Avatar: From Fire and Ashes, meet in a well-known land (review)

James Cameron takes us back to Pandora. A third journey which still splashes the eyes, but suffers from an air of déjà vu.

Sixteen years after the revelation of the first part and three years after the azure immersion of The Way of WaterJames Cameron reignites the embers of his pantheistic opera with Avatar 3: Of Fire and Ashesthird movement of a saga already toured, well marked and thought of as a disproportionate narrative arch. We therefore return to Pandora, no longer amazed but almost familiar, as we return to a place that we had left behind. This is the first evidence of this episode: this time, Pandora no longer discovers herself – she finds herself.

Because if Cameron continues to sculpt images with maniacal precision, if each rock seems to have been polished by hand, the technological “wow effect”, the one that we expected almost by reflex, is not there. No visual explosion comparable to the shock of 3D in 2009, nor any feat comparable to the aquatic filming of 2022; just the quiet demonstration of a filmmaker who now perfectly masters a technical language that he himself invented. He warned us, in the interview he gave us, that he had “no vocation to revolutionize the medium with each film“, as if we now had to look Avatar no longer as a series of technological exploits but as the logical continuity of a world that he refines with each opus.

The paradox is that this creative serenity highlights narrative flaws that are more visible than before. We could multiply the examples. Why does the Sully family embark with Spider on their journey when The Way of Water had made it a moral and strategic time bomb? Why does Quaritch seem to go back in search of the sea tribe when he had already set foot on its shore at the end of the previous film? These inconsistencies (and others) never ruin the experience, but they crack it, sometimes giving the impression that we are facing a story constrained by the soap opera mechanics of a franchise that has become heavier than its own breath.

The most persistent sensation, however, is that of repetition: Avatar 3 replays with almost academic fidelity the structure of the second film – escape, learning, intertribal tensions, human threat, final shock – as if Cameron were revisiting his own score without daring to modify its themes. The film, on several occasions, resembles a reflection, a variation without any real break. We recognize each movement, each emotional strategy, and we begin to anticipate previously unpredictable sequences.

But there remains in Cameron a storyteller’s instinct which saves the whole thing from pure mannerism. The trajectory of the Sully children, the growing fragility of Neytiri, the power of Varang (new antagonist with overwhelming beauty): all this gives the film an intimate vibration which goes far beyond its structural limits. Cameron continues to think of his blockbuster as a giant family melodrama, where each battle is only the extension of a transmission story. Certain scenes, notably around Kiri’s visions or the rituals of the Ash People, reach a mystical intensity, reminding us that Pandora remains a laboratory of emotions as much as a visual playground.

And even if the technological flesh is no longer surprising, the film aligns a series of scenes which testify to the intact power of its director: burnt landscapes eaten away by the wind, nocturnal ceremonies where nature seems to breathe like a single organism, confrontations of an almost choreographic fluidity. Cameron no longer invents the form; he perfects it.

SO, Avatar 3 is it a missed appointment? At times, yes – by its lack of risk-taking, by its repetitions or too visible narrative gaps. But it also remains the work of a filmmaker who refuses to surrender, who prefers to deepen his world rather than reinvent it with each chapter. Cameron no longer seeks to revolutionize Pandora: he wants to inhabit it. And despite the repetitions, despite the absence of technological shock, we are still surprised, when the last images disappear, to already be waiting for the sequel. As if, in the still hot embers of Of Fire and Ashesburned the lingering promise of a myth that has not yet said everything.

Oh yes, there is definitely a form of novelty that slips here and there into the film. Discreet and involuntary: the appearance, in places, of a certain boredom, this unexpected thrill which reminds us that a universe as perfect as it is can end up wearing out, and that it is now up to Cameron to restore to Pandora the fragile shine of the unknown.