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.”

Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 (2023)

Director: James Gunn

Cast: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldaña, Dave Bautista, Karen Gillan

Have I Seen it Before: Nope.

Did I Like it: After somehow still missing Black Widow (2021), Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), and Eternals (2021), only to then sit through the middling experience that I wouldn’t have partaken in if I wasn’t trying to kill a few hours in the midst of an oil change that was Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantummania (2023), I could feel the urgency of the MCU beginning to melt away from me.

But I’m glad this one brought me back. Had it not come out on the weekend I wrapped up a semester, I might have chosen something else to try and relax after 16 weeks of endless discussion board posting, but that would have been a mistake.

I’m still ruminating on this one several days after taking it in, but it’s tempting to say this the best entry in the Guardians trilogy. That statement becomes only more amazing when I can also honestly say that the film is the least funny of the three. It is not a film at all interested in delivering laughs, though. It has far loftier ambitions to go straight for pathos and not let go. It also significantly helps matters that the movie is pointedly uninterested in being beholden to setting up future installments of the larger series. It has proven time and again to be a crucial flaw in some of the studio’s films, including Iron Man 2 (2010), Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), and yes, just as recently as Quantummania, and Gunn’s final Marvel film manages to not only duck that problem, but make a strong case for the fact that Gunn had been forging a mini-cinematic universe within the larger MCU. And now Gunn can move on to bigger—and one could dare hope better—things.

Somehow a Marvel movie has made me even more hopeful for the future of DC movies, which is not an arrangement of words that make any sense in that order, but when delivered in context is a delight.

Now just release Batgirl, and we’ll be more than fine.