Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025)

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang

Have I Seen It Before: Brand new.

Although…

Did I Like It: There are few directors who’ve had the track record that Cameron has. On a recent episode of Beyond the Cabin in the Woods I made the proclamation that even his worst film* was a cut above most films produced by most people.

Fire and Ash might test that assertion, but I tend to believe that it still holds up. It’s nice to look at, but I’m getting too much of a sense of deja vu here. Aside from the occasionally intriguing performance by Oona Chaplin as Varang**, the leader of the Ash People, there is almost nothing in this film that wasn’t covered already in Avatar: The Way of Water (2022).

Is it possible that Cameron has spent too much time on Pandora, and unlike Jake Sully, gotten bored of the whole thing? The fact that I can’t honestly remember where that magnetic anomaly in the ocean comes from during the film’s climate is certainly a sign that he may have lost a step as a storyteller. The way he’s been talking on this press tour—semi-threatening us with a Schwarzenegger-less Terminator sequel—I do start to wonder. I’d like to see him create something new, if he has it within him. But as this film already drifts on momentum alone towards the 1 billion mark, I imagine I’m probably going to politely show up for Avatar 4 and 5***.

*I assumed everyone would be on board with his worst film being The Abyss (1989), but had to revise when I realized many people weren’t as eventually charmed by the original Avatar (2009) as I was.

**I will admit that I can drop the names Jake Sully (Worthington), Neytiri (Saldaña), and Pandora, but the rest of the Avatar mythology melts into a ball of blue-skinned noise for me. (I may not be as charmed by this series as I’ve been insisting up until this point in the review.)

***Are we taking bets yet on the titles? Avatar: Up In the Air? Avatar: More Water Because Uncle Jim Never Really Gotten Over Titanic (1997)? Avatar: You’ve Already Bought a Ticket For The 2:45 iMAX 3D Showing, So You might As Well Show Up?

Avatar (2009)

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez

Have I Seen it Before: I think if you were alive in 2009 you were required to see it. The box office numbers would certainly seem to back that up.

I first saw the film in IMAX 3D, which is probably the way to see it. I certainly enjoyed Avatar: The Way of the Water (2022) in that environment. What I wouldn’t recommend, however, is seeing the film in IMAX 3D… from the first row of the theater. I don’t like to include nausea in my filmgoing experience, unless Ari Aster is involved.

I feel obligated to say that this film is one of the few films my cat has ever taken an interest in**. It is entirely possible that I’ve only seen it the second time when I watched it with her, back when she was a tiny kitten.

Did I Like It: The film works better out of 3D in the long run. That’s a little bit because I don’t have to grumble about the rash of 3D conversions that riddled movie releases for the better part of a decade, but also a testament to Cameron’s fundamental skills behind the camera. He might have had ambitions to bring a new level of spectacle to the movie-going experience***, but he still understood that the movie would be playing on my crappy TV for the most of the rest of history.

I might complain—and was indeed, more than a little bit surprised—that the film leaned on VO narration so much, and the less said about “unobtanium,” the better, but when the shit really starts to hit the huge helicopter blades on Pandora, the film picks up with a pace that can’t be denied. If I’m more than content to judge the entirety of a film based on the strengths of its third act—and I am—it’s entirely possible that the film earned all of those eyes on it way back when.

*Even then…

**For obvious reasons.

***Essentially boiled down to “3D without people fling objects straight at the camera.”

The Abyss (1989)

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Michael Biehn, Leo Burmester

Have I Seen it Before: Huh. Weird question. Maybe? I can’t imagine I spent all of this time avoiding the film, but I really don’t have much memory for it.

Did I Like It: And why is that? Under one possibility, over thirty-plus years the film on spec never ensnared enough of my imagination to finally make a point to watch it*. Or did I see it, and it just didn’t make enough of an impact to get into any kind of regular re-watch cycle.

While Cameron’s skill with pacing is unassailable, I think there might be two things holding him back here.

