The New Trailer for ‘Avatar: Fire & Ash’ Readies for War

Our first major look at Avatar: Fire & Ash a few months ago focused a lot on the kind of things James Cameron’s sci-fi saga does very well: very pretty celebrations of the natural world of Pandora. Our latest look puts all that under threat, as enemies old and new rise up to not just give the Sully family a hard time but threaten to consume all of Pandora itself in a devastating new war.

The latest trailer for Fire & Ash dives much more into the story that we can expect from Cameron’s third return to the world of Avatar (with plenty more still on the way over the next few years). We get a bit more about the background of the mysterious new fire tribe known as the Mangkwan clan and their leader, Varang (Oona Chaplin), and why they’ve turned their back on wider Na’vi society in the wake of a cataclysmic inferno that ravaged their lands. That isolation and aggression, naturally, leads to them running into the arms of the devious Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who coaxes Varang into leading an all-out war on her fellow Na’vi.

But there’s a lot more than just the inter-Na’vi conflict going on in this trailer, which once again sets the stage for a broader conflict between Pandora and Earth: namely that, after a close encounter with the Mangkwan, young human adoptee Spider (Jack Champion) suddenly becomes the first human to be able to exist on Pandora without having to use an oxygen mask. That very quickly becomes a problem if the other humans suddenly learn there’s a way they can breathe in Pandora’s atmosphere without having to use the Avatar system to take on Na’vi form… and no doubt any fighting between the Na’vi themselves will dissipate very quickly when they realize who the real threat is going to be.

All that means, of course, there’s going to be lots of action as the various conflicts break out, and there’s lots of very fun visuals here, like Na’vi riding ginormous sea creatures to attack the human flotilla, or the Mangkwan’s aerial assault. You can count on these films to look very pretty and have a ton of fun action in them, if nothing else!

Avatar: Fire & Ash hits theaters December 19.

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