This month on The Film Board, Pete Wright sits down with Tommy Metz III and Steve Sarmento to wrestle with a question that keeps resurfacing throughout Avatar: Fire and Ash: how can a movie built with such extraordinary care feel so strangely forgettable?
James Cameron’s return to Pandora is, once again, a monumental technical achievement. The scale is enormous. The craft is meticulous. The effort behind it is undeniable. And yet, as the conversation unfolds, the panel keeps circling the same uneasy feeling—that the film never quite gives its spectacle anything meaningful to serve.
The discussion ranges from Cameron’s latest performance-capture and adaptive frame-rate experiments to the franchise’s growing habit of mistaking motion for momentum. There’s real admiration for the artists who built this world, paired with frustration over a story that repeatedly rushes past its most interesting ideas. Themes of environmentalism, colonialism, faith, and family surface again and again, only to be flattened by familiar beats, unresolved questions, and a narrative that seems unwilling to slow down long enough to let any of them land.
By the time the conversation reaches ratings, the outcome feels less like judgment and more like inevitability—the natural endpoint of trying, and failing, to locate the film’s emotional center.
Watch & Discover
- Watch Now: Apple TV | Letterboxd
- Original Theatrical Trailer
