Film Reviews: Fire and Ash — colonialism, genocide and environmental catastrophe

Avatar: Fire and Ash (Disney)

It's gonna be a blue, blue Christmas.

Avatar: Fire and Ash

★★★☆☆

(12) is the third instalment in James Cameron’s epic sci-fi myth set on the planet of Pandora, which opens with ex-Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) – now a Na’vi warrior – living in peace among the Reef People with his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), children Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) and Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), and Spider (Jack Champion), the human boy who has become more Na’vi than the Na’vi themselves.

The family’s idyll is soon shattered, however, by a series of attacks by a number of enemies, among them Jake’s old foe Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), an invading ‘Sky People’ force led by General Ardmore (Edie Falco), and Varang (Oona Chaplin), the leader of a rival tribe of Na’vi who is determined to use human weaponry to establish her clan’s dominance.

In further developing the world-building of Avatar (2009) and Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), Cameron delivers a jaw-dropping CGI spectacle once more, and he has also ramped up the stakes: Fire and Ash is a film about colonialism, genocide and environmental catastrophe, with Jake and his plucky band of Na’vi a thin blue line in a last-ditch defence against planetary collapse.

Chock-a-block with action sequences and inventive in its creation of alien species, Fire and Ash should be a great sci-fi flick, but the big problem with its multi-plot approach is that too many of the story strands are delivering more or less the same message, ie the dire consequences of failing to respect Mother Nature (in addition to the threats outlined above, there is also a Sky People whaling mission that promises to exterminate the wise old creatures of Pandora’s seas, and the youngster Kiri also explores a mystical bond with a Gaia-like goddess).

With a running time of 195 minutes, Fire and Ash feels like an entire saga shoehorned into a single movie; here, as is generally the case, less would very definitely have delivered more.

The Six Billion Dollar Man

★★★★☆

The Six Billion Dollar Man (18s) is a documentary from Eugene Jarecki about how Julian Assange, the Australian journalist who founded Wikileaks, became ‘the most dangerous man on the planet.’

The Six Billion Dollar Man is a documentary about Julian Assange that seeks to get behind the headlines.

Dangerous, that is, to any state with dirty secrets it wanted to keep hidden; Wikileaks emerged from what Naomi Klein describes here as ‘the idealistic phase of the internet,’ releasing classified information into the public domain in the name of free speech and human rights as it delivered ‘the untold truths to the world.’

A two-time winner at Cannes 2025, for the 10th anniversary L’Oeil d’Or prize and the first ever Golden Globe for Documentary, Jarecki’s film seeks to get behind the headlines of ‘the public narrative that [Assange] is a hacker, a rapist, a spy.’ Far more interested in Assange the activist, journalist and publisher than Assange the man, The Six Billion Dollar Man is compelling viewing for anyone interested in the freedom of the press and the future of democracy.

The Spongebob Movie: Search for Squarepants

★★★☆☆

And so to Bikini Bottom and The Spongebob Movie: Search for Squarepants (G) , which finds the delightfully gormless Spongebob (voiced by Tom Kenny) pressganged by the Flying Dutchman (Mark Hamill), aka ‘the most pants-wettingingly scary ghost ever to roam the high seas,’ who seeks a pure, innocent soul to break the spell that has doomed the Dutchman to his fate for the past three centuries.

The Spongebob Movie: The Search for Squarepants

Happily, Spongebob is determined to win his Swashbuckler Certificate from his mentor Mr Krabs (Clancy Brown), and so our yellow hero swings into action with hearty yo-ho-ho.

It’s all wonderfully ridiculous, of course, and Spongebob makes for a charmingly naïve piratical hero as he accidentally thwarts the Dutchman’s nefarious scheme. Be warned, though: while previous Spongebob movies have offered plenty of gags for older audiences, this one is aimed squarely at the younger demographic.

All theatrical releases