Avatar: Fire and Ash review – A deeply political epic for the present moment

Since the film series began in 2009 – and indeed since the idea was first conceived in 1995 – Avatar has always been the moral project of James Cameron’s life.

It is not usually positioned that way. More often, Avatar is discussed in terms of scale and spectacle – the extraordinary technical wizardry, the billions spent developing new tools to tell a story no one else could attempt. These are films engineered for the biggest screens possible, designed for IMAX, 3D, Dolby and whatever other limits cinema can still be pushed towards.

But to understand Avatar as technology first and story second – as an excuse for the director of The Terminator and Titanic to play with new toys at his New Zealand sound stage – is to misunderstand what this ambition is in service of. What drives Cameron to innovate, to push filmmaking further than it has ever gone, is not novelty for its own sake, but a belief that cinema can still move audiences at scale – and, in doing so, nudge humanity towards a better path.

It sounds cheesy, I admit. But cheese resonates. While critics have often dismissed the Avatar franchise, it remains one of the few pieces of media this century to genuinely unite audiences across the world. The first film is still the highest-grossing of all time; the second, released in 2022, sits comfortably in third place. There is simply nothing else like it.

Zoe Saldana as Neytiri and Sam Worthington as Jake Sully. Photograph: 20th Century Studios

Popularity, though, does not preclude seriousness – nor does it require cynicism. At their heart, these are deeply sincere films that grapple head-on with humanity’s continuing history of genocidal and ecological atrocities driven by colonialism and capitalism. The Na’vi, the Indigenous people of Pandora, represent an idealised vision of what humanity might become were it to embrace values of community, sustainability and collective responsibility.

The criticisms that have followed Avatar for years – that it is a "white saviour" narrative, for instance – have always missed the point. What distinguishes Jake Sully as a hero in the first film is not that he outperforms the Na’vi, but that he rejects the world that has already failed him. His arc is defined by renunciation rather than triumph – a turning away from the identity, loyalties and systems that shaped him, and towards genuine alliance.

For all its accessibility, Avatar advances a surprisingly radical idea: that meaningful change requires the rejection of evils we have learnt to live with. Cameron’s film is not interested in soothing its audience so much as challenging it, arguing that progress begins only when compromise is no longer an option.

Avatar: The Way of Water is best understood as the first half of a larger whole, completed by Avatar: Fire and Ash, releasing in cinemas across the Middle East this week. Originally conceived as a single film, the story grew beyond what one instalment could contain – not unlike Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – in which resolution is deliberately withheld until the second chapter.

Set around 15 years after the original, The Way of Water introduces new narrative threads.