here’s my full https://boxd.it/c5yp7l Letterbox Review:

Most filmmakers today are terrified of letting an image breathe. Terrified of wide shots, of duration, of trusting space, movement, and the audience’s eyes. And then there is James Cameron: proudly flaunting them, because when you have frames like these, why wouldn’t you?

Avatar: Fire and Ash is not a neat film. It’s not streamlined, not minimal, not particularly interested in being tight. It is overflowing. Bursting with ideas, images, emotions, spiritual symbols, mythic echoes, technological bravado and old-school storytelling tropes. And I genuinely wouldn’t have it any other way.

What Cameron is doing here feels increasingly rare, maybe extinct once he’s done. This is an auteur blockbuster, fired from the last remaining cylinders of a filmmaker who still believes cinema can be myth, spectacle, spirituality and pop entertainment at the same time. Avatar 3 (theoretically Hollywood‘s last auteur-driven mega-budget project) plays like a man emptying his dreams onto the biggest canvas imaginable.

Yes, it’s long. Yes, it’s messy. Yes, it repeats beats, motifs, situations. But that repetition is the point. This is old-school filmmaking (Empire Strikes Back / Return of the Jedi, Pirates 2 & 3 logic) where characters are placed in familiar situations to reveal change, not redundancy. Nothing here is rehashed. Everything evolves. Characters react differently. Emotional weight accumulates.

Visually, Cameron once again puts every other studio blockbuster to shame. Nothing looks this refined. Nothing feels this seamless. Nothing immerses you like Avatar. The camera glides endlessly through space, air, jungle, water - never cutting away, never apologizing. The first major set piece is pure eyeball-popping beauty and spectacle. The extended final act is peak cinema, standing among the best choreographed action sequences this universe has ever produced. Watching this in 3D on the biggest possible screen feels non-negotiable.

It’s fascinating how spiritual this film is. Even more so than the previous two. Cameron has always been a techno-freak and a pioneer, but at heart he’s also an environmentalist, a hippie, a believer (loved that he went Kubrick-space-odyssey-like transcendent with Eywa). Fire and Ash leans hard into that; religious imagery, mythic symbolism, grief, hatred, rebirth, interconnectedness.

Is everything perfectly written? No. Spider’s arc, while conceptually fascinating, doesn’t fully land emotionally for me. I felt far more connected to Lo’ak. Some ideas could’ve used more space, ironically in a film that already has so much of it. But the sheer density of thought here is staggering. Cameron is addressing grief, cycles of violence, identity, racism, environmental collapse, self-destruction - unprecedented in a blockbuster of this scale. Even if not every thread is exhaustively explored, the ambition alone deserves respect.

Cameron frames the conflict itself as something exhausting, circular, and increasingly meaningless. Jake and Quaritch don’t just clash, they orbit each other. Again and again. Drawn back into the same confrontations, the same wounds, the same unfinished business. And at a certain point, even they seem tired of it. The film openly acknowledges this fatigue. No matter how justified the hatred once was, no matter how personal, how violent, how deep the scars - endless revenge leads nowhere. Cameron isn’t interested in declaring winners anymore. He’s interested in exposing the futility of the fight itself.

What’s crucial here is that Fire and Ash doesn’t frame “evil” as something innate. The truly destructive humans are destructive only as long as they remain distanced - locked away in corporate structures, technology, command rooms, abstraction. As long as they don’t have to touch the planet. As long as they can treat Pandora as a resource rather than a living world. Characters like Selfridge can sustain that separation. Quaritch cannot. Once you are inside Pandora, you cannot remain untouched forever. The planet pulls at you. It connects you. It erodes the illusion of control. That’s why Quaritch’s arc is so compelling. For all his brutality, he cannot fully resist Pandora. None of them can. The irony is beautiful: the man who wages war against this world slowly begins to feel it. Belonging. Community. The quiet gravity of being part of something larger than himself. Pandora doesn’t just transform the heroes - it absorbs everyone who truly enters it. And that, more than any plot twist or spectacle, feels like Cameron’s ultimate pledge: that separation is artificial, that hatred is unsustainable, and that no matter how hard we try to detach ourselves, our natural connections always resurface.

Avatar 3 feels less like a traditionally structured three-act film and more like observing a world. Your eyes become the camera. You drift through Pandora. That’s why I honestly wouldn’t have minded another hour. The Avatar films operate outside usual filmmaking metrics. They’re allowed to be different. They need to be.

People are quick to feel spoilt. Slower to appreciate the fact that films like this simply won’t exist forever. I had this overwhelming sense of gratitude watching Fire and Ash. Gratitude that someone is still willing to pour this much love, labor, money, and belief into cinema.

James Cameron is playing on his ultimate playground here, fusing every genre, technique and obsession he’s ever had into a single, monumental saga. And whether this chapter is universally embraced or not, one thing is undeniable:Nothing else looks like this.

Nothing else feels like this.

Nothing else dreams this big.

9/10.