Soggy ‘AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER’ A Gateway Drug for the Return of 3D

After thirteen years, countless production delays, and allegedly tectonic technological leaps forward, Avatar: The Way of Water is finally here. And it’s… fine. This long-awaited but not-that-anticipated sequel to the highest grossing movie of all time reintroduces audiences to the world of Pandora and the Na’vi people who occupy its lands and oceans. The second film in a planned total of five films, The Way of Water features some groundbreaking tech advances but for a three-plus hour movie, the plotting is notably sparse, the characters are weak, and it feels very much like a middle chapter.

In the time since we’ve last seen them, the Sully family has expanded, with Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) welcoming four children into their clan. There’s their rebellious second son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton); their loyal and obedient firstborn son Neteyam (Jaime Flatters); their coy eight-year old daughter Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss); and their enigmatic adoptive daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver). The “sky people” (aka humans), led by a back-from-the-grave Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), return to Pandora with designs to inhabit the planet. Their aim: to quell any potential unrest by offing the Sully family. Jake and his family flee to new wet corners of Pandora.

This feels more like a narrative convenience to shift the setting from the floating stone lands and verdant jungles of Pandora that we’ve already seen to the ocean tribes just so Cameron can play around with some new tech. And boy does he play. The famed innovator spent over a decade developing new motion capture technology that enables him to shoot mo-cap underwater and the result is often wowing. The visual highlights of the film are found when Cameron literally just lets his camera run as the Sully family plays around in the ocean wave, dancing with gigantic whale-turtles or learning to surf on water banshees.

By contrast though, some of the other visual components feel weirdly dated. On land, there doesn’t seem to be any discernible advances in the technology since the 2009 original film. By modern standards, the effects can look pretty unconvincing. While it enables Cameron to paint on a truly massive scale, the overwhelming amount of CGI often gives the impression of a video game cut scene. This presents issues in terms of visual consistency that are only exacerbated by some very distracting frame rate swaps where the film’s projection appears to change from smooth to choppy often in the midst of one scene. The effect is jarring when it’s not straight up nauseating. 

The problem remains that it’s all in service of an often paper thin narrative. Cameron, working from a script he co-wrote with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, doesn’t really find much to do with the Sully family other than put them at odds with a villain they’ve already confronted. Thematically, the film offers similarly thin takes on ideas of capitalism vs. environmentalism while placing larger focus on the idea of responsibility within a family. The fact of the matter though is that I couldn’t remember a single Na’vi’s characters name, let alone a single Sully family name other than Jake, even after spending 193-minutes in a dark theater with them. These characters are familiar archetypes going through familiar motions. If the larger story had felt more substantial than a “rehash of previous conflicts, plus wet,” then the thinly written characters might not have mattered. But unfortunately there just isn’t much depth to be found here, regardless of how long you can hold your breath for.

There’s many, many more of these Avatar movies coming down the pipeline, with the third film scheduled for release in December of 2024. The Way of Water feels like its purpose was to get Avatar back in the spotlight after nearly a decade-and-a-half on the shelf to make waves for future endeavors rather than it was designed to tell a fulfilling story in and of itself. At the end of the day, there just isn’t much Na’vi meat on the bones here. After 13 years, this critic expected more. Let’s just hope we don’t see the resurgence of 3D. 

CONCLUSION: ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ propels certain directorial methodologies forward but forgets to also tell a compelling standalone story. The not-wet effects are often iffy and the characters are largely unremarkable and one-dimensional archetypes. But the water sure does look neat. 

C+

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