Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025) | REVIEW

Varang (played by Oona Chaplin), leader of the Mangkwan tribe, in 20th Century Studios’ AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH.

Directed by James Cameron — Screenplay by James Cameron, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver.

It’s time to return to Pandora. Avatar, James Cameron’s original otherworldly sci-fi epic franchise, is often criticized for lacking a significant cultural impact when compared to franchises like Star Wars, Marvel, DC, or The Lord of the Rings. And yet, here we are again, and audiences are already flocking to the theaters around the world to travel back to a world populated by tall blue-skinned aliens with braids that can connect with other life forms. One of the highest-grossing (and most expensive, notably) franchises remains a spectacular cinematic event with state-of-the-art visual effects and performance capture technology. The latest film in the franchise, Avatar: Fire and Ash, is equally breathtaking visually, but there are key narrative and dialogic issues, as well as a general sense of repetitiveness, that hold it back from matching the level of the previous films.

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Avatar (2009) is pretty great, even though its story feels very common | Retro Review

James Cameron’s late 2000s sci-fi epic is one of the biggest movies of all-time – Photo: 20th Century Fox.

Directed by James Cameron — Screenplay by James Cameron.

Whether it’s due to disbelief, overhype, or that product having been oversold, I think we’ve all been guilty of calling something widely praised or beloved ‘overrated.’ When Avatar first came out, people were perhaps slightly hyperbolic when it came to praising the somewhat allegorical James Cameron sci-fi epic. I was a teenager when it was released, and I remember once standing in line at a Blockbuster as people were over-the-moon excited to own the film on physical media. I hadn’t seen it in theaters and, after having seen it, I struggled to really be as thoroughly overwhelmed by it as other people seemed to have been. I really enjoyed the Leona Lewis song, and I thought it looked really good. I recognized that it was a solid picture, but, when I finally saw it, I do remember thinking something along the lines of “is that what all the fuss was about?” It wasn’t the best thing since sliced bread, which it certainly felt like it had been sold as.

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