Pandora—the stunningly imagined planet of James Cameron’s Avatar enterprise—has been populated by something unexpected and extraordinary: compelling characters.
Even as a defender of the series, I wouldn’t have predicted this from Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third installment. Up to this point, neither character nor narrative have been strengths of the franchise. Avatar, released in 2009, succeeded on its visual artistry alone; 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water doubled down on that with its aquatic setting, while also establishing the series as an example of blockbuster auteurism (where massive resources are devoted to a personal vision that is both enormously popular and bizarrely idiosyncratic). Whatever else can be said about the series, it remains closer to something like George Lucas’ Star Wars prequels (which I mean as a compliment) than latter-stage Marvel Cinematic Universe.
With Fire and Ash, Cameron commits to further idiosyncrasies (prepare yourself for Na’Vi sex). This time, however, he and co-screenwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver also make space for subplots that deepen our understanding of characters new and old. This Avatar is less about the wide-scale conflict between invading humans and indigenous Na’Vi—which is still unfolding after the film’s three-hour-and-17-minute runtime has come and gone—and more about what that conflict means for individual characters’ and their evolving understanding of themselves.
Notably, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington)—the Marine turned Na’Vi turned father who was the bland center of the first Avatar—falls to the wayside in favor of more interesting figures. Foremost among them is Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), Jake’s Na’Vi partner, who has come to regret her involvement with humans after their son’s death in The Way of Water. “I hate their pink little hands,” she hisses to Jake during a particularly prickly argument. “I hate the insanity in their minds.” Saldana brings a feral grief to the performance, one given a tactile verisimilitude by the animation artists who help bring Neytiri’s face to life. (If there is a technical advancement in this Avatar, it’s in the realism of these alien faces.)
A certain kind of grief also drives the film’s most fascinating character: Varang (Oona Chaplin), who is new to the series. Part witch and part warrior, Varang leads a ferocious clan of pirates (their attack on a fleet of sky ships is one of the action highlights). Stalking the screen as if anything that moves could be prey, Varang comes with a theologically resonant origin story. When an erupting volcano threatened to wipe out her clan, Varang prayed to Eywa—Pandora’s goddess figure—to be saved, but there was no rescue. “Eywa didn’t come,” Varang says at one point, “so I went to the fire, and I learned its way.” Having experienced the power of death and destruction, Varang has embraced both—to the point of colluding with the human invaders in exchange for weapons that can emit more fire than she has ever dreamed of wielding.
Varang and her gang may bring new blood to Fire and Ash, but they’re also a flash point for one of the series’ continual complications: the Na’Vi as stand-ins for indigenous people here on Earth. With his Avatar films, is Cameron a villainous cultural appropriator? Or is he a benevolent creative appreciator? Fire and Ash strikes me as something in between, with both good intentions and obvious missteps (having Varang’s warriors hoot and holler like “savages” from a mid-century Western, for instance). As always, I’ll concede the point to anyone who has a personal, cultural stake in the issue. But at the least—and more so than in the previous Avatar films—characters like Varang and Neytiri register as fully realized individuals with varied ways of living and being within this imagined world. As a whole, Avatar is richer for it.
(1/3/2026)
