Review: "Avatar: The Way of Water"

The sequel to the highest-grossing movie of all time is just as impressive, and just as forgettable.

Avatar: The Way of Water (Dir. James Cameron)

It’s here! Thirteen years and about a billion dollars later, we finally have it: The long-awaited sequel to James Cameron’s sci-fit megahit Avatar—a film that everyone loved, but no one can remember.

Because, let’s be honest. Who actually remembers anything about the movie besides macho marines and 10-foot tall blue aliens? The planet Pandora is glorious, yes. The CGI is impressive, yes. But what else? All I’ve got is a vague memory of humans in mech suits waging war against a Giant Metaphor for colonized indigenous populations (with questionable implications). There was some sort of communion with a deity, I think? Some environmentalist overtones? Call me a hater, but I just don’t think that anything from Avatar­ really sticks. It’s a glossy action flick that was (and is) a fine piece of entertainment, but nothing more than that. This is, of course, the movie that made just under three billion dollars, broke every box office record in the book, and forever changed action cinema into the greenscreen-churning machine that it is today. So what do I know?

Apparently nothing, because I found Avatar: The Way of Water just as forgettable as its predecessor.

Ok, that’s a bit hyperbolic, so let me clarify: I enjoyed The Way of Water, in all its schlocky, uber-expensive glory. I was fully engaged and entertained over the course of a three hour and twelve minute(!) runtime, impressed by James Cameron’s scope of vision for Pandora and its creatures. Everything worked, but for all that, I walked out of the theater with a sense of quiet numbness, the feeling that I would forget most of what I watched by the next day. (Spoiler: I did.)

This is kind of a weird thing to complain about, given the current state of action cinema. Writer/director/CGI visionary James Cameron evidently cares for his sci-fi universe, having populated it with big-hearted characters and a genuine sense of awe. This is a movie with feelings, god damn it, and in a year when films like Jurassic World: Dominion and Thor: Love and Thunder are topping the charts, that matters. Phrase it another way, though, and you have a different story: In a year when blockbuster cinema means paint-by-numbers corporate synergy projects, then, yeah, The Way of Water is inevitably going to be a masterpiece.

Anyway, what’s the movie actually about? As with the first film, the humans, or “sky people,” have left a resource-depleted Earth to colonize Pandora, home of the blue-skinned Na’vi people. Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the human villain from the first film, has returned from the dead in a Na’vi avatar with the objective of colonizing Pandora and killing protagonist Jake Sully (Sam Worthington). Fearful that his presence will bring further destruction to his Na’vi clan, Jake and his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) decided to move their family to the land of the Metkayina, a seaside Na’vi clan fully adapted to the high seas. There, Sully sons Neteyam (James Flatters) and Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) find their warrior identities while adopted daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver)—the immaculately-conceived daughter of Dr. Grace Augustine (also Sigourney Weaver)—begins a spiritual journey.

Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) teaches his son to hunt.

Sound overwhelming? It certainly is, but Cameron interweaves these characters with the expansive scope of a well-written fantasy epic, a luxury afforded to him by the film’s three hour and twelve minute(!!) runtime. Throughout, we get spiritual communions with ancient whales known as the Tulkun, soap operas about teenaged outcasts, environmentalist polemics against overfishing, and more beyond that. It’s all here, and save for some occasional moments of truly stupid dialogue (the dick-swinging marines are the main culprits), it all works, thanks in large part to Cameron’s grand vision.

But ultimately, The Way of Water lacks physical crunch. This is the thing that makes action cinema stick in one’s mind, from the swooping jet sequences of Top Gun: Maverick to the crackling physical violence of John Wick. I blame the CGI: While everything on the surface of The Way of Water looks great (the underwater sequences are particularly shimmery), there is an inertness to the punches, kicks, rifle shots, and explosions that stems from the oh-so-expensive mo-cap technology. Certain Marvel films feel like gritty social realism in comparison to Na’vi action setpieces, not least because in those films, CGI is used to accentuate the actions of flesh-and-blood actors, not totalize them. In The Way of Water, digital effects are no longer just tools—they are essential' features.

I’m just not persuadedby the idea that cinema should (or even can) fully shift into something that so distorts reality. I admit to some hypocrisy in thinking this—I love Avengers: Infinity War as much as the next MCU fanboy, and was fully convinced by Thanos, basically a shriveled digital fruit. Yet The Way of Water banks its existence on digitization in a way that even the first Avatar didn’t. Save for Spider (Jack Champion), the human son of Colonel Quaritch and adoptee into the Sully family, The Way of Water’s protagonists are all mo-cap’d Na’vi, and thus dependent on engineers programming them into existence from a keyboard.

The performers behind the polka-dotted suits are almost universally excellent, and give The Way of Water’s its most affecting qualities. Worthington imbues Jake Sully with the loving discipline of a military father; Britain Dalton plays his son Lo’ak as a tender outcast. As Colonel Quaritch, Stephen Lang reprises his villainous turn from the first film with his snarlig Texan drawl, while Sigourney Weaver injects wide-eyed wonder to a teenager discovering a new natural world. Zoe Saldaña gives the film’s best performance as Neytiri, a Na’vi woman with a fury that leaps out of the screen. Hers is an impressive case of human emotion displayed across layers of digitization.

This is the first of four planned Avatar sequels by Cameron, and if this is anything to go by, we should be in good hands. I can’t say that I found The Way of Water all that memorable—I am yet to be convinced by this level of animated reality—yet it is hard to deny the artistry that went into it. Whether we like it or not, CGI blockbusters are the zeitgeist, and Jim Cameron—bless his soul—has the care and the clout to make them into passion projects. Here’s to hoping the next three ventures into the Pandoran wilds push those boundaries even further.

Avatar: The Way of Water is available in theaters everywhere.