First, while I enjoy an Alan Silvestri score just as much as the next guy, he seems to be doing merely perfunctory work here. Or, at the very least, Cameron is more naturally in sync with someone like Brad Fiedel, James Horner, or someone who has worked very hard to bring a James Horner quality to a James Horner-less world.

Finally, the special effects age not so well. The floating column of water now looks like not much more than cheap CGI, because it is. I’m tempted to eschew that criticism as unfair. Judging an entire movie by the aging of its special effects is a great way to stop enjoying a lot of films, but it feels like the entirety of the movie is incidental to proving the concept of the CGI creature. It didn’t work unassailably well ten years later for George Lucas and Star Wars — Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999).

*Although to be fair, Cameron is being unusually stingy with options to watch not only this, but most of his catalog. Whispers on the internet point to a 4K re-release being nigh, but there’s such a sellers market on physical media at the moment (derogatory), that I’ll believe it when I see it.

Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang

Have I Seen it Before: Never. I know, I’m running behind. It’s probably mostly a busy holiday season that kept me out of the theater all together, but it might just be a little bit that when I saw the original Avatar (2009), I made the boneheaded move to show up to the theater late. This was before theaters had assigned seating (kids, ask your parents). I then sat in a 3D IMAX screening for 3 hours in the front row. I spent the next few… uh, weeks, if memory serves, vomiting.

The movie was fine. I enjoy it now a lot more on Blu Ray and with no 3D

Did I Like It: So, anyway, yeah, I went to go see it in IMAX 3D again. I chose seating anywhere other than the front row, and am happy to report that I experienced not even the slightest bit of nausea this time. Put that on a newspaper ad*, Disney!

There’s been an obnoxious, bad-faith debate leading up to the release of this movie about whether or not the whole Avatar thing has any cultural relevance, especially with more than ten years between movies. Given that the sequel is making money hand over fist, that argument feels quaint already, but why did it come about in the first place?

Is it that gap? No, I think that’s too easy. Really, I think it was the first film’s success giving way to a new trend of 3D releases, many of them not needing them in the slightest. I’m looking in your direction, The Green Hornet (2011). I spent most of the 2010s patiently wearing two pairs of glasses in every movie, and you can’t help but feel a little resentment for the Na’vi each time it came up.

Which is unfair. The first was great (even with becoming quite ill), and now it is absolutely impossible to deny both the skills of James Cameron, and any film that goes north of 3 hours and doesn’t wear out its welcome. Sure, the man who built the Terminator may be returning to some wells here (is there a director who can better make a third act out of a sinking ship?), but the action is non-stop, it all serves character and story.

But do you want to know the movie’s best special effect? Sigourney Weaver. No, not the fact that Weta’s motion capture can make her character look like a 14 year old, but her performance in making me believe that she might actually be one.

That’s Cameron’s real strength. All the toys and tools are put to full effect, but in the end the writing and performances keep things aloft… until the third act, when they’re supposed to sink.

*Do newspapers even run a movie times section anymore?

True Lies (1994)

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Arnold, Eliza Dushku

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: It is a shame that James Cameron so rarely makes films now. Indeed, his only feature directorial effort in nearly twenty-five years* is Avatar (2009), and the only films he has on his schedule are sequels to that film. Had he kept his output at the pace it was in the 1990s, we’d have 5-10 new films from him to enjoy. 

And we might be less inclined to dwell on the ones that don’t work as well as the others. I remember enjoying this film a great deal in years past, but something about it doesn’t ring as sharply now.

The action is good, which isn’t surprising, as anything less from the team of Schwarzenegger and Cameron would have been a colossal blunder. Even then, it does feel like it is not all that surprising. The set pieces you see here would be stuff that had become old hat in the James Bond franchise by that time.

Maybe part of the problem is that Schwarzenegger isn’t quite the right casting for a suave mega-spy. He’s a better actor—or at least movie star—than most people give him credit for, and his roles after leaving the governor’s mansion have been by and large pretty good, but he is a howitzer, not a device for finesse.

