Avatar: The Way of Water
Directed by James Cameron
★★★½
Country Burbank
Project Title Avatar: The Way of Water
Caption (L-R): Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) and a Tulkun in 20th Century Studios' AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2022 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright © 2022 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.
Headline AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER
Thirteen years after the original Avatar, James Cameron invites us to revisit Pandora, the moon our protagonists live on, which is exploited by corporation-obsessed humans. After such a long wait and many rumored releases of this movie coming and going, it seemed like it was never going to make it to fruition, making sitting down to watch this movie a surreal experience. With the massive amount of anticipation for this movie and the reputation of the first one, this is a sequel that had a lot to live up to. Which, depending on what you want out of this movie, it may or may not have done just that.
It is absolutely insane how visually appealing Avatar: The Way of Water is. James Cameron has brought the most beautiful CGI to a movie the world has never seen, well, twice now. This film gives you plenty of fantastical set pieces and moments of characters just exploring the world, which make for delightful eye candy. And it isn’t just the same forests, floating mountains, helicopters, and mech-suits of the first one. The plot brings our characters to the reefs to hide for most of the movie, which brings about all kinds of new wildlife and man-made tools and weapons to experience with awe-filled eyes.
Unfortunately, Avatar: The Way of Water suffers from a bloated cast and an uninspired story. This film introduces the family Jake Sulley and Neytiri have made for themselves, which alone brought 5 new characters into the story. Between this, the new tribe, the new scientist team, and the marines assisting the resurrected Colonel Quaritch (yes, he’s really back), there’s simply not enough screen time to do this large of a cast any justice. Instead of growing to care for these characters, they merely exist as machinations of the plot, which is about little more than delivering cool action scenes and beautiful shots.
What should have made the movie a compelling and nail-biting experience, instead made it feel like a chore to watch at times. Tossing aside so many characters who could have benefited from more development in the film’s more than 3-hour runtime, the film would have benefited from using some of its time spent exploring Pandora to actually have the characters do something that makes us care about them. With all that being said, this is still a very visually stunning movie. If a beautiful world and incredible action scenes are all this movie needed, it would have been fantastic.