Fire and Ash's ending has a Death Star problem

Here’s a useless piece of trivia: Out of the 11 canonical Star Wars movies, eight feature the Death Star in one way or another. There’s the original planet-exploding weapon in A New Hope and the rebuilt version in Return of the Jedi. We see early plans for its construction in Attack of the Clones, and that construction itself in Revenge of the Sith, while Rogue One is all about the plans for the moon-sized space station. In the sequels, Force Awakens introduces a planet-sized new version of the Death Star, while The Last Jedi shrinks the tech down to a cannon-sized device, and The Rise of Skywalker sets a key scene in the wreckage of the Death Star. (If you’re keeping track at home, The Empire Strikes Back, Solo, and The Phantom Menace are the only exceptions.)

Why does this matter to Avatar: Fire and Ash? Well, it matters a lot, because just three installments into the James Cameron franchise, it’s starting to seem like Avatar has already found a Death Star of its own.

[Ed. note: Light spoilers ahead for the ending of Avatar: Fire and Ash.]

Neytiri and Jake walking forward in the Avatar Fire and Ash trailer

Avatar’s Death Star is a series of giant military ships that keep getting destroyed by space whales. In 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water, one of these massive vessels was a key part of the human-led Resources Development Administration’s plan to hunt and kill intelligent alien whales (the tulkun) on the extrasolar moon of Pandora so they can harvest their brains to produce an anti-aging reagent that sells for tens of millions of dollars back on Earth. This absurdly villainous, extremely captivating premise culminates in The Way of Water’s explosive final act set aboard a sinking ship, mixing the best parts of Cameron’s action sci-fi filmmaking with the sweeping scale of his ’90s blockbuster Titanic. In other words, it rules.

Image: Disney

But here’s the thing, Avatar: Fire and Ash ends in almost the exact same way. Again, the humans are hunting the tulkun (only there are even more of them now), and again, the Na’vi have to fight back to save their aquatic friends. The scope is slightly bigger, and there’s a giant magnetic vortex pulling ships into its field and crushing them, which never gets fully explained. But for the most part, Fire and Ash’s final battle feels more like The Way of Water on steroids than an original climax. (For good measure, Cameron and his co-writers also throw in a remixed version of the scene where Pandora’s animals rise up in unison, like in 2009’s Avatar.)

The entire experience feels a bit like watching Return of the Jedi for the first time (or The Force Awakens, or most other Star Wars movies). What was marketed as a fresh installment in a beloved franchise instead plays like a remix of an old classic. The beat still slaps, but at a certain point, it starts to get repetitive.

Avatar isn’t anywhere near as far gone as Star Wars in this department. The next movie (assuming there even is one) could easily move on from the whole space-whale-hunting motif to explore some other Pandora biome. Cameron has also confirmed that the last two films were originally one script that grew so large it had to be split in half, which helps explain (but not excuse) the sense of cinematic déjà vu that Fire and Ash evokes.

But from where we’re currently standing, Avatar has never been on shakier foundations. Fire and Ash suggests the very real possibility that future movies could be stuck rehashing the same set piece over and over, finding new ways to send tulkun crashing into RDA warships for years to come, just as Star Wars seems to be perpetually stuck in the Death Star’s gravitational field.

Avatar: Fire and Ash is in theaters now.