I think the real problem, though is that the film is at its heart a romantic comedy, and Cameron excels at action and spectacle, and not so much the smaller human stories. He doesn’t fail at it, necessarily. He brought plenty of romance to Titanic (1997), obviously, but a light comedy may not be in his blood.

*His version of Spider-Man (2002) would have really been something, though. DiCaprio as the Wall-Crawler? Schwarzenegger as Doc Ock (had they ever gotten around to it)? But in that scenario, we all would have idly wondered what Sam Raimi’s version of the films would have been like.

Titanic (1997)

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Bill Paxton, Billy Zane

Have I Seen It Before?: I’m relatively sure I came to the film late. In December 1997, the stink of the massive delays with the movie led me—my analysis of the movie business as a thirteen-year-old were not to be dismissed—to insist that Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) would win the box office that particular opening weekend. I may still owe a school chum a couple of Star Wars CCG cards as recompense for my folly.

I did eventually see the film during its unparalleled run at the box office over the next few months. Everyone did. Girls wanted to see the movie. Now, of course, I ended up seeing the movie by myself, but one did want to be conversant in the vernacular of the age.

Not that I was talking with too terribly many girls either.

Ahem.

Did I like it?: There’s an interesting trend with the writer James Cameron. His tastes are pretty basic*. The Terminator (1984) is essentially just a slasher movie. Aliens (1986) is a war movie. True Lies (1994) is a Bond movie merges with what is essentially a family sitcom. Avatar (2009) is a pulp sci-fi novel. Even Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) is essentially Shane (1953) with robots. So, too, is this film a very basic romance story. In the hands of any other filmmaker, Cameron’s scripts could be a real drag.

Cameron the filmmaker is at or near the top of his field. I hesitate to think of a filmmaker who has been able to more successfully buck the studio system in favor of his gigantic budgets. Even Orson Welles was only able to pull of the trick once. Cameron does it time and time again. Even when he had to work with a shoestring, he knew better than most how to make each shot work in symbiosis with one another. His words may be pedestrian, but the way he speaks the language of cinema are second to none. The cast is fine, although I don’t think I’d be alone in thinking that DiCaprio’s best work still lay ahead of him, after he was sufficiently freed from the burden of being a teen heartthrob. Package that all together with one of James Horner’s finest scores, and you might not even notice that the film runs over three hours, entering that hallowed ground of movies that had to be split up into two VHS tapes (and even had to run on two discs in the here and now).

But let’s get serious. If Jack (DiCaprio) and Rose (Winslet) hadn’t been making out so close to the crow’s nest, then none of us would be still talking about the damned boat, I’d imagine.

*I know. Who am I to judge?

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Robert Patrick, Edward Furlong

Have I Seen it Before: It’d be weird if I hadn’t by now, right?

Did I Like It: It’d be weird if I didn’t right?

The big (and likely unfair) question one must confront when critiquing this movie is how it ranks against its predecessor, The Terminator (1984). Many say that this is the superior film, putting it in that rare pantheon of sequels that out-perform the original film, The Godfather, Part II (1974), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), and another entry in the Cameron pantheon, Aliens (1986).

I’m not sure this one qualifies.

Don’t get me wrong, the tools Cameron brings to bear here (now with a full budget) cements his status as one of the greatest technical filmmakers. The then-embryonic use of CGI is perfectly applied, used to bring the T-1000 character to life at a time when it really couldn’t do anything other than give us strange metallic polygons. But at the same time, the use of puppetry, miniatures, and even rear-screen projection is used with just the right amount of restraint that it makes it all the more irritating when other filmmakers over the last twenty-five years have decided that even lesser quality CGI is all they needed to sell the reality of their films. Honestly, no one uses rear-screen projection anymore, even Cameron. It’s a real shame.

And yet, the restrictions make for a more interesting film. The restraint that Cameron uses here is all the more present in the initial film. There a fewer moments in the original film where I am thinking about the technology at play. I am more thoroughly immersed in the story there. Maybe the romance between Sarah (Hamilton) and Kyle Reese in the original film is a stronger engine for a story than the Shane built out of chrome on display here. No wonder Cameron got out of the cyborg game after this one, and with each new entry in the series why we wonder why they keep going.

