Avatar: Fire and Ash

James Cameron: Avatar. Fire and Ash (US 2025). Above: Oona Chaplin (Varang), Middle: Zoe Saldaña (Neytiri), Sigourney Weaver (Kiri), Jack Champion (Spider), Below: Britain Dalton (Lo'ak), Sam Worthington (Jake), Stephen Lang (Quaritch).

Avatar : de feu et de cendres / Avatar: fuoco e cenere / Avatar: fuego y ceniza / Avatars: uguns un pelni / Įsikūnijimas: ugnis ir pelenai / Аватар: пламя и пепел.

    US 2025. PC: Lightstorm Entertainment. 20th Century Studios presents. P: James Cameron and Jon Landau (1960-2024). EX: Richard Baneham, Rae Sanchini, David Valdes.

    D: James Cameron. SC: James Cameron, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver. DP: Russell Carpenter - colour - 1.85:1 and 2.39 - negative format AXS-R7 - source format X-OCN RAW (4K dual-strip 3-D) - released on 4K - in IMAX 3D, Dolby Cinema 3D, RealD 3D, Cinemark XD, 4DX, ScreenX. PD: Dylan Cole, Ben Procter. Cost: Deborah L. Scott. SFX: Wētā FX - Joe Letteri, Daniel Barrett. Lightstorm Visual Effects. - Richard Baneham. Legacy Effects. VFX: Wētā FX - Nicky Muir. Eric Saindon. AN: Wētā FX. Industrial Light and Magic. M: Simon Franglen. Miley Cyrus: "Dream as One" (Miley Cyrus, Andrew Wyatt, Mark Ronson, Simon Franglen). S: Brent Burge - DTS - IMAX 6-Track - 12-Track Digital Sound - Auro 11.1 - Dolby Atmos. ED: Stephen Rivkin, Nicolas de Toth, John Refoua, Jason Gaudio, James Cameron. Casting: Margery Simkin.

    C: Sam Worthington (Jake), Zoe Saldaña (Neytiri), Sigourney Weaver (Kiri), Stephen Lang (Quaritch), Oona Chaplin (Varang), Kate Winslet (Ronal), Cliff Curtis (Tonowari). Brendan Cowell (Scoresby), Edie Falco (General Ardmore), Jemaine Clement (Dr. Garvin), CCH Pounder (Mo'at), David Thewlis (Peylak), Britain Dalton (Lo'ak), Jack Champion (Spider), Trinity Jo-Li Bliss (Tuk), Bailey Bass (Tsireya), Jamie Flatters (Neteyam).

    In loving memory of Jon Landau.

    Loc: New Zealand, Los Angeles (CA), Lviv (Ukraine), Yavoriv (Ukraine). Studios: Stone Street Studios (Wellington NZ), Warner Bros. Studios (Burbank CA).

    199 min

    US premiere: 1 Dec 2025 Dolby Cinema.

    US premiere: 19 Dec 2025 wide.

    Finnish premiere: 17 Dec 2025 - released by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Finland.

    Viewed in 2D at Finnkino Tennispalatsi isense, Helsinki, 27 Dec 2025

AA: Even the previews / trailers are appropriate: Kullervo (the avenger antihero of the Finnish epic Kalevala), Thor (the Nordic thunder god as a Marvel superhero) and Ulysses according to Christopher Nolan. Mythology reigns in blockbuster cinema.

Mythology has been James Cameron's metier since The Terminator. I am a follower, even of the Avatar series, although I find its digital aesthetics unappealing and the hybrid characters impossible to relate to. Real actors are credited, but they have metamorphosed beyond recognition to humanoids. 

I would compare Cameron's oeuvre with Ramayana, Mahabharata, Homeric epics, die Nibelungen and Kalevala.

Cameron's films are mythological epics for an industrial - architectonic - militarist - imperialist - digital - virtual era. He excels with aliens and robots but has less passion for human beings.

Cameron stages formidable cosmic battles with mythological powers and apocalyptic energies. He creates worlds of magnificent spectacle. He is capable of evoking a sense of wonder.

Since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States a serious expansion of the superhero film took place, including the Marvel Cinematic Universe (since 2008) and the DC Extended Universe (since 2013). They are works of escapism and celebrations of superpowers.

At the same time, Cameron launched his Avatar series, an original work. Despite offbeat colours, weird creatures and 3-D aesthetics, they grew to become among the all-time highest-grossing films. They, too, satisfy expectations of escapism and identification with superpowers. 

But the Avatar films are also ecological. They criticize our very existence, based on abuse and exploitation of nature. Having destroyed the Earth we are now busy destroying a moon called Pandora.

Portraying this, Cameron the action film veteran indulges in the imagination of disaster and satisfies our appetite for destruction, in full "Nero complex" mode, to refer to André Bazin. Less might be more.

I might try to find the secret of Cameron's success in Arthur Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung / The World as Will and Representation (1818). Cameron displays an extraordinary willpower in creating his worlds. Despite their clunky features, the irresistible joy and drive and inner essence shines through. Cameron is a superpower in himself.

I have been impressed by the accomplishments in 3-D technology in the previous Avatar movies and Daniel Mendelsohn's view of Cameron's visual look, which he calls "bioluminescence". I saw Avatar: Fire and Ash in 2-D and will make a point of catching it also in 3-D.

I regret that there is no Finnish title. "Avatar: tuli ja tuhka" would be great and accurate.

