December 19, 2025

There is a scene in James Cameron's "True Lies" (1994) in which members of an archetypal terrorist organization gather around in a circle and shoot their machine guns in the air as an act of solidarity. The men are supposedly from some unnamed Arab country and exist chiefly as the bad guys to Arnold Schwarzenegger's good guy, with little to no character development or insight into their motivations or hardships. Granted, "True Lies" is meant to function as a silly action romp, and so I suppose we can forgive it for being superficial, but a similar scene takes place with the bad guys in Cameron's "Avatar: Fire and Ash," a movie I imagine he wants us to take more seriously given its scope and earnest messages about family and nature, and while this series continues to show Cameron's ceaseless passion and successful execution for pushing filmmaking standards and leveraging state-of-the-art technology, it also shows he hasn't grown much in the "making generalizations" and substance departments, and at this point in time, "Avatar" is in need of some substance.