With Avatar: Fire and Ash, pioneering director James Cameron may have delivered the most impressive filler episode ever made.

Once again we turn to the once tranquil tropics of Pandora, where the blue-skinned Na’vi used to live in harmony before the Sky People – humans to me and you – arrived to colonise and strip their moon of its valuable resources.

Former Marine Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington) and his Na’vi wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) have settled into life with the seafaring Metkayina clan, but Jake’s former commander Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) is hungry for vengeance after their epic clash in the spectacular conclusion to the previous film, The Way of Water.

Watching Fire and Ash – all three hours and 17 minutes of it – it becomes clear that these latest two instalments in the ambitious sci-fi franchise were conceived as one story, before Cameron presumably thought his ideas were simply too huge, too impressive to be contained within one film.

Unfortunately, if audiences left the long-awaited sequel back in 2022 with a sense of awe, the primary response this more hastily put together threequel will provoke is a feeling of deja vu.

Don’t get me wrong, Fire and Ash is still one of the most visually impressive cinematic spectacles you will see all year. From the lovingly crafted close-ups of alien faces caked in photorealistic blood, sweat and tears to the nature documentary-style detours across Pandora, not to mention the sweeping action sequences on a massive scale, Fire and Ash almost justifies its arrogant runtime.

There are also some truly fantastical, trippy sci-fi ideas at play that fans of Dune and the like will greatly appreciate, rendered with the most psychedelic imagery the saga has seen so far. But the connective tissue linking these ideas are sadly single-ply.

Clearly, Cameron’s well of storytelling tricks is starting to run dry. While his self-plagiarising from Aliens, The Abyss and Titanic could be forgiven in Way of Water after spending two hours getting to know both the Sully family and a whole tribe of aquiline newcomers, Fire and Ash seems to forget what made them so likeable. Only a handful of players in this game of interstellar Risk emerge with any true sense of self, while the majority of the cast is simply there to move around, escape, get taken hostage, escape again, and shoot up some baddies.

One highlight is Avatar’s slinky and sadistic new villain, Oona Chaplin as Varang, a witch doctor of sorts who leads the Mangkwan clan, Na’vi who have abandoned the goddess Eywa and dwell in a volcano. Varang’s psychosexual alliance with Quaritch, her people’s own oppressor, is Cameron at his twisted best, but the rest of the Mangkwan are sidelined.

Considering the introduction of the Metkayina and their coastal environs were some of the most elegantly watchable moments of the previous film, fans must have been rubbing their hands at the promise of a new tribe who live amongst flame and lava.

Any anthropological interest in the new villains goes unrewarded, however, as Varang quickly becomes a machine gun-toting right-hand woman to Quaritch while her followers become faceless fodder for Na’vi and humans alike in the inevitable third act clash. There’s a single interesting moment early on where a Mangkwan warrior performs a fiery, Mad Max-style sacrifice to attack the Sullys, but this mad devotion to Varang is never explored later. Perhaps he was just having a bad day.

It’s in the final hour that Cameron’s dependency to familiar story beats becomes the most egregious. Presumably realising that the majority of his characters are too forgettable for those who haven’t revisited Way of Water since its cinema release, character arcs are quickly wrapped up to make way for the action, which is truly impressive in its execution but narratively pedestrian.

Sure, there are some neat concepts being thrown around, particularly the introduction of some nasty, squid-like creatures that come into play quite gloriously in the final battle, but it all starts to feel a little like a summer holiday to the same place you’ve taken one too many times.

Perhaps Avatar’s lack of so-called “cultural impact” is actually to its benefit. In the intervening three years since the last film, there has once again been a drought of discussion, memes and Halloween costumes inspired by the franchise, making it feel like one of the last remaining events where cinema attendance is mandatory to be in the know.

Despite its shortcomings, Fire and Ash is still an absolute must-watch for the big screen and Cameron knows that, until these become truly awful, a new Avatar film is a guaranteed money spinner. So why try any harder with the scripts when the visuals do all the heavy lifting? The studio exec in me agrees, while the fan I actually am is getting more than a little bored. 

Avatar: Fire and Ash is in UK cinemas from Friday, 19th December.