There is a moment in the volcanic heart of Avatar: Fire and Ash when the frame fills with embers and ash-light and you remember, with something close to awe, that James Cameron still commands the largest canvas in cinema. Then a character says a line you are fairly certain you heard two movies ago, and the spell flickers. That push and pull — astonishment and déjà vu trading blows across three hours and eighteen minutes — is the whole experience, and it is why the film is at once the spectacle of the season and the most divisive chapter the franchise has produced.

The third installment drives Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) out of the reefs and into fire. Still raw from the death of their eldest son, the Sully family collides with the Ash People — a scorched, expansionist Na’vi clan ruled by Varang (Oona Chaplin), the first antagonist in this saga who feels genuinely dangerous rather than merely armour-plated. For the first time Pandora is not a paradise to be defended but a furnace to be survived, and the change of element hands Cameron a fresh palette of blacks, reds and choking grey he attacks with obvious relish.

On pure craft, Fire and Ash is staggering. The fire simulation, the volcanic vistas, the Windtraders drifting their jellyfish airships across a bruised sky — it is, frame for frame, the most beautiful blockbuster in years, and the BAFTA for Special Visual Effects it collected feels understated rather than generous. Cameron and his team have not merely rendered fire; they have given it weight, temperature and menace. On a true IMAX or high-frame-rate screen there is no current rival for what this film does to a wall of light.

And yet the screenplay keeps reaching for the same beats. Family imperilled, paradise threatened, an outsider learning humility, a third act that resolves in roughly the shape you predicted from the first reel — Fire and Ash repeats the structural rhythm of its predecessors closely enough that even sympathetic critics reached for the word “autopilot.” At 198 minutes it has room for everything except surprise, and the stretches between set-pieces sag in a way Cameron’s tighter work never did. It is the first time in a generation that one of his films has arrived to genuinely split the room.

The cast holds the line. Saldaña remains the molten core of the enterprise, giving Neytiri a grief the digital pipeline transmits without dilution; Worthington is steadier and sadder than before. But it is Chaplin’s Varang who walks off with the picture — a villain of conviction rather than cliché, fury wrapped around a real wound. Kate Winslet‘s Ronal, Sigourney Weaver‘s Kiri and Stephen Lang’s endlessly recycled Quaritch each get their moments, even if the ensemble is now large enough that some threads are left smouldering rather than resolved.

Avatar: Fire and Ash. © 20th Century Studios / Disney.

So where does that leave the verdict? Fire and Ash is not the revelation the first Avatar was, nor the clean emotional machine of The Way of Water; critics handed it the franchise’s coolest notices while audiences pushed it past a billion and a half dollars and the fourth ten-figure gross of Cameron’s career. Both camps are right. This is a familiar story told with a command of spectacle no one else alive currently possesses — and if you are going to see one film on the biggest, loudest screen you can find this year, the case for this one writes itself. Bring patience for the runtime; the fire is worth it.