Avatar: Fire and Ash review – A deeply political epic for the present moment

The series’ anti-colonialist argument sharpens, confronting violence and moral compromise amid war and occupation

Oona Chaplin as Varang. Photo: 20th Century Studios

Since the film series began in 2009 – and indeed since the idea was first conceived in 1995 – Avatar has always been the moral project of James Cameron’s life.

It is not usually positioned that way. More often, Avatar is discussed in terms of scale and spectacle – the extraordinary technical wizardry, the billions spent developing new tools to tell a story no one else could attempt. These are films engineered for the biggest screens possible, designed for IMAX, 3D, Dolby and whatever other limits cinema can still be pushed towards.

But to understand Avatar as technology first and story second – as an excuse for the director of The Terminator and Titanic to play with new toys at his New Zealand sound stage – is to misunderstand what this ambition is in service of. What drives Cameron to innovate, to push filmmaking further than it has ever gone, is not novelty for its own sake, but a belief that cinema can still move audiences at scale – and, in doing so, nudge humanity towards a better path.

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It sounds cheesy, I admit. But cheese resonates. While critics have often dismissed the Avatar franchise, it remains one of the few pieces of media this century to genuinely unite audiences across the world. The first film is still the highest-grossing of all time; the second, released in 2022, sits comfortably in third place. There is simply nothing else like it.

Zoe Saldana as Neytiri and Sam Worthington as Jake Sully. Photograph: 20th Century Studios

Popularity, though, does not preclude seriousness – nor does it require cynicism. At their heart, these are deeply sincere films that grapple head-on with humanity’s continuing history of genocidal and ecological atrocities driven by colonialism and capitalism. The Na’vi, the Indigenous people of Pandora, represent an idealised vision of what humanity might become were it to embrace values of community, sustainability and collective responsibility.

The criticisms that have followed Avatar for years – that it is a "white saviour" narrative, for instance – have always missed the point. What distinguishes Jake Sully as a hero in the first film is not that he outperforms the Na’vi, but that he rejects the world that has already failed him. His arc is defined by renunciation rather than triumph – a turning away from the identity, loyalties and systems that shaped him, and towards genuine alliance.

For all its accessibility, Avatar advances a surprisingly radical idea: that meaningful change requires the rejection of evils we have learnt to live with. Cameron’s film is not interested in soothing its audience so much as challenging it, arguing that progress begins only when compromise is no longer an option.

Avatar: The Way of Water is best understood as the first half of a larger whole, completed by Avatar: Fire and Ash, releasing in cinemas across the Middle East this week. Originally conceived as a single film, the story grew beyond what one instalment could contain – not unlike Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – in which resolution is deliberately withheld until the second chapter.

Set around 15 years after the original, The Way of Water introduces new narrative threads. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), now fully Na’vi, has three biological children with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), as well as two adopted ones, including Spider (Jack Champion) – the human son of Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the first film’s antagonist, whose memories have been implanted into a Na’vi body. Once again, Pandora faces invasion, though the possibility of redemption is now uneasily folded into the threat.

Sigourney Weaver as Kiri. Photograph: Disney

The film is laser-focused on ocean conservation – one of Cameron’s defining real-life causes – with Earth’s whaling crisis transposed onto Pandora through the hunting of the Tulkun, a super-intelligent, peaceful marine species slaughtered for a substance that allows the ultra-wealthy back on Earth to effectively live forever.

One of the film’s central threads follows Jake’s rebellious son Lo’ak, who befriends a Tulkun named Payakan, banished for believing that his kind should fight back against their oppressors. Much of The Way of Water is deliberately unhurried, with long, almost transcendent stretches allowing characters – and audiences – to experience the beauty of Pandora and the depth of its bonds. This is heaven, complete with a benevolent deity that connects all life, even in death – and it needs time to feel so.

That heaven is under threat in Fire and Ash, which escalates the conflict across a 200-minute runtime that rarely feels its length. The film introduces a new Na’vi tribe, the volcano-dwelling Mangkwan, led by Varang (Oona Chaplin). Unlike the clans we have met before, the Mangkwan are defined by their rage and disillusionment – they are a people who have lost faith in goodness itself.

How, Varang asks, can there be a benevolent deity in a world so defined by violence? The question has no easy answer. Fire and Ash grapples with profound existential and spiritual concerns throughout, expanding ideas first raised through the Tulkun in The Way of Water. When is violent resistance justified? When is war justified? Can reactive destruction ever produce good, or does it only replicate the evils it seeks to destroy?

These are not abstract questions. They echo through the real world daily, shaping conflicts defined by asymmetrical power and moral deadlock – from Gaza and the West Bank to Ukraine, and to Indigenous communities worldwide whose suffering often unfolds beyond the attention of those with the privilege to look away. It is difficult to watch Avatar: Fire and Ash without recognising those parallels.

Britain Dalton as Lo'ak and Bailey Bass as Tsireya. Photo: 20th Century Studios

To dismiss the film as frivolous entertainment, you would have to actively ignore the questions it foregrounds. Its spirit is not subtle – nor does it pretend to be. Avatar has always worn its convictions openly, insisting that the biggest problems facing humanity deserve to be confronted at the largest possible scale.

Its radicalism extends beyond theme into form. Western – and particularly American – storytelling has long elevated individualism as an unquestioned good, favouring lone heroes raging against corrupt collectives. In Fire and Ash, there is no single protagonist. Individual triumph is measured by service to the greater whole.

Transcendence lies not in dominance, but in connection – to family, to community, to society and to ecosystem. By its conclusion, the film has more in common with collectivist works such as I Am Cuba than with most contemporary Hollywood blockbusters.

That this vision is realised through such extraordinary craft only reinforces its sincerity. In an era increasingly shaped by generative AI and frictionless replication, Fire and Ash is the product of years of painstaking human labour – hundreds of artists building a world frame by frame, performances captured with an intimacy closer to theatre than animation. Every expression is felt, every movement intentional.

For all its technological ambition, Avatar: Fire and Ash ultimately argues for something disarmingly simple: that survival, meaning and progress are collective acts. Cameron is not offering escapism so much as a challenge – asking whether we are willing to imagine a future built not on domination or compromise, but on responsibility to one another, and to the world that sustains us.

Avatar: Fire and Ash is in cinemas on Thursday