My remarks on the previous films:

Avatar (US/GB 2009)

Avatar: The Way of Water (US 2022)

FROM AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH PRODUCTION NOTES

~ PERFECTING THE ART OF PERFORMANCE CAPTURE ~

“The performances have to be authentic, and that is the power of these films. We know these characters are impossible. People don’t really have ears like that. They don’t have eyes this big. They don’t have these long necks and these tails and all the aspects of a Na’vi, but we believe them, and why do we get seduced by the fact that they seem so real as people? It’s because of that ethos, that mantra, that we use every single day to honor the performance above all other things.” –James Cameron

A virtual camera system is used to capture a scene. The actors work in a Volume, either doing dry performance capture on a soundstage or in a massive water tank that can capture underwater performances. They have markers on their body and rigs with two high-definition cameras on their heads to capture 100 percent of their performance in the digital world.

“’Avatar’ movies are not made by computers,” says director/co-writer/producer James Cameron. “’Avatar’ films are made by an incredibly talented team of people – especially our actors – who physically perform every scene. I worked with my cast on ‘The Way of Water’ and ‘Fire and Ash’ for almost 18 months. Every expression, every movement, every emotional beat comes from their real performances. And once we have that captured, our artists work tirelessly to bring those characters – and the entire world – to life.”

In discussing the actor’s role on a virtual camera stage, Sam Worthington says, “You are basically wearing a suit and a mask of dots, and they are captured by hundreds of infrared cameras. So, anything that you do, anything that you say, anything that you feel, anywhere you look, how you are, it’s translated using those dots into the system. Now, whether it’s us or a stunt guy jumping into the water or flying on a creature or crying when their son dies, it is all us, and it is all true. And the more the technology has improved, the more subtle we can do our performances. So even me just standing there breathing and thinking, that is going to translate through the system, and there’s not one thing that is added to my performance.”

The actor-driven nature of performance capture technology is the driving force behind the “Avatar” films, and their success is often attributed to its pioneering use of this technique, which enables the fictional world and its characters to come alive in a literal sense. It is a technique that uses movements and facial expressions to drive the performance of photorealistic computer-generated characters. In each of the “Avatar” films, it has played a crucial role in bringing the Na’vi and other fantastical creatures to life. 

Cameron and his phenomenally talented team use cutting-edge technology to translate the nuanced expressions and physicality of the actors into the digital world of Pandora. By capturing the subtle emotional cues and movements of the performers, the technology allows for photoreal lifelike characters, enhancing the immersive experience for viewers. Every nuance of the actors’ physical and facial performances faithfully drives their CG counterparts, such that every minute detail of their performance is translated faithfully into these fantastical CGI alien characters.

“Everything from the most intimate dramatic moments to our biggest stunts and underwater movement is all done for real,” explains co-producer Jamie Landau. “In the past, there has been a misconception that these films are animated, which they are definitely not. In fact, we were doing performance capture for 18 months.”

Jon Landau explains, “Jim Cameron wrote ‘Avatar’ in 1995. The technology at the time did not exist to tell the story the way we wanted to tell it. When I say that to people, a lot of people think I’m talking about 3D, but it has nothing to do with 3D. It had to do with putting up emotional and engaging characters on the screen that we wanted to do using computer-generated effects. So, the challenge became, how could we create – for a director like Jim Cameron – the same intimacy where he could work with a cast, but create computer-generated characters playing in the world of Pandora? The technology did not exist. We looked at the landscape of what people were doing with what they called motion capture, and it was promising, but it missed one key letter in front of it for us: an e for emotion capture. And we turned that first into performance capture when we started to capture the facial performance at the same time as the body. We then turned that into virtual production, where we put a camera in Jim Cameron’s hands and he could see the character, not the person who was standing in front of him, but their Na’vi or avatar character, and when he would look across the barren stage that we were on, he didn’t see the barren stage. He saw the world of Pandora. It was now a filmmaker’s tool in a very acting-centric process. That did not exist. We needed to create all of the technologies to do that.”

Jon Landau continues, “Whenever we do performance capture, we shoot reference footage of the actors. We’ll sometimes shoot up to 16 cameras at one time. This reference footage is first used by the editors to see the performances. They’ll take a sixteen-quadrant split, where we see all sixteen images, then they will blow up one image to see the subtlety of a performance that an actor gave in order for them to pick the best performances. That reference footage stays behind the scenes throughout the entire process. When we turn over a template to our visionary colleagues at Wētā, we give them reference footage, and once they start working on the animation, they do a picture-in-picture all the time with that reference footage to make sure that their animated character is accurately doing what the actor did on the day.”

“At this point in time, nobody does the visual effects capture finishing work better than Wētā, and that is because of that iterative relationship between the production and the visual effects house with the technology and creative feeding back and forth,” says Sanchini, “And we’ve developed a real shorthand. Sometimes it is hard to explain exactly why a shot isn’t working, why a face doesn’t look natural, or why it’s not moving in the right way, and it took years to develop that shorthand for them all to see the same things, to understand how to address it. And on this film, everyone is on the same page at all times.”

Cameron and the editorial team select the best performances for each moment of a given scene, and then use a virtual camera to create the specific shots. The virtual camera allows Cameron to shoot scenes within the computer-generated world, just as if he were filming on a physical location or soundstage. With this virtual camera, he sees the actors as their 9-foot-tall blue characters in Pandora.