cameron and his collaborators taking this philosophy and pushing it even further, to almost staggering effect. This third installment is monumental by every metric: a larger ensemble, more locations, a denser narrative, and more ambitious large-scale action sequences than ever before.

And yet, despite all of that scale, the film is also the most intimately and emotionally grounded entry in the franchise. It is deeply rooted in the interpersonal lives, struggles, and inner conflicts of its characters. The relatively simple archetypes of the first film have given way to richly nuanced, complex, and fully realized individuals. What’s truly astonishing is how organic Cameron makes that evolution feel, as if this depth was always embedded in the story, simply waiting to be unlocked.

RGM GRADE

(A)

I suppose I can understand why some critics and audiences aren’t embracing Avatar: Fire and Ash as readily as its predecessors. It’s a stranger, funnier, bigger, more emotional, hornier, and altogether more bombastic film. If you’re not on board for the full spectrum of eccentricities and idiosyncrasies that come with that, Fire and Ash simply might not be for you.

But for the freaks like me who’ve spent 2025 celebrating the wins of big, ambitious, auteur-driven cinematic swings—films like Sinners, 28 Years Later, or One Battle After Another—Avatar: Fire and Ash feels like the ultimate victory in a year full of them. It’s the batshit-insane, deeply personal, and unmistakably singular vision of James Cameron unleashed in the most glorious and uninhibited way possible.

New Avatar is the best Avatar.