Avatar: Fire and Ash

Jake Sully and his family are on the run again, and not just from the military. While transporting Spider to be with his own kind — humans — they’re ambushed by the Mangkwan clan, or Ash People, and those berserkers are just the tip of the chaotic iceberg.

The third installment of James Cameron’s Avatar franchise is the best so far. Visually stunning, of course, but also a wild ride emotionally. Grief, fear, anger, the whole emotional range. A big part of it is that Jake and his family are still grieving the events of the last movie, and even though everyone grieves differently, relationships suffer in the process.

The movie can be a bit repetitive with the amount of times people get kidnapped, but it’s better than characters being raped repeatedly. Looking at you, Outlander. Even though it ends up being a bunch of rescue missions, the action scenes are still really cool.

The audience doesn’t really get much back story for the Ash People, but maybe that’s a backstory in itself. When the tribe has lost everything — at the hands of the humans, presumably — they have to make do with what they can. And because they’ve lost everything, the only thing that keeps them going is vengeance.

It’s also thematically on the nose. Accidentally, of course. The government invading a whole other world just because it wants something the other world has, with no regard for the native people? There’s no way James Cameron could’ve planned that. Sorry, this isn’t about politics. It shouldn’t be; this is a movie review, but it’s like they say. Sometimes art imitates life, and the parallel just couldn’t be ignored.