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:

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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.)

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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.)

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Editor’s note

For the first time in a long time, my day job actually has a holiday shutdown period until the 12th 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).