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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. 

Fire and Ash does not do nearly enough to differentiate itself from its immediate predecessor. Once again we are with Jake (Sam Worthington), his warrior wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), and their children, who have made a home with a tribe of seafaring Na’vi, the Metkayina. Once again they are being aggressed upon by an evil military-industrial concern from Earth, who are looking to harvest what is basically magical whale blubber from the Tulkun, a sentient species of sea creature to whom the Metkayina are tightly bonded. (Unobtanium, the precious resource so coveted in the first film, is firmly a thing of the past.) Stephen Lang’s evil colonel, now in a Na’vi body, is back on the case, pursuing Jake and Neytiri as they mourn the loss of their eldest son. 

The grief bit is new, I suppose, as is Varang (an alluring but underused Oona Chaplin), who is the leader of the Mangkwan, a fearsome clan of Na’vi who, in their bloodlust for their enemies, make common cause with the colonel and his militia. Varang and friends are meant to be enough of an addition to distinguish Fire and Ash from Way of Water, a violent bunch of Cousin Olivers who are there to add further texture and breadth to Cameron’s world. But the film doesn’t flesh them out enough; as is, they are merely Bad Na’vi, signified by their red adornment and, frankly, more primitive modus operandi. Here Cameron runs smack into the wall of criticism the Avatar films have long faced, relying so hard on noxious stereotypes about Native Americans that it’s a little shocking that no one at 20th Century/Disney even gently suggested he rethink matters. 

While Varang and the gang swoop and slash around the good Na’vi, a whole lotta stuff is going on with House Sully. Kiri, the teen girl played by Weaver, is further exploring her extra-special connection to Eywa, the great spirit of all creation on Pandora, while also attending to her crush on Spider (the improbably named Jack Champion), the human teen whom her family has adopted. (Neytiri doesn’t like him because he’s one of the Sky People and the Sky People killed her real son, a dark bit of drama that I wish was better explored here.) Spider suffers a traumatic incident and must be rescued by Kiri and Eywa, which kind of turns him into a Na’vi-human hybrid, and thus makes him valuable to the humans looking to further colonize Pandora. He becomes something of a holy grail, or a MacGuffin. 

In that way, Spider of all characters—who, by the way, is also the colonel’s bastard son, remember??—moves very close to the center of the story. Which is a pretty surprising development considering that, for one, Champion can’t really act, and two, Spider is running around mostly naked all the time. The sorta main character of Avatar 3 is a barely dressed teenager with white-boy dreadlocks. I guess that too is a departure from The Way of Water, but not in the right direction. 

Far be it from me to tell James Cameron that he’s developing his mythology wrong, but Fire & Ash carries things off to weird places. And it doesn’t carry other things far enough. The Mangkwan represent an entirely missed opportunity—I really do, genuinely, want to learn about more Na’vi cultures, but Fire and Ash doesn’t teach us much. Varang is pure villainy without any further shading. Maybe the planned fourth and fifth movies will better elucidate her people, but for now they exist solely as clichéd plot devices. Cameron is no stranger to such things, but typically he at least gives old tropes a little spit polish. 

All of these narratives and hokily drawn characters eventually converge on the moment we’re really all there for: the climactic battle extravaganza. The first Avatar took to the skies for its final siege, The Way of Water added the ocean. One might expect that—given that the secondary antagonists of the film live near an active volcano and the subtitle of the movie is Fire and Ash—the third opera of carnage might involve some big burny things, bursts of pyroclastic flow and lava and molten rocks shooting through the air. But, well, nope. Instead, Cameron stages what is essentially a tweaked rehash of Way of Water’s splashy melee. We’re back in the water, we’re worried about the whales again, folks are zipping around on their dragons. It looks incredible, but the familiarity makes it all curiously unexciting. 

Right before the lights went down at my screening, a colleague expressed some concerns about what we were about to watch. I reminded him that James Cameron doesn’t make bad movies. I mostly still stand by that. Fire and Ash is not bad, it’s just an erratic, strangely repetitive lesser effort. But parts of it do approach genuine awfulness, many of them involving poor Champion trying to perform while standing around stupidly nude like Christopher Atkins in The Blue Lagoon. And entirely too much time is spent within the human settlement on Pandora, an ugly industrial space that makes one long for the lush greens and blues of the world outside of it. Longing is part of the Avatar equation—we are meant to pine for its beauty and possibility. But now that it’s been hurried back into our life, its flaws are more evident, its existence as mere product has sadly become more plain. May we not journey back to Cameron’s mind palace again until we’re well and truly foaming at the mouth for it.