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.”

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?

Conan the Barbarian (2011)

Director: Marcus Nispel

Cast: Jason Momoa, Rachel Nichols, Stephen Lang, Rose McGowan

Have I Seen It Before?: There is literally nothing in this film that has not been seen before.

Did I like it?: It’s probably unfair to expect a good Conan movie, but Milius ruined that for everyone who followed. Even a hypothetical late-stage Arnold King Conan would probably be something of a letdown, after one was subjected to Conan the Destroyer (1984). I’ve been intermittently reading the Robert E. Howard canon of stories since recently re-watching Conan the Barbarian (1982) and from a laundry list of muddled, droning sword and sorcery tales, films like this one are what Conan adaptations probably ought to be. At least this film sports a solid R rating, and doesn’t continue the trend of making the stories suitable for children, starting with Destroyer. Movie series like Robocop can’t seem to shake of the need to smooth rough edges to a dull, PG-13 shine.

That preceding paragraph may sound like some sort of absolution for the film, but it isn’t. This film tries for nothing, nearly to the point where I began to wonder if the production was an ashcan attempt by some half-baked production company to keep the rights to the character. Momoa has proven himself since to be a charismatic movie star, and he is probably closer casting to the original character than even Schwarzenegger was, but he barely appears in half the movie here—the first third of the movie consumed by a needless prologue that the original Milius film dispensed with in a few minutes. Where the formation of Conan’s sword makes a visceral experience out of the opening titles in the original, here it is barely-rendered and boring CGI, tossed off because it is a list of things a producer wanted included in the movie, not something that serves the story.

Scenes that hardly needed to be shot in front of a green screen are, giving the film an antiseptic feeling, where a Conan film should be anything but antiseptic. It should be positively septic, bordering on gangrenous. Oh, and it was converted to 3D at the last minute, which was probably useless beyond the tanked opening weekend, and makes it pretty much in line with every film released during the era*.

Eventually, I was consumed by noticing things that couldn’t possibly work, even in the context of the film. The battlefield c-section that brought Conan into the world? Dubious. Conan freeing a village of slaves, and then carrying off one of their women? Counterintuitive. The henchman who had his nose cut off by Conan, and the rails about the injury while sounding like nothing might be altering his speech? Likely the only thing I will remember about the film.

*The new trend in film releasing in the 2020s? Skipping the theater altogether.