The new Avatar trailer fills me with despair

Telegraph

28-07-2025

I'm trying to think of the nicest thing I can say about the new Avatar trailer and I suspect this is probably it: it definitely looks like more Avatar.
Subtitled Fire and Ash, the third of five instalments of James Cameron's shimmery late-career opus will slosh into cinemas worldwide this coming Christmas – when Disney presumably expects it to join its predecessors in the ranks of the highest-grossing films ever made. (The original and the first sequel, The Way of Water, currently occupy the first and third places on that chart respectively.)
However much organic excitement for another Avatar sequel any of us actually encounter in the wild, it's highly likely it will be the year's most successful film – even if the trailer, which has already generated countless reaction videos, left me cold.
What was most striking (and depressing) about the two minutes and 25 seconds of new material in the clip – which cinema-goers can currently experience in front of screenings of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and the rest of us can watch on YouTube – was how little any of it seemed to add to the existing Avatar deal. So with apologies to the various TikTokers and influencers claiming otherwise, what we saw could not be described in good conscience as 'freaking insane'.
Front and centre are the cosmetic updates which have been installed since Avatar 2.0 – and perhaps it's this immersive travel-brochure material, rather than the meandering plot about tribal squabbles, the repelling of Earthling invaders, and a religion centred on a sort of purple Wi-Fi tree, that has made the series such a global phenomenon.
This instalment apparently concerns a war between two previously unseen Na'vi tribes: the peaceable Wind Traders, who drift about in flying airships, and the red-skinned Fire People, who live in a Mordor-like ashy landscape and ride around on flying beasts. The money is on them to be baddies – at least until the remnants of the invading Earth forces show up again, at which point an uneasy Pandoran alliance will presumably be struck.
Controversially-slash-foolishly, I suspect the astonishing popularity of the two previous films sprung from different places. In every respect bar technologically, the 2009 original was a blockbuster blowout as Hollywood used to make them in the 1980s and 90s: it was essentially Dances with Wolves transposed to space, and gave audiences their final chance to experience neoclassical Cameron craftsmanship – in the brand new 3D format he'd developed specifically for the occasion, no less – at the very moment the franchise era took hold.
But then Avatar disappeared for 13 years – and returned, still banging the 3D drum the industry had otherwise largely abandoned, having reinvented itself as a franchise movie.
Unlike its predecessor, The Way of Water was simply a jumbo dose of truly borderless escapism but not actually about anything beyond itself. (I defy anyone who sat through it to describe anything of narrative interest that actually happened in it apart from the whale hunt near the end.)
And that latter approach is what Fire and Ash appears to be replicating. Volcanoes, not oceans, are clearly the signature backdrop this time around, all rendered in mineral-water-crisp 3D computer graphics, and in frame rates that vacillate between a purring 24 and slippery 60 per second.
A few new bizarre beasts of burden have also been added to the Avamenagerie, including a big airborne stingray with wiggly bits coming out of its mouth and a sort of jellyfish that the Sully clan flies around in, like a sentient hot air balloon.
But three years on from The Way of Water, the modus operandi hasn't seemingly altered a jot. The trailer promises more teeth-baring tribal melodrama, wildly expensive virtual nature documentary sequences, some jump-and-shoot forest battles that look like the bestselling video-game of 2045, and digitally rendered characters whose faces' astounding visual intricacy is only surpassed by their supreme slappability.
'You cannot live like this, baby – in hate,' Sam Worthington's Jake Sully tells his bride, Zoe Saldana's Neytiri, in one contextless excerpt, enunciating the word 'baby' like Lena Lamont's elocution coach in Singin' in the Rain.
'Your goddess has no dominion here,' hisses a shaman (perhaps?) from Pandora's stern-looking, red-painted mountain tribe – presumably referring to Sigourney Weaver's Teenage Na'vi Jesus-like character (Kiri te Suli Kireysi'ite to you, or so says Wikipedia), who apparently spends the entire film gazing beatifically at CGI fronds.
Amid the flurry came two moments of despair. One was the return of Stephen Lang's Colonel Miles Quaritch, the electrifyingly charismatic human villain from the first film, in the identikit Na'vi body, which I forgot he'd transferred into in the second. The other was the reappearance of Spider, Quaritch's rebellious and dreadlocked teenage son, family friend of the Sullys, and essentially the most annoying gap-year kid in the galaxy. He's glimpsed at death's door (good), and also jumping across a series of falling slabs, like Sonic the Hedgehog.
Aside from the awful Spider, I counted a grand total of one shot that featured human beings, and which may or may not foreshadow the journey from Pandora to Earth that is supposed to take place in Avatar 4, coming in 2029.
Of course there's no reason for either Cameron or Disney to change a single element of the Avatar recipe, since The Way of Water won an Oscar and made $2.3bn. Even so, this trailer's proud sameyness grates on a spiritual level. The original Avatar was so valuable in part because it barked a defiant last hurrah for original blockbusters. But the series it went on to spawn seems to have succumbed harder than any of its contemporaries to the deathless curse of more of the same.