Avatar: The Way of Water Review

Which way would that be, then? Would it be downward and in a spiralling motion? Likely so. After the forgettable, CGI-laden charms of the first feature from over a decade ago, James Cameron sticks electrics into the lifeless corpse of the Avatar series, paddles up and powers through. Avatar: The Way of Water takes some powering through, and most of that trouble doesn’t even come from the appalling running time that looks to redefine new areas of Pandora, even though audiences had explored the same ideals and messages in the first, better movie. At least Avatar is now better than something, with Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and company back for several rounds after a knockout blow. 

Fleeing the nest and community they saved in the first film for the sake of protecting the unit and teasing the audience with the prospect of change and adventure, Avatar: The Way of Water sets out with something to prove. In his hopes of pontificating on the new world that has had little detail truly delivered, Cameron amps up the character designs, the tribes and the beauties of Pandora as much as he can. A returning Stephen Lang makes about as much sense as a cop-out, trap door sleight of hand trick, and it comes as an inevitability. Much of the shaky core of Avatar: The Way of Water comes from that paralysis that comes from writing to conclusions. Open-ended, the first was not. Justice was restored but Cameron must pull his characters, dead or alive, into the fold once again. It is rocky. New additions be damned, Kate Winslet and Edie Falco are criminally underused. Wasted.

Worthington takes a back seat to introduce the children of Sully, who are as forgettable as they are forcefully rammed through as something to be connected with. An outcast here, a dynamic hero there, a youngster to tie it together and an extra addition to include Sigourney Weaver. Fleshing out a whole batch of characters eats up time, so much so that the essential moments take a backseat to trying to reveal so much of these characters with as little detail as possible. All of that is a ninety-minute montage gamble. It fails, but it is clear why Cameron has to do that, to build up to a massive blowout at the end of the movie, as overdrawn and segmented as it was in the first feature, its cuts to black teasing the sweet release of the lights coming up and the stretch of the legs as the masses plod out into the dying embers of sunlight, where once the world was brighter. No dice for Avatar: The Way of Water, a feature that goes on in perpetuity, for its sequels are close upon us.  

Familiar and familial messages overtake the flash hands of new dynamics, but at least there is limited consequence. Avatar: The Way of Water stretches its story, its purpose, and its character, sacrificing all three for the sake of padding out a story that had met with its natural end. So goes merchandising. Cameron peddles his blue man group wares with obvious connotations of family unit strength, grief in warfare and environmentalism, all of it played to the same tune as the first – and without the growth necessary to make the sequels worth holding any breath for. Breathe in, as those blue and light blue clans speak of frequently. It relies on the fundamentals of the first feature, the connection to nature and the beauty of it all – but were those fundamentals even explained that well in the first place? If they were, Cameron should know better than to tread water for three hours.