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It’s been three years since our last trip to James Cameron’s blue heaven. Three long and torturous years have we waited to be reunited with our old friends Jake and Neytiri and the kid in the loincloth and Sigourney Weaver playing a 14-year-old alien messiah. What horrors we have endured while bereft of our beloved Na’vi and their dreaded foes, the Sky People. Many nights have we implored the stars to return us to the forest eden of Pandora, that beautiful place that Director Cameron drew from his mind like Zeus birthing Athena. But now, at long last, Avatar is back. To be honest, I think it’s too soon. 

Avatar: Fire and Ash, which opens the world over on December 19, is another dizzying technical spectacle from modern history’s greatest purveyor of such things, a long (it clocks in at 197 minutes) continuation of an epic saga about a native population (and its gone-native allies) waging ongoing war against its occupiers and would-be annihilators. This time around, things don’t feel quite as special. The gap between Avatar and its sequel, The Way of Water, was a healthy 13 years, plenty of time for fans to forget about it, then go to the Disney theme park attraction based on the first movie, then remember the movie again, then get excited for a sequel. It was also ample time for a zillion iterations of the same tired online discourse about Avatar having no cultural impact despite being the most financially successful film ever made. 

The Way of Water created its own cottage zeitgeist, its release was buoyed by both enthusiasm and skepticism. Regardless of how anyone ultimately felt about the movie or its potential legacy, it was an object that demanded confrontation, it encouraged talk, it eventually made a zillion dollars. Fire and Ash, on the other hand, arrives in the still-frothing wake of what just passed through. It’s a second helping after a pretty full meal. I wish Cameron had given us more time to digest.

But that is not really how the Hollywood economy works—though, the Hollywood economy has been known to bend itself around James Cameron’s whims, so maybe this is just not how Cameron wants to work right now. He’s not getting any younger, and most of Fire and Ash was filmed at the same time as Way of Water, so it was ready to go to market much more quickly, whether or not the market was quite ready for it.