The Terminator (1984)

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, Linda Hamilton, Paul WInfield

Have I Seen it Before: I want to make some kind of joke about their being no fate but what we make

Did I Like It: Why don’t you make movies with real things and real people, James Cameron? Why?

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first. This film is perfectly cast. Before he became the most improbable quip-machine in history, Schwarzenegger brings all of his monosyllabic lethality to the role of a lifetime. Lance Henriksen wouldn’t have been the right choice—although he is good in the film, and does eventually reach his potential as a robot for James Cameron one day. OJ Simpson was in the running at one point, but everyone decided he wouldn’t be convincing as a killer. True story. Linda Hamilton plays the arc of the Final Girl’s transformation to Warrior Woman much more efficiently than her peers or successors. And then there’s Michael Biehn. Is there an American action star who is better to display constant patience with the events and people around him? That he hasn’t been a much bigger star over the years is completely beyond me.

But let’s really talk about how this film has no business working out at all.

This thing could have floated away in a river of nonsense exposition, in the middle of the second act. But Cameron is no idiot. When Kyle (Biehn) has to tell the whole story of the future, and John Conner, and the Terminators to Sarah (Hamilton), he does so in the middle of a car chase. And not just any old blah-blah middle-of-the-backlot run-of-the-mill car chase. This is a next level, look out French Connection (1971) car chase, and it’s one of three in the film. You could do a film like this much less artfully, but then it would be Highlander (1986).

Even the few elements fo special effects in this film that don’t age super well (spoiler: it’s those moments when there’s any kind of rear-screen projection, or when The Terminator (Schwarzenegger) is clearly a puppet) have their delightful charm. I can kind of see how a grade-a control freak like James Cameron now wants to exclusively make films using the motion capture technology he adopted in Avatar (2009). He is no longer at the mercy of the elements, time, or people. It sounds nice, but I’m starting to miss great movies made outside of a computer, especially when James Cameron is making them.

Aliens (1986)

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Lance Henriksen, Carrie Henn

Have I Seen it Before: It is one of the greats..

Did I Like It: It is one of the greats…

*I viewed the 1990 special edition, which is notedly preferred by director James Cameron.*

There can be a problem with director’s cuts, especially when the vast majority of additional footage is lumped into the first forty-five minutes of the movie. Hard to front load a story like that, but Cameron is right in his introduction. This movie has 40 miles of bad road before things go truly pear-shaped, but when it does, that first bunch of the film is necessary. Without them, the film would be less. It would be more like most of the bland movies that exist now. Most writing advice would have you start your story as close to the meat of the action is possible, and I’m glad that Cameron ignored—at least in one format—that advice.

This first sequel in the Alien series is a master class in floating opposites, and miraculously, it makes a strong argument for itself as the superior film. Where Alien (1979) is steeped in subtext within the relationships between the characters. 

The original film straddles between a space-based haunted house movie, demonic possession movie, slasher, and monster man-in-suit shocker, all while staying firmly weighted in Horror. This one embraces a full-throated action vein by becoming a Vietnam War picture in space, but still feels of a piece with the original film. It’s a tricky thing to do, as most movies in a series that try to jump genre usually have to jettison much of what made the earlier films work.

The people of the Nostromo in the original film don’t particularly care for each other or the work they do in the cosmos, but they’ve been on the job for so long that they would never dare speak about it. In this film, the marines have much more clearly defined relationships. The subtext is gone, but the motivations are far clearer, and richer for the specificity. In the original film, Ripley’s (Weaver) mission to recover the ships cat is a gaping flaw in the work, if for no other reason than not one character appears to have any particular attachment to the cat up until that point. Here, Ripley’s forming of a surrogate family makes her quest to recover Newt (Henn) makes perfect sense.

Is this sequel superior to its progenitor? I’m not sure there is an objective answer to that, as it will almost exclusively (as with a great many things) be a matter of taste. It’s certainly in the running, and it isn’t exactly like any other film in the series can compete in that fight.