Around this time of year, I always end up debating in my own mind the concepts of “favorite” versus “best” when it comes to ranking a year in movies. We’re obviously in the home stretch of that process, and so it’s fascinating that Avatar: Fire and Ash drops into the discussion at this time. I personally love the first two films in this franchise — perhaps not at the level that some do, but I highly appreciate the breakthroughs in visual effects they both represent. Fire and Ash obviously continues in that tradition, and if I was only grading it in terms of its spectacle and ambition, it would rank as my favorite of the franchise so far. However, it is decidedly not the best of the franchise, because its story as told is too messy in too many spots to ignore.
The issues with the storylines in the first two films really had nothing to do with messiness, but more so that they are boilerplate as all get out. We’ve all heard the jokes and the comparisons — it’s Dances With Wolves, it’s FernGully, it’s Pocahontas. I didn’t go into Fire and Ash expecting anything more than that from a plot perspective, aside from the phenomenal world-building director James Cameron has facilitated on the planet of Pandora. Here, as with the previous installments, I loved the introduction of new animal and plant species and how they fit into indigenous Na’vi culture, although I do think similar elements are handled even better in Predator: Badlands, one of my favorite films of the year and one which I would also defend as one of 2025’s best. Fire and Ash almost doesn’t have time for this kind of world-building, or at least it feels like it wouldn’t if it were a movie of average length.
Human turned Na’vi Jake Sully (motion-captured performance by Sam Worthington) and his Na’vi wife Neytiri (motion-captured performance by Zoe Saldaña) are still living with a water-based Na’vi tribe following the destruction of Neytiri’s forest home. In attempting to transport Miles, a.k.a. Spider (Jack Champion) — basically their adopted human son — to a more hospitable tribe to humans, they are beset by a nihilistic fire-based Na’vi tribe, led by the villainous Varang (motion-captured performance by Oona Chaplin). Varang eventually partners up with the big bad humans who want to exploit Pandora’s rich natural resources, and she does so in unforgettable style.
As enjoyable of a character as Varang is, it’s a problem for a movie of this scope and with a main cast this expansive that its villain is its most memorable character. Where Neytiri consistently stole the show in the first two films, Fire and Ash feels that it has to give some kind of plot thread to each of Jake and Neytiri’s four children (if you count Spider), even if they are fairly uninteresting (like Spider). This leads to the film ultimately feeling a bit sliced and diced; the wonder of new discovery in The Way of Water is replaced by many more obvious blockbuster beats which are only papered over by the raising of stakes right around the film’s midpoint. The film is less messy after its best scene, in which Varang and the Na’vi version of Colonel Miles Quaritch (motion-captured performance by Stephen Lang) first team up, but this is only because that scene gives the film more narrative momentum after a fairly wayward first half.
I hope I don’t sound like I didn’t enjoy the film overall, because I truly did. It’s just that I see its predecessors as such grand achievements in spectacle filmmaking that it is a slight disappointment that I can’t even consider calling Fire and Ash one of my favorite films of the year, and certainly not one of the year’s best. It’s been a delicious year at the movies, and it’s certainly nice to return to Pandora as a cherry on top of 2025, but oh, how I wish Cameron had given us another full sundae! | George Napper
