Avatar: The Way of Water

Avatar: The Way of Water

Set more than a decade after the events of the first film, learn the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri, and their kids), the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive, and the tragedies they endure.

  • Released: 2022-12-14
  • Runtime: 192 minutes
  • Genre: Action, Adventure
  • Stars: Kate Winslet, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Cliff Curtis, Giovanni Ribisi, CCH Pounder, Joel David Moore, Matt Gerald, Trinity Bliss, Britain Dalton, Jamie Flatters, Jack Champion, Filip Geljo, Duane Evans Jr., Chloe Coleman, Jemaine Clement, Ava Diakhaby, Edie Falco, Michelle Yeoh
  • Director: James Cameron
 Comments
  • bootsnchaps - 21 June 2024
    Avtar-Water is Familiar and Wet
    While beautiful to look at, this was largely the first movie shifted to the fad of being kid-centric. Netiri was reduced from warrior to a weeping screeching weak sister with very little to do. Jake was reduced from Turok Makto to a grumpy ex-marine dad who has to act like a maine to look like he's in charge over kids that don't listen.

    Why go to the expense of reviving disposable and dead soldiers? How did Grace's avatar which was not animated conceive a child.? What happened to the mining site? What happened to the ancestor tress in the conflagration?

    The next slew of Cameron fantasies HAS to be better.
  • lucaslw-93145 - 26 May 2024
    Lovely visuals from the mind of James Cameron and.. what technically counts as a script.. also from the mind of James Cameron
    Boy am I not a fan of this franchise. Some of the most involved VFX art and creative world-building in the history of cinema and they continue to dump mediocre script after mediocre script into this. James Cameron's lack of pretense with these movies is admirable. I'm convinced he knows these scripts suck but he just keeps chugging ahead to fund this monument to his imagined sci-fi paradise. Kudos for that.

    If you didn't like the first plot of the first film, you won't like this one either. It's the same recycled, boring beats that didn't work the first time repackaged into this second installment. There's the literal same antagonist (despite dying in the first film), there's Jake learning a new way of life again, humans destroying the environment, and then a final battle between Jake and the Colonel. Riveting stuff, hard to see what's coming next with all the twists and turns the story has to offer. In fairness, there are children in this film, that's a new addition, but they're bland and the similarities drawn between the younger brothers of the two chiefs and the lone whale-creature are pretty much surface level and end at they're all "outcasts" however dramatized that may be. I'm not really invested in any of these characters and when the older brother dies or the younger sibling is in grave danger, I struggle to feel anything.

    The colonel loves to threaten to kill Jake's children, but he seems way more invested in announcing how he'll definitely do it rather than actually kill anyone the 3-4 plentiful chances he gets to actually kill the kids. Not really a fan of that. Either write the children out of these cheap farces or have him follow through. The only thing more laborious than sitting through 3 hours of this slog is listening to the colonel repeat himself over and over again as he continually lets opportunity obnoxiously slip past him.

    The soundtrack is forgettable, it wasn't till the 3rd act of the film that I realized there even was a soundtrack. Not that every great movie needs a memorable soundtrack, but this movie is already missing a lot.

    Zoe Saldana is in this. Good for her, get that bag girl.

    Idk, VFX are fine. The first one was groundbreaking for its time, by this point in 2022, I'm not entirely sure the VFX have been pushed much further than the first movie. It may have been my imagination or the fact that I watched this on a TV instead of a theater (55in 4k OLED screen though, so still no slouch), but parts of the VFX, largely the mix media between real humans and their CGI surroundings / alien fauna & flora weren't even top of the line by modern standards. Either way, Pandora remains a visually spectacle even if it's not enough to make up for the lack of story here. The ocean and sealife shots are still very cool to watch.

    Not a fan, looking forward to making the same review in 15 years when Avatar 3 drops.