If you check the archives, you’ll find I’ve already written two scathing reviews of the previous Avatar films, so it hardly seems worthwhile to type out a third one for Avatar: Fire and Ash.

They’re all the same film anyway, with minor changes. Writer-director-egomaniac James Cameron seems to feel that if it ain’t broke, financially speaking, don’t fix it, so he spends sickening amounts of money ($400 million for this installment) realizing his insipid sci-fi CGI visions, knowing they’ll make even more sickening amounts of money and guarantee further bloated sequels. As it stands today, Fire and Ash has already made more than $800 million worldwide.

Every time audiences turn out for these movies, it’s always the same: We arrive on the planet Pandora, a natural paradise rendered in slick pastels and populated by tall, trite-adage-spewing noble savages who are under attack by human colonizers seeking resources to exploit, the hyper-militarized “sky people.” Though the noble savages are always hopelessly outgunned, they inevitably channel their warrior skills and oneness with nature just in time for the big battle, when the sky people are defeated. Until the next sequel comes out, in which we’ll do it all over again.

And the usual suspects return for their big paydays: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Kate Winslet, and the gang.

This has been going on since 2009, when the first Avatar was released. The twenty-first century has been so harrowing, sixteen years feels like five lifetimes, at the very least. Even Cameron seems to acknowledge we’re now all in hell together, so this time he adds a bit of spice to this second sequel in the form of what we might call the “ash people.” Unlike the bland blue-skinned Na’vi “forest people” and the bland aqua-skinned Metkayina “water people,” the volcano-dwelling Mangkwan are a fierce offshoot of the Na’vi who have been literally burned by nature, their main settlements going up in flames. As their badass chief Varang (Oona Chaplin) tells it, their prayers to the usual nice nature gods went unanswered as they faced incineration, so the survivors decided to worship the fire itself as the more obviously powerful force in the world.

Well, okay then! This is almost a little bit interesting. And for once, we’re not dealing with pastels — the ash people go for gray, black, and red as their signature color scheme, and it’s wonderfully enlivening to the eye to get away from all those babyish hues that define life on Pandora. But the Varang character doesn’t really go anywhere. She’s cooler to look at than the other characters, but beyond snarls and swaggering, she doesn’t do much, especially once she hooks up with war-loving jarhead Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who’s offering to sell her clan guns. He was killed in the first Avatar, but was of course resurrected as a Na’vi “Recombinant,” which seems to make very little difference to his stupidly aggressive anti-Na’vi soldiering.

In Avatar: Fire and Ash, Quaritch “goes native” with Varang, but again, it doesn’t actually go anywhere. All the plotting tends to be strangely curtailed in these Avatar films, presumably because of the fan commitment to seeing the same movie again next time. One consequence is that characters have to be resurrected in some form or other, with nobody ever truly dying, to the point that death seems like a wonderfully elusive goal we never fully appreciated before.

Cameron borrows liberally from the old 1950s Westerns that clearly inform his conception of native peoples — and I defy you to find a more dubious source. So the ash people are after guns, just like the stereotypical “bad Indians” always were in old-time movies. Stereotypical “good Indians” in old Westerns, on the other hand, tend to befriend genocidal white settlers — embracing peace and cutting deals. The “good Indian” philosophy is expressed in Avatar: Fire and Ash by a wise old whale, who argues against fighting the sky people because violence always begets more violence.

Which brings us back to James Cameron, who recently gave an interview quoting a version of that line from his own film, partly in order to demonstrate that his Avatar movies are designed to parallel real-world conflicts: “It’s a fine line…. killing only leads to more killing, an endless expanding spiral…. That’s what we’ve seen. We’ve seen it in Gaza. We’ve seen it in Sudan. We’ve seen it in Ukraine.”

But he adds, referring to the Palestinian struggle against Israeli genocide, “There are some fights that are righteous. And total annihilation is a reason to fight. It’s existential.”

That might not sound like much — the bare-minimum acknowledgment of the reality in Gaza. But placed in the context of insistent pro-Israeli sentiments and, beyond that, mostly deafening silence from influential figures in the world of arts and entertainment, Cameron’s statement is more impressive.

It’s vintage Cameron, who’s obnoxious as hell and generally makes rotten but super-successful movies. But on the other hand, he periodically takes a public stand that you wish would be more typical of people who are rich and famous and can afford to take risks. Cameron has been one of the most vocal filmmakers when it comes to trying to save the medium from the powerful creeps who are eager to make money off cinema’s demise. Cameron has particularly blasted Netflix for its increasingly aggressive moves to kill off the theatrical exhibition of films in favor of in-home streaming:

Cameron criticized [Netflix co-CEO Ted] Sarandos’ publicly expressed belief that going to the theater to watch films is “an outmoded idea” for the majority of people — as well as Netflix’s habit of releasing its top-tier features, like Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma and Jane Campion’s Power of the Dog, for very limited runs in order to qualify them for Oscars consideration.

Cameron also addressed Sarandos’ claim that if Netflix acquired Warner Bros., the streamer would continue to release the studio’s films in theaters. “It’s sucker bait,” Cameron said. “‘We’ll put the movie out for a week, we’ll put it out for 10 days, we’ll qualify it for Academy Awards consideration.’ See, I think that’s fundamentally rotten at the core. A movie should be made as a movie for theatrical. And the Academy Awards to me mean nothing if they don’t mean theatrical, and I think they’ve been co-opted, and I think it’s horrific.”

Again, not the strongest sauce, except by comparison to the silence of most of Hollywood’s heavy hitters. Cameron at least makes it clear he wants to preserve some vestige of the theatrical film experience, even if he mostly wants to save it for the kind of films he makes, humdrum sagas full of obsolete notions done in same-old, same-old CGI.

Is it worth wrestling with the uncomfortable fact that, when so much else is bombing in theaters, Cameron can still draw enormous crowds with another Avatar movie? Even a sixteen-year absence from the screen between the first and second Avatar movies couldn’t kill the franchise. And it’s not just the reliable lure of big IP movies — even the Marvel films aren’t the reliable draw they once were. With a budget of $593.7 million, the last Star Wars movie way underperformed and the trailer for the new one, The Mandalorian & Grogu, has been widely mocked for looking like little more than Disney+ TV show.

Is there some secret sauce for getting people in theaters these days? Currently, people tend to leave their homes for lowish-budget horror, or the occasional auteur version, such as Sinners and Weapons. They go for large-scale kids’ movies like Zootopia 2, which is still doing booming business in its fifth week. They go for Christopher Nolan movies — look at the impact of the Odyssey marketing already starting for a movie not due in theaters until July. And, finally, they go for Big Jim’s Avatar movies.

I’d say horror and kid movies have perpetual appeal. Beyond that, people will leave the house to see giant action-oriented spectacles that justify a trip to the theater for the sake of the big-screen experience — if they seem likely to hit some sweet spot of kinetic thrills and feel-good sentiments. That’s a big if. But Cameron’s created a trusted brand when it comes to that combination, with two supremely successful franchises to boast of — Terminator and Avatar — along with a legendary entry in another franchise (Aliens) and, of course, the immensely profitable Titanic on top of the heap.

It could also be argued that Avatar hits a kind of ultimate sweet spot, fostering the illusion for audiences worldwide that we’re all on the side of those bravely fighting to save Mother Earth, even while most of us are actually standing by, letting our environment go straight to hell, and even siding eagerly with the top destroyers of the planet.

And happy New Year to you, too.