FILM OF THE WEEK: Avatar: Fire and Ash

James Cameron’s reputation rests not only on his command of spectacle, but on his rare instinct for when a sequel earns its place. Aliens, his continuation of Ridley Scott's classic, didn’t simply escalate Alien but reconfigured its terror into something militarised and psychological. Terminator 2 expanded a stripped-back chase film into a bruising emotional epic about fate, violence and surrogate parenthood.

Even Cameron’s less universally loved follow-ups understood that continuation demands transformation. The third entry in a franchise, however, is a more treacherous undertaking: it is where expansion risks stagnation, where mythology ossifies into lore, and where ideas must finally add up to something cumulative rather than merely bigger.

How does Avatar: Fire and Ash fare?.

Set a short time after The Way of Water, this latest chapter finds the Sully family still living among the Metkayina, still grieving Neteyam, and still caught between the desire to protect what they love and the impulse to strike back. Jake (Sam Worthington) is harder now, angrier, flirting with a militarization that feels pointedly ironic given everything the Na’vi are meant to stand for.

Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) simmers with unprocessed rage that’s increasingly directed at Spider (Jack Champion), their adopted human son. Neteyam’s brother Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) opens the film in a register of grief and guilt that briefly suggests a quieter, more emotionally grounded chapter might be coming, but that promise proves fleeting.

Visually, the film is often extraordinary. Cameron remains unmatched when it comes to scale, clarity and physical coherence in action, whether he is staging aerial skirmishes among cloud-bound traders, plunging characters into volcanic wastelands, or orchestrating enormous battles that never lose a sense of where bodies are in space. Some of the set-pieces are genuinely remarkable, the kind that remind you why theatrical spectacle still matters, and why Cameron continues to operate in a league of his own as an image-maker.

The most arresting new element is Varang, leader of the Mangkwan, or Ash People, and the film’s great stroke of inspiration. The leader of a traumatised and displaced people now terrorizing other tribes, Oona Chaplin gives a fierce, committed performance that cuts through the digital artifice with something like genuine menace. Varang has embraced destruction, power and violence with a lusty ruthlessness.

Her power is embodied, defined by blood rituals, hallucinogenic ceremonies and a raw, almost feral anger rooted in ecological catastrophe and spiritual betrayal. She rejects Eywa and channels her grief into domination, and Chaplin brings genuine brilliance to her performance, with every micro expression giving Varang personality, her sensuous movements indicating a connection to her own darkness. In a series often accused of moral simplicity, she represents something thornier and more unsettling, a vision of what happens when environmental devastation curdles into nihilism rather than stewardship.

Which makes it all the more baffling that the film repeatedly sidelines her. Despite being the most vivid character introduced here, Varang is gradually reduced to an accessory within a larger, plot, orbiting Stephen Lang's Quaritch instead of driving the story herself. The film gestures toward her inner life and her warped belief system, then pulls away just as things get interesting. What could have been a galvanizing central conflict becomes a missed opportunity.

That sense of narrative diffusion is the film’s core problem. There are simply too many story threads competing for attention, and few of them are strong enough to sustain the running time. The script, credited to Cameron, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, struggles mightily with dialogue and characterization. Characters are defined by single traits rather than full personalities, and emotional arcs are sketched rather than drawn. Even moments of grief and familial tension feel underwritten.

The film’s themes are grand and earnest: colonial violence, environmental responsibility, spiritual division, the corrosive effects of revenge. Yet for a production this large, this expensive, and this thematically ambitious, it is striking how little emotional impact the story ultimately has. Scenes arrive freighted with significance, then pass without leaving much behind. The ideas are there, but rarely developed with the depth needed to make them resonate.

It would be unfair to dismiss the film outright. When it works, it really works. Ballyfermot native and visual effects supervisor Richard Baneham’s work is truly remarkable, earning him an executive producer credit and likely another Oscar nomination. Certain sequences achieve a kind of operatic grandeur that few filmmakers can touch, and Chaplin’s Varang lingers in the imagination long after the credits roll, precisely because she hints at a darker, stranger version of this saga that never fully materializes. With sharper writing, clearer priorities, and the courage to let its most compelling character take centre stage, this could have been something genuinely magical.

As it stands, the film is an impressive technical achievement, beautiful to look at, but curiously hollow. Cameron still knows how to build worlds and stage spectacle, but this chapter suggests that Pandora, for all its visual splendour, is in desperate need of better stories to tell.

Directed by James Cameron. Written by James Cameron, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver. Cinematography by Russell Carpenter. Edited by Stephen E. Rivkin, David Brenner, Nicolas de Toth, John Refoua, Jason Gaudio, James Cameron.

Starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Oona Chaplin, Cliff Curtis, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Edie Falco, David Thewlis, Jemaine Clement, Giovanni Ribisi. 195 mins. In cinemas December now.