There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and that James Cameron will defy all the doubters. 20th Century Fox was reluctant to make a sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien, only to be swayed by Cameron’s gumption during a pitch meeting when he added a “$” suffix to the title. Titanic was destined to be a humongous flop as its production timeline grew longer and its budget eventually ballooned to the biggest ever for its time. It took over a decade for technology to catch up to the vision of Avatar, with an executive claiming that Cameron was delusional for thinking that he could pull this off. After being subjected to eight delays totaling thirteen years, people wondered if the sequel, The Way of Water, would be worth all the trouble. It’s safe to say that I don’t need to mention the combined $8 billion at the box office and dozens of Academy Award nominations for you to know how each of those films fared.

Unfortunately, Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third of the five planned films in the franchise, might mark the end of this forty-year winning streak, at least in terms of critical and cultural relevance. I have absolutely no doubt that this film will join its predecessors to become one of the highest-grossing films of all time. Granted, that achievement won’t be as much of a challenge considering the several Premium Large Formats (PLF) the film will be released in, such as 3D, RealD 3D, Dolby 3D, Dolby Cinema, 4DX, ScreenX, IMAX, IMAX 3D, and HFR. Here in Minnesota, a ticket to screening in one of those formats will cost you about $25, an almost 50% increase from the average price of $17 for a normal screening.

As much as those costs can be balked at on paper, every dollar is well earned on the screen. Seeing this in Dolby 3D HFR reminded me how much these films operate on a different plane of existence. Everything simultaneously feels lifelike and otherworldly, with the fully computer-generated sets having an amazing depth. Cameron delivered a foreword speech about the perils of generative AI, and made it very clear that his films are fully human-driven. Everything took a painstaking amount of time and resources to transfer from the mind to the silver screen. That includes the actors, whose performances are captured with an ever-increasing amount of detail. It’s quite astonishing for Zoë Saldaña to open this year with an Oscar win for her supporting role in the Spanish-language musical Emilia Pérez, and then close it out with equally impressive work as a ten-foot-tall blue alien.

Despite it now only being three years since the previous film, it still takes some time to adjust to the sensory explosion. Cameron doesn’t make it any easier by forgoing all opening studio logos, plunging us right into the action of Pandora. After the death of their eldest son at the conclusion of The Way of Water, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Saldaña) find themselves wandering down different paths of grief. Like every hardened marine, he keeps it all on the inside, pushing the family like a drill instructor so that something like this will never happen again. Neytiri has abandoned all compassion for humankind, pushing for all-out war against them. Unsurprising, considering our history, humans share Neytiri’s sentiment and are more than willing to raise the stakes.

The Na’vi are not as unified as they once were, with several clans harboring resentment for how Sully’s involvement in their plight has only brought more death and destruction. The most outwardly spoken of these factions is the Mangkwan clan, also called the Ash People. They resolve their differences with their fists and are led by the witch Varang (Oona Chaplin). Seeing how this splintering can lead to the whole dam breaking, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the biggest proponent of Han Solo’s famous quote about how “hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side,” decides to ally with Varang and supply her with all the firepower she could ever want.

Cameron has always been the master of understanding the purpose of a sequel, how the re-entry into a world marks an opportunity to expand upon the original and carve a new path. Fire and Ash contains no footprints of that ideology, essentially being a carbon copy of The Way of Water, a fact that both does and doesn’t make sense, considering that the two films were originally envisioned as one epic story. It seems that when the decision to split them was made, Cameron, along with co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, decided to hit copy/paste and call it a day. If you were to watch the final hour stretches of The Way of Water and Fire and Ash side-by-side, it would be nearly impossible to spot the differences.

The introduction of Jaffa and Silver for these two sequels has not improved the quality of the writing. This is the kind of blockbuster where you can predict exactly what’s going to happen and when it will occur. The stakes of a lead character dying in the first battle are weightless because there are still another two-and-a-half hours to go. This trash for your mind is treasure for your bladder, as a movie that features this much water footage across a 195-minute runtime will naturally lead to a steady stream of bathroom breaks.

If The Way of Water left you clamoring for more from the Avatar series, then Fire and Ash has delivered in monkeypaw fashion. It’s more… of the same, focusing on survival rather than evolution. The tension around my ears and markings all over my face from the 3D glasses were well worth it for the audio/visual experience, another in a long line of raisings of the bar by Cameron. But what good is a tricked-out sports car if you're just going to cruise around the neighborhood?