December 18, 2025
Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri's (Zoe Saldana) family have settled with the Metkayina clan led Tonowari (Chris Curtis) and his now pregnant wife Ronal (Kate Winslet) in their seaside community. Lo'ak (Britain Dalton) was still feeling very guilty about his brother's death, and was advocating for an exiled young tulkun (whale). Neytiri was unhappy that Spider (Alex Champion) was staying with her family, and wanted him to live with "his own kind."
One day, while the Wind Traders were visiting Metkayina, the war-like Mangkwan clan (or Ash People), led by their cruel leader Varang (Oona Chaplin), launched a destructive attack against them. Jake's nemesis Quaritch (Stephen Lang) introduced firearms to Varang, and became her consort of sorts. Their respective troops merged together to form an even more formidable army to capture Jake, who was considered a traitor against humankind.
This new film in the Avatar franchise is 3 hours and 17 minutes long, 5 minutes longer than the second film, "Way of Water." Since these were shot together, they basically looked very much the same, sharing the same animated-looking CGI designs of the backgrounds and characters. In fact, for me, it felt like it just retread the main plot of the second film, with only two significant story points that distinguished one from the other.
The addition of the Varang and her Mangkawan clan was merely to double the menace and danger against Jake and his family, by giving Quaritch a similarly heartless war-freak of a partner, especially after she learned how to operate automatic weapons and flamethrowers. However, with all these various Navi clans fighting each other on their flying animals, the battle scenes did get confusing to follow who was who and who was winning.
The only other innovation to the plot involved Spider, who had developed something very significant to his respiratory physiology which had scientists racing the clock to find out how this happened. Whatever this was could be the key for all humans to be able to move to and further exploit Pandora. This detail led to a intense scene with Jake and Spider that called to mind a similar walk taken by Abraham and Isaac in the book of Genesis.
I read that there will still be an Avatar 4 and 5 coming up. However, even at this point with Avatar 3, we already feel that James Cameron had literally been telling the same story of colonization and exploitation over and over again, just with different settings and different Navi clans. Despite being great to look at, this third film really felt very long because of the repetitiveness of its message, which had been already been tackled from the first film. 6/10
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