Has James Cameron been trapped in the metaverse longer than we have? The 71-year-old director reportedly spent over a decade working on what eventually became Avatar (2009), and has been involved in making its sequels Avatar: The Way of the Water (2022), the latest Avatar: Fire and Ash released on Friday (December 19), and another film in the making – making it a cumulative 30 years spent on four films, set on the faraway planet of Pandora.Ushering a new age of 3D technology into Hollywood with the first film, Cameron’s obsession with the world, with the overall arc of films being largely unchanged, has felt increasingly more quixotic with each film. Cameron is too much of a self-assured maverick to heed advice of even his most well-meaning fans, but this latest venture is sufficient proof of the diminishing returns from the exotic world of the Na’Vi.A still from Avatar: Fire and Ash.Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his family are still on the run from the ‘sky people’. Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) and his associates want to capture Sully, as a traitor to his race, after he abandoned the human colonisers at the end of the first film, to live permanently with fellow Pandora natives. It’s a busy plotline; the family grieving the death of their eldest son Neteyam, who was killed during the climactic battle of The Way of the Water, Neytiri (Zoe Saldanha) still unable to accept Spider as a part of the family, calling him ‘pink-skinned’ in a derogatory manner, Quaritch trying to connect with his paternal side for Spider, his biological son. As if this wasn’t enough, there’s also the Mangkwan clan — of the ‘Ash people’, who reside near a volcano — opposed to other clans because of their disillusionment in Eywa (the central neural network of the planet, worshipped as a deity by the locals).Fire and Ash has many of the predictable beats we now expect in an Avatar film. Eye-watering flora and fauna, the most exceptionally-designed digital water on screen, more actors lending their voice and physicality to the Na’Vi characters – rendering them almost unrecognisable (I’ve not been able to make my mind up on whether that’s a good thing). Despite all the bluster of Cameron’s grand visionary spectacle, he remains a B-movie genre filmmaker at heart. And that reveals itself in the near-shocking discrepancy in scenes when Cameron and his writers (Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver) are writing sincere lines for Sully’s family members, and scenes around Quaritch and his hand-picked antagonists of the film.A still from Avatar: Fire and Ash.One of the few times I remember sitting up straight and watching Fire and Ash with rapt attention is when the Mangkawa clan attacks the Windtraders, a traders’ community travelling across Pandora. In a moment of pure ‘cool’ evil – something we associate with George Miller’s Mad Max films – a warrior pours a liquid over themselves. The Tsahik (Godmother) of the Mangkawa shoots a burning arrow towards him, and sets the warrior ablaze, shortly after which he crashes and burns into a hot air balloon, causing an explosion. It’s the kind of kinetic choreography one associates with the man who directed one of the most memorable chase sequences in cinema history. There’s another pre-interval scene between Quaritch and Varang (the Tsahik of Mangkawas, played with chilling righteousness by Oona Chaplin), where the colonel seduces a native clan with his weaponry. In these sporadic moments of tension, you sense what Cameron clearly prefers writing.A still from Avatar: Fire and Ash.There’s not a whole lot that Fire and Ash does to justify its standalone existence, taking the narrative ahead only ever so slightly before the much-anticipated finale. And yet, it’s too competent to be outright dismissed, and Cameron invokes some interesting ideas within the vessel of a tentpole blockbuster. Through the Payakan (a whale-like creature belonging to the Tulkun clan) thread — the filmmaker tries to differentiate between violence as a means to colonise, and violence as a means to resist colonisation. Maybe I’m giving it too much credit here, or this could be Cameron’s extremely diluted commentary on the many armed conflicts taking place around the globe.Avatar: Fire and Ash does the unthinkable by making Cameron look ordinary. Ever since his first film, I can’t remember a James Cameron film feeling like an imitation of something mass-produced in a shopping mall. The commentary on the hubris of the American establishment rings hollow now, especially considering how measured it’s been since the first film, 16 years ago. The two films before this have cumulatively made five billion dollars, which is conservatively six times the investment into these films. Even without the euphoria of its predecessors, the latest one looks set to do all right.A visionary at one point, it’s sad to see James Cameron eager to die on Pandora’s floating hills. Not everyday do we see such once-in-a-generation talent defeated by their own success.*Avatar: Fire and Ash is playing in theatres.