“James Cameron’s semi-amphibious sci-fi franchise is back,” said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. Small wonder: the combined box-office takings of the first two films now exceeds £3.7 billion.

‘Cheesily colour-coordinated’

Yet this third chapter is “even longer”, “more humourless” and “cheesily colour-coordinated than the last”, adding “astonishingly little” to the cinematic universe he has established with previous instalments.

Set, once again, on the planet Pandora, and once again filmed in 3D, “Fire and Ash” sees Sam Worthington’s US marine and Zoe Saldaña’s Na’vi people “do battle with a rival volcano-dwelling tribe”, who have allied themselves with Pandora’s human invaders. Yet its only sources of inspiration “appear to have been Avatar one and two”: you see the same pterodactyl race, the same bioluminescent seascapes. It’s like watching £300 million of glitter tipped “into a fish tank”.

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‘Photo-real’ spectacle

There are certainly some moments of déjà vu, said Ben Travis in Empire. But the storytelling is impressively ambitious: the new film builds on “the familial threads, the vast world-building, the interpersonal beefs” of the previous pictures.

And in terms of pure spectacle, it’s fabulous. “It’s near-unfathomable that barely anything on screen actually exists”; it’s “so photo-real, you never even think about it”.

Yet this “Avatar” feels “a zillion light years from the excitement” of the 2009 original, said Nicholas Barber on BBC Culture. The extraterrestrial setting has “lost its novelty value” and “doesn’t seem as dazzling as it once did”. If the franchise once seemed “exhilaratingly futuristic”, it now looks like “a relic of an earlier era”. “It’s terrifying to think that Cameron still has two more sequels scheduled. How much longer and more self-indulgent can they possibly get?”

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