We round up the reviews for the latest film in the Avatar series.
The Guardian: ** “As ever, the look of this film is impressive and yet strange. Billions upon billions of pixels have been crunched to create its huge, infinitesimally detailed digital world. Like Middle-earth, it is probably the key to the franchise’s great success but, presented as it is in motion-smoothed high-definition, it looks to me like a “making of” featurette projected on to the white cliffs of Dover. And when ordinary human faces appear, they seem bizarrely out of context, as if Photoshopped in, like seeing American movie stars’ faces on a poster advertising a panto.”
Empire: **** “Still, this is about the most spectacular spectacle you could ever ask for — utterly transportive, technically masterful. It’s near-unfathomable that barely anything on screen actually exists; so photo-real, you never even think about it.”
BBC.co.uk: * “Now it just seems outdated – an experiment whose time has passed. I’m not sure whether that’s because the effects are actually worse than they used to be, or because that film-making style has been done to death, but Avatar: Fire and Ash feels as unrealistic and un-immersive as an old arcade game. Everything in it appears so artificial that when a Na’vi is knocked off their dragon mid-flight, there’s no sense of danger: even if you can tell which one of them it is, you feel as if you could just press the “Keep Playing” button and they could carry on as they were.”
Den of Geek: “Fire and Ash is more of the same, and in some areas better. Overwhelm your senses and then go back to forgetting about the blue people until Cameron and 20th Century Studios need to collect a couple more billion dollars from us in three to 20 years.”
IGN.com: “Avatar: Fire and Ash isn’t the technical leap forward that its predecessor was, which is to be expected after three years instead of thirteen. But what it lacks in novelty, it more than makes up for with refinement on every level. The planet Pandora feels slightly less alien, but its denizens become a lot more familiar, and James Cameron has given them – and his first trilogy – an immensely gratifying finale that’s well worth the wait.”
The Telegraph: * “The mind-numbing third film in James Cameron’s mega-franchise proves he’s stuck in a creative cul-de-sac.”
The Hollywood Reporter: “Yes, the movie offers gargantuan-scale spectacle, imposing technological wizardry and virtually nonstop action involving over-qualified and mostly unrecognizable actors in motion-capture suits. But it’s easily the most repetitious entry in the big-screen series, with a been-there, bought-the-T-shirt fatigue that’s hard to ignore.”
Roger Ebert.com: ** 1/2 “Of course, many will forgive the storytelling flaws of “Fire and Ash” in favor of the pure spectacle of it all. In a time when it feels like entertainment is contracting under the weight of shoddy streaming service originals and the abundance of AI, it’s tempting to give “Fire and Ash” a pass just for how much it seeks to wow the viewer. “
The FT: “Oona Chaplin oozes charisma as a gun-crazed witch in James Cameron’s otherwise flashy but formulaic third visit to Pandora.”
Variety: “It’s better than the second film — bolder and tighter — and still has its share of amazements. But it no longer feels visually unprecedented.”
Deadline.com: “With truly dazzling production elements all around this is a movie hard to resist, even if you think you have already seen what wonders Cameron has in store for this franchise. He isn’t committing firmly to the hoped for and scripted fourth and fifth films in the Avatar universe until he sees how this one performs, but my guess is people are gonna go more than once.”
Avatar: Fire and Ash is out in cinemas on the 19th December.