Wednesday new release: 17 December 2025

Avatar: Fire and Ash (Cameron, 2025) is playing in cinemas.

Before I start on Avatar: Fire and Ash, I want to acknow­ledge a sad milestone.

Today, my RNZ film review­ing col­league Simon Morris records his final ever epis­ode of At the Movies. He took over the slot when Jonathan Dennis passed away in 2002 and he’s pro­duced and presen­ted over 1000 shows since then. (He was metic­u­lously keep­ing count until a change to the RNZ web­site meant he could no longer num­ber them publicly.)

Today’s pro­gramme will be avail­able online tonight (I pre­sume — he doesn’t always remem­ber to flick the switch) and will air on Sunday afternoon’s Culture 101 show at about 1.30.

Looking back on it, the loss of the Wednesday night broad­cast slot was the begin­ning of the end for At the Movies, replaced by yet more polit­ic­al debate.

I’m proud that I have made a small con­tri­bu­tion to At the Movies over the years — I might have made 50 of them dur­ing times when Simon was unavail­able. In 2020, I had a decent run of about 14 shows, all recor­ded and edited at home while the Covid lock­downs were in place.

But it’s Simon who we are here to cel­eb­rate. A media legend, you might say, with involve­ment in the Wellington music scene in the late 60s and 70s, scriptwrit­ing for tele­vi­sion, and pro­du­cing pop­u­lar music shows like Radio With Pictures in the 80s (includ­ing mak­ing pion­eer­ing music videos). He once deigned to take part in a pop music quiz show that I made for stu­dent radio in about 1988 — that’s how far back we go — and he was a colum­nist in the two issues of OnFilm I edited before that went kaput.

Unerringly affable, it’s always a pleas­ure to see him at screen­ings and dis­cuss what we’ve seen — even if we rarely agree on much. He and At the Movies will be sorely missed from a film media land­scape that is shrink­ing by the day, it seems.

I’ve been asked a few times lately what will hap­pen for RNZ screen cov­er­age in the new year and the truth is I don’t know. When the restruc­ture was announced, there was talk about the newly cre­ated gaps in the ser­vice being filled by the freel­ance pool but who knows? It’s going to be a dif­fer­ent world.

At least I’m being invited back to work with Emile, Tim and Bonnie on Nights each Friday. It’s always a high­light of my week but I’ll miss those times when I actu­ally got to make radio — script­ing, sourcing audio, edit­ing (either by myself or with the geni­uses who oper­ate the stu­di­os at RNZ). Editing the James Cameron inter­view last week­end reminded me how much I enjoy the process.

Which brings me to Avatar 3 (aka Avatar: Fire and Ash). The inter­na­tion­al embargo on reviews broke at 3am this morn­ing and every man and their dog appears to have had their say. Here’s my ver­sion for the RNZ web­site:

…

And yet, Avatar is still not a fran­chise that appears to have fans, the way that Star Wars or even Harry Potter does. If there are any Avatar tat­toos or cos­play­ers out there, I haven’t seen them. It’s hard to argue that these films are beloved in any mean­ing­ful way but they are clearly enjoyed by mil­lions of people and maybe that’s enough.

We can argue some­thing sim­il­ar about James Cameron, the dir­ect­or. Despite all the box office suc­cess (three out of the top four films of all time are his) and the icon­ic char­ac­ters he has been respons­ible for, audi­ences haven’t warmed to him the way that they have with the imp­ish, late-period, Martin Scorsese. (The cur­rent pub­li­city tour seems designed to try and turn Cameron’s prickly repu­ta­tion around.)

…

It’s this expan­sion of both the anthro­po­lo­gic­al and spir­itu­al worlds of Pandora that are the main nov­elty in this edi­tion of the Avatar chron­icles. We see a rich­er, more ‘human’ ver­sion of Pandora but we also learn more about the mys­ter­i­ous Eywa, the Gaia-like god­dess who binds all of nature– and every gen­er­a­tion – together.

It’s clear that Na’vi val­ues are hugely import­ant to Cameron – the idea that everything you might need is either with­in arm’s reach or to be found your feet, and that the waste­ful and destruct­ive ‘extract­ive’ human approach denudes us envir­on­ment­ally but also spir­itu­ally. To that extent, Avatar: Fire and Ash is anoth­er bil­lion dol­lar piece of vegan pro­pa­ganda but Cameron the film­maker also knows that audi­ences want some sug­ar to go with their veget­ables and, once again, he proves that there is no bet­ter dir­ect­or of large scale action sequences. No one has bet­ter com­mand of the phys­ic­al geo­graphy of a scene – you are always aware of where every­one and everything is in rela­tion to each oth­er, a skill that’s sur­pris­ingly hard to pull off.

Read the whole thing at RNZ – Life. No, really, I need the clicks!

Further reading

Coincidentally, my con­tri­bu­tion to the RNZ ‘Best Films of the Year’ sur­vey was also pos­ted today. (Again, clicks are good.)

Editor’s note

For the first time in a long time, my day job actu­ally has a hol­i­day shut­down peri­od until the 12^th of January (and RNZ aren’t gear­ing up to offer me any freel­ance work until that date either) so I feel like the stars are align­ing to tell me to take a few weeks off from the news­let­ter, too. This will be the first prop­er sum­mer break — no writ­ing, no radio — in nearly ten years and I’m start­ing to feel the lack of it. It’s been a bru­tal few years and I need to recharge my batteries.

Therefore, next Monday will be the last news­let­ter of 2025 and Funerals & Snakes will return on Monday 12 January. Any incon­veni­ence caused is regret­ted (but not too much).