Avatar: Fire and Ash Review: A Gorgeous Rerun Lands on Disney+

Avatar: Fire and Ash arrived on Disney+ on June 24, six months after it opened in theaters and finished its run at $1.49 billion worldwide. That makes it the third Avatar in a row to clear a billion dollars, and the lowest-grossing of the three. It is now a couch movie, which is a strange fate for a film James Cameron built to be seen on the biggest screen you can find, in 3D, at a frame rate most theaters could barely keep up with.

So here is the real question for anyone deciding whether to give it three hours and seventeen minutes on a weeknight. Does it hold up at home, and does it earn a third trip to Pandora?

Mostly yes on the first. Barely on the second.

The setup (no real spoilers)

The Sully family is still grieving the loss of their eldest son, and the war with the RDA never actually ended. The new piece is the Mangkwan, the clan the marketing calls the Ash People. They live in a scorched, volcanic stretch of Pandora, they fight with fire, and their leader Varang (Oona Chaplin) has decided that Eywa walked out on the Na'vi a long time ago. So she quit praying and started conquering.

That idea is the most alive thing in the movie. Every Avatar so far has run on the same engine: nature is sacred, the people who listen to it win, the people who exploit it lose. Varang breaks the engine. She is Na'vi, she knows the religion better than anyone, and she has looked at all that sacred balance and called it a lie that got her people killed. For about twenty minutes, Fire and Ash feels like it might actually interrogate the thing the whole franchise is built on.

What Cameron still does better than anyone

Then there are the visuals, and this is where the praise is earned. By the third film, "I have seen this before" should be the fatal problem, and somehow it isn't. The Ash People's home is the best new environment in the series since the floating mountains of the original: black rock, drifting embers, smoke catching in fur, firelight doing things to Na'vi skin that I have not seen a digital movie pull off this convincingly. Cameron shoots fire the way he once shot water. He finds the texture in it.

The action is clean and legible, which sounds like faint praise until you remember how many blockbusters this size turn into gray mush. You always know where you are, who is chasing whom, and what it will cost. Even shrunk down to a television, the craft reads. There are individual shots here that look better than anything else you can stream right now.

Where it sags

Here is what the critics flagged, and they were right. The story is a rerun. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus landed it at 66 percent, and the recurring note (it repeats the beats of its predecessors) is fair. The climax lines up almost exactly with The Way of Water, down to human poachers learning the hard way not to corner Pandora's wildlife. If you saw the last one, you have seen the shape of this one.

Worse, the movie keeps shoving its best character to the edge of the frame. Varang should be the spine of Fire and Ash. Instead, every time her storyline builds heat, the film cuts back to the RDA-versus-Sullys plumbing it has run twice already. Chaplin plays her with real menace and a wounded logic you can follow, and the script keeps forgetting she is in the room. That is the disappointment. The new idea is right there, and Cameron flinches.

And at 197 minutes, when the action stops, you feel it. The middle hour drags in a way the first two films, for all their length, mostly avoided. There is a leaner, stranger, braver movie buried in this one, and it is the Varang movie.

Does it survive the small screen?

Partly. Fire and Ash was engineered for theatrical scale, high frame rate, and 3D depth, and you lose all three at home. What survives is the composition and the detail, and that turns out to be most of what made it work. On a large TV with a real sound system, the spectacle still lands. On a laptop, do yourself a favor and wait for a big-screen re-release, because half of what you would be paying for is gone.

The verdict

It helps to separate two different complaints. "I wanted more from it" is not the same as "it is badly made," and this is not badly made. It is one of the best-looking films of the decade and a genuine technical high point for the people who built it. It is also the first Avatar that feels like Cameron working from memory instead of pushing into something new.

The Ash People deserved their own movie. What they got was a strong supporting role in someone else's. If you have a big screen at home and three hours to give it, you will not feel cheated on the spectacle. You may just wish the story behind it were as daring as the world around it.

BCN Score: 73/100. A spectacle worth your time, carrying a script that already knows how this ends.