In Avatar: Fire and Ash, Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) mourn the death of their son, while coming up against the violent Mangkwan Na’vi clan and the continued aggression of the human colonists. When the Mangkwan leader Varang (Oona Chaplin) teams up with Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), it brings the Na’vi struggle to a head and forces Jake to unite the other clans against them. Again.

How many times must I write the same Avatar review? I suppose it is ultimately down to how many times James Cameron is allowed to go back to his dizzying CGI world of Pandora, and how many times audiences choose to follow him there. Until either he or they tire of it, I suppose we are trapped here.

It is clear, in this third instalment Fire and Ash, that there is a vanishingly small chance of anything particularly interesting or innovative happening. What I thought of 2022’s second film The Way of Water is pretty much what I think of the third. It is very prettily assembled, with gold-standard computer graphics and motion capture creating an array of lush alien landscapes, odd flora and fauna, and valiant blue-skinned indigenes fighting an ongoing human colonisation of their world.

It still upholds a rather reductive and silly approach to its central characters, and its heavily painted-on environmental themes come across as dreadfully trite. The dialogue is mostly both corny and humourless. The pace is staggeringly slow, and at constant risk of collapsing under the weight of its own portent. One miserable realisation is that these films are progressively growing longer: Fire and Ash is even longer than Cameron’s seemingly endless 1997 epic Titanic.

It is difficult to escape the thought that a little too much of Fire and Ash plays out like a photocopy of The Way of Water. I did prefer that second film to the first, mainly because it moved on from a lot of the stereotypical elements and poor disability representation that plagued the original. Fire and Ash fails to add anything new to the equation, however, and its extended climax in particular feels like a 45-minute case of deja-vu. There is no particular structure to the narrative, simply a sense of ‘the same, but more’ for another 197 minutes. James Cameron is clearly heavily invested in the affairs of the planet Pandora; I honestly wish I was even a tenth as committed.

It is very pretty. Cameron still has a masterful handle on how to plot, edit, and pace an action scene. Any viewer who particularly loved the earlier films should find more to enjoy here. Any viewer less committed to the enterprise is going to struggle. Any viewer with a very specific alien sex fiend kink is probably going to get very excited. I deliberately avoided this film in cinemas, preferring to wait seven months and see it in the comfort of my living room with handy access to a pause button. I am extremely glad I made the choice. This film is a chore, and then some. Unless Avatar 4 can bring some major creative uplift or new ideas, I desperately hope Fire and Ash is the end of it. I’m tired.

Avatar: Fire and Ash is now streaming worldwide on Disney+, and is likely available in other countries on DVD and bluray. I would not know, as I am based in Australia and Disney don’t like physical media here.