Crucial tonal shifts mean the film asks harder questions than the series ever has before. Share your thoughts in the comments below
• This article contains spoilers for Avatar: Fire and Ash
For more than a decade now, James Cameron’s Avatar films have been built on the reassuring idea that the universe is alive, connected and spiritually pure. Part of the pleasure of making it to the end credits of one of them is the comforting feeling that we are nothing like all those evil humans who want to destroy Pandora’s gorgeous bioluminescent utopia of giant blue cat people and navel-gazing whale creatures. Cameron wants to remind us that if we only spent less time chasing profit and more listening to nature, everything would probably be fine.
Fire and Ash is where that reassurance starts to curdle. It is still recognisably an Avatar movie: the tech is absurd, the sincerity remains weaponised, and the creatures appear to have been designed by a benevolent god with a doctorate in marine biology. But something has shifted. Harmony is no longer guaranteed; nature does not reliably pick a side. What emerges is a threequel that feels oddly argumentative, sometimes with the audience, sometimes with itself. The saga that once promised balance now seems fascinated by fracture. Avatar has started asking much harder questions than it ever has before.
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