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Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025)






You know when you can tell that you are gonna hate something and still go through with it out of some morbid curiosity. Well that happened to me when I sat down to watch the third Avatar film. The first was ok and the second one was quite the endurance challenge and there was nothing that made me think it was going to be a masterpiece and one of the big positives of the film is that I wasnt disappointed.

The film features Oona Chaplin and there were large chunks of the movie where I was thinking about Charlie and how her family has gone form him being the pioneer of silent cinema to this nonsense. There seemed to be something good about her character in terms of being a good villain but it gets bogged down but the ‘plot’. She does meet her demise so its clear that she will return. If the film had been about that then the film would have worked better but they decided to chuck in the thing about Spider being sent away because he is in danger to not being able to breathe the air but when he is able to they still want to send him away. There is a lot of family stuff which just isn’t very interesting and I could have done without. Oh and there is the conflicted father-son thing going on between Quaritch and Spider that I didn’t care about because it seemed to be there to…….. nope I got nothing there.

The main problem is that the more James Cameron loves this world then the more we have to put up with before the ‘plot’ kicks in. In the previous film it was about an hour before we started to get the plot, in this one its closer to 90 minutes. The only time that I ever care about what was going on was during the battle in the final 40-45 minutes. Like most people in the screening I was at, I had to go for a toilet break and when I got up a group of people were talking and when I came back about 4 minutes later they will still in the same conversation. Clearly nobody told Cameron about pacing because I am guessing that the conversation they were having could have been cut in half.

The obvious plus point is the look of the film. James Cameron has done a great job building this world and making it look spectacular which is which explains why these films are so long. The budget was a reported $400 million and it shows because nothing about this film seems cheap and the time and care has been put into making this film look spectacular.

I think if you ‘get it then the film will be a much more enjoyable experience but if like me you dont then it will be an endurance. I couldn’t honestly say that this is the worst film of the year or even in the bottom 10 but it is a slog of a film to sit through and Cameron seems to be threatening more so hopefully he will learn the lesson that longer running times do not equate to good quality. Sometimes shorter films are more enjoyable. The first one was 162 minutes, the second was 192 minutes and this was 198 minutes so that is just over 9 hours in total and if Cameron could get the next ones down to the run time of the first one then I would have a much better experience. Three films in and I am still not convinced that this franchise is any good.


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