Living amongst the coastal Metkayina clan, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his wife, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), are still struggling to fit into their new environment as well as their new family dynamic after the passing of their son, Neteyam (Jamie Flatters). The boy also left behind his brother, Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), sister Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), and adopted human brother, Spider (Jack Champion). Jake, knowing that Quaritch (Stephen Lang), Spider’s biological father and a former squadmate of Jake’s, will stop at nothing to get him back, sends Spider away with a fleet of traveling merchants. Sure enough, Quaritch is not far behind, but an even more immediate threat than the growing threat of human influence over Pandora is Varang (Oona Chaplin), the fire-wielding leader of the ferocious, pirating Mangkwan clan.

Waiting only three years to return to Pandora, James Cameron directs Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third installment of a nebulously-promised saga. Cameron also welcomes back screenwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver to help him shape this 197-minute space adventure, though with these films conceived of and shot back-to-back, it is more just a continuation of their effort from Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), though some time has elapsed narratively between the two titles. Ever the technophile, Fire and Ash boasts the same improved performance capture that was unveiled in Avatar (2009) and was released wide on a litany of premium formats to also show off the action scenes shot with a high frame rate.

Part of the enduring allure of the Avatar franchise is that it promised to show audiences something they have never seen before. While the narratives were often thin as a tradeoff to the visuals, Cameron must be commended for his shepherding of performance capture technology, and while other studios and directors have not widely adopted this approach to filmmaking, it works in favor of Avatar as there is still nothing that looks quite like it. With The Way of Water, Cameron again treated audiences to sights as of then unseen as we explored the coastal region of Eastern Pandora along with Jake and his family, and we sat in awe at Cameron’s artificial water that was as crystal clear and refreshing as the water seen in any Caribbean resort ad. It would then stand to reason that with Fire and Ash, we would explore the hard, mountainous regions of this fantastical planet; a land far away from the lush forests of Eywa and her crisp waters. Instead, we spend frightfully little time with Varang and her clan, and even less so in their region.

The film’s handling of Varang is one of the most frustrating things about it as her introduction truly does help to open up the world of Pandora in a very similar way to the introduction of the Metkayina in The Way of Water and it shows that Cameron wants to avoid a Skywalker problem in his space opera, yet he is too enamored with his initial creation to truly move them forward. Her tribe fell victim to a volcano, and seeing the destruction that Ewya can cause despite their faith and dedication to her, they turned their back on her. Chaplin allows Verang to move so differently than any of the Na’vi we have seen as of yet, always stalking, wary of everyone she encounters, her wide eyes studying their every move, determining if they are prey or predator despite being all children of The Great Mother. Outside of this one performance choice, everything else about the Mangkwan is delivered in the briefest of flashbacks – told instead of shown – and it sets up a great theological and ideological debate that Cameron is just not at all interested in meaningfully embroiling his characters in, further frustrating his audience that wants to see more than spectacle.

Instead, he falls back on the action filmmaking staples and allows Varang to be easily swayed by the allure of Quaritch’s machine gun. This choice eventually results in an Avatar that is incredibly violent, leaning more towards realistic violence than either of its predecessors, making it an uncomfortable watch and pushing the envelope of a PG-13 rating. In the grander scheme of things, Cameron – an avowed ecologist – has been using this series to promote good stewardship of the planet and inditing military backed corporations for having seriously scarred our own Earth. The threat of human invasion grows even larger in this third installment through the introduction of some narratively questionable rituals that can allow a human to breathe in the Pandorian air without the need for masks, or to be permanently changed into a Na’vi as Jake and Quarritch were. The results of this introduction are reserved for the eventual fourth film; one that – and we can hope our reasoning is once again wrong as it was with the promise of seeing fire and ash – centers heavily around Spider.

Unfortunately for audiences, Spider remains one of the weakest links among all of the characters, yet is undeniably important to the wider arc. This does not lie entirely on the shoulders of Champion, but rather Cameron and his writing team, who have saddled the young actor with some of the most atrocious dialogue of an already horrendous spoken script. All of the young characters are subject to rough exchanges, and there is something incredibly jarring about these six-foot-tall, lanky blue teenagers calling each other “bro” as they ride through the ocean on the backs of their aquatic companions. No matter how often Cameron inserts it into the script, it never feels at home in the world, and the line readings become more distracting than anything. Despite being the top-grossing director at the box office and welcoming Jaffa and Silver back into the writing room on these expansionist titles, Cameron’s writing style is still stuck in the blockbusters of the 1980’s. Maybe in 10 years, these rough one-liners will also prove to stand the test of time, polished into diamonds adorning our pop vernacular, but it is unlikely, as despite pulling in billions of dollars, the Avatar franchise has surprisingly little impact outside of the four walls of the cinemas. Disney tries to prop it up with Pandora World in their parks, but these films have become something of begrudgingly appointment viewing; like going to the dentist, it is something we must do, but few are really amped up and excited to do so. Simply put, the performance capture, while it can be stunning – the high framerate action scenes notwithstanding – leaves little for human audiences to connect to, and on rewatches at home, the weaknesses of the script falter against the looming list of housework that is always on mind.

Fire and Ash is at once the most interesting of the Avatar films to date, and also the most frustrating because its creator gets in his own way. Finally, Cameron seems to have a firm enough handle on these characters, setting them up with different personal goals and forging various alliances across the family units and the generations; alliances that are dangerously close to being crossed, which make for interesting, simmering exchanges between them. At times, it almost becomes something that could be considered character-driven instead of just spectacle, but while Cameron may be a pioneer in the field of performance capture technology, when it comes to storytelling, this old dog just will not learn a new trick. Beat for beat, set piece for set piece, the third act of Fire and Ash can practically be superimposed onto the third act of The Way of Water, and they are essentially interchangeable. It makes for a fine conclusion in vacuum, but as either the crowning narrative conclusion of a trilogy – or, the center point of a rumored (read: threatened) quintology – Cameron seems to have stalled out and if he ever gets his Skel Suit out of this rut, it seems he still will be hesitant to steer it into any truly new territory.