Avatar: The Way of Water Movie Review - 13 Years Later…More of the Same

James Cameron’s “Avatar” is one of the most critically divisive films ever released to cinemas, but it’s also one of the biggest flukes in Hollywood history, setting inconceivable box-office record after record, eventually becoming the highest grossing film ever made. That is until it lost its spot to “Avengers: Endgame” in 2019, and then two years later, it retained its throne after a 2021 re-release in China and 2022 re-release in the United States. My thoughts? It’s a film that does have revolutionary CGI, but revolutionary CGI does not a good film make. Sure, the world of Pandora, the wildlife and the motion-capture of the Navi are impeccable thanks to the best visual effects house in Hollywood, Weta, James Horner has a solid score and there’s competent acting to be found. But if you take the spectacle and other elements out of the equation, everything surrounding the movie is subpar. The characters are flat, generic and dimension-wise black and white, the dialogue is horrible, the environmental message is ham-fisted and the story, yes, borrows plot-points of Pocahontas, Fern Gully and Dances with Wolves—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as a lot of movies take story beats from other stories—but it doesn’t execute them well, nor establishes the complicated narrative it thinks it has.

Whether or not Cameron’s visually masterful picture left a cultural staple on the industry is an endlessly debatable topic, but regardless of everyone else’s thoughts on the film, including my own (positive or negative), it was inevitable that a sequel to the biggest film in history would become a reality, but only when advancements in filmmaking technology for motion capture underwater was possible according to Cameron. And how can you go wrong with James Cameron and sequels? After all, he made the action movie masterpieces that are Terminator 2: Judgement Day and Aliens, so maybe his experience with sequels could go hand and hand with newly awaited “Avatar: The Way of Water.”

James, I get that this is what you are passionate about and you want to cultivate a franchise on this world that you have envisioned since 2009, but, really…this is it? Your biggest fans and even the most avid of film aficionados have anticipated with bated breath for a sequel for 13 years that has a $400 million budget and a star-studded cast, and this is the best we got? This is what’s touted on advertisements as ‘a motion picture event of a generation?’, that’s getting awards consideration? Here’s the deal guys, if you are expecting to see an adventurous new leap forward into the world of Pandora with an enthralling plot and improvement on its characters, what you actually get with “Avatar: The Way of Water”, is more of the same thing of what you would expect.

The story? Well, in the new storyline here is that we jump many years after Avatar’s events. Jake Sully (remember him?) is living good life on Pandora, as the Omaticaya chieftain and a family man with his wife Neytiri from the last movie, and his children. It isn’t long until the humans would return to the luscious planet again along with a familiar face in Colonel Miles Quaritch now inhabiting a Na’vi Avatar who plans with his fellow Avatar platoon to exact revenge on Jake and his family. Jake flees with his family to a Na’vi water tribe to seek refuge and camaraderie, but as the humans and Quaritch draw ever so closer, how will Jake and Na’vi prevail against the humans?

Before we discuss anything positive about the movie, I want to hone in something (or someone) that indubitably pulls this movie away from reaching its ambitious potential of being this motion picture event of a generation. The most important and glaring problem with “Avatar: The Way of Water” is James Cameron himself. Cameron in the past has been known, or used to be known, for providing a good story with compelling, memorable characters while including innovative effects as seen in “T2”, “Aliens” and I’ll throw a bone in and say “Titanic”. “Avatar 2” is the antithesis of his prior work. Yes, the visual effects are beautiful, the environments and civilizations are stunning, the wildlife, the difference of the two Na’vi types, humanity’s technology and organisms have such attention to detail, but when Cameron focuses way too much on the CG, he pads the film out with laborious, drawn-out, self-absorbed sequences of characters looking at the wildlife, going to beautiful vistas, and communicating with extraterrestrial sea creatures. His overindulgence and obsession with the world of Pandora and Weta’s state-of-the-art visual effects distracts him from getting us to know, care about or improve the characters or telling a better story about family that earns its needless, punishing 3hr long runtime.

And speaking of story, let’s discuss it, shall we? I have watched a bunch of movies that are three hours long or more, and I have never seen a movie like this where the film is so long, and yet there’s so little that’s accomplished. “Avatar 2” is not a movie that essentially a movie in which it is compiled of scenes that advance the plot by way of deus ex machinas, contrives as a way to repeat the same stakes as before of characters being captured and rescuing said captees—all of which happens to Sully’s children for about three times in a row, mainly because the film always has to find a way to get them into trouble—or subplots that are hardly explored and barely have a payoff of any kind.

You have a romance subplot which you think builds up to something but by the end hardly has an ending; there’s even a bullying plot point where the son of the Water tribe and his friends plan to prank one of Sully’s youngest reckless son after a scuffle they had as the son was defending his own adopted sister from their torment. They pretend to forgive his apology and ask him if he wants to go fishing beyond the barriers, in which the son accepts cautiously. During their hunting trip, they enact their plan by leaving him stranded all by himself, eventually encounter and almost get eaten by what looks like a Pandora Dunkleosteus. And just when he thought he’s punching his ticket to the afterlife, a whale comes out of nowhere to his aid and kills the Dunkleosteus, which in turn makes both them connect as they learn about each other as being outcasts by their communities.

Here’s the funny part, that is literally is the catalyst of the movie that leads to the battle in the third act and also addresses its hastened environmental message that comes out of left field. Had the whale not come and rescue Jake’s middle son by sheer luck after the bullies purposefully abandoned him, the water tribe and Jake Sully would have terrible beef and the movie’s story would become completely different.

And brace yourself with this nugget. See, with the first Avatar, the message was about prevent the destruction of nature and says anti-corporate things, people bad-nature good… The new environmental message is to not mess with the oceans and to make shallow grade-school social commentary about ivory hunting and whaling. But that falls apart when you realize that the whales communicate immaculately with the Na’vi, and they harbor a one-of-a-kind resource such as a fluid inside the whales which prevents aging/immortality that changes science and humanity forever that it opens so much can of worms that it didn’t need to open and renders the message totally fruitless!

We move onto the backbone of stories which are its characters and I find it ironic that Cameron criticizes Marvel for poor character writing, and yet, his characters and how they are written aren’t any better. Despite the fact that the movie and Avatar 1’s extended cut states that humanity is suffering on Earth from overpopulation, disease and finite resources and the Na’vi are savages that are hard to reason with, Avatar 2 plot conspires against the humans to such a degree that there’s no nuance to take the movie seriously, and every advantage the humans have end ups making them incompetent. All the movie has to provide for characterization that the Navi are the good guys and the Humans (except the ones allied with the Na’vi) are Star Wars Empire levels of bad, to the point of wiping out and burning forests and animals with a single gigantic drop pod just to show comically evil they are.

Starting off with the protagonists, Jake Sully, since the beginning, has always been a boring main character and it doesn’t help that Sam Worthington isn’t that good of an actor to make Jake a compelling and relatable one both in Avatar 1 and 2. His entire journey of the original rests on him being lucky , such as the fact that despite the Na’vi encountering many false Na’vi bodies, they accept him simply because of pure plot convenience, he does a much better job than every human being on Pandora when trying to make a compromise and is a better Na’vi than those who lived for countless generations when it comes to battle strategy and flying aquatic beats that he’s never been familiar with. Nothing about Jake is special, earned or fascinating, as he’s just a prop to get the story from A to B.

Not to mention the horrid things he has caused throughout both movies such as screwing humanity over because he thinks the Na’vi are misunderstood or endangering a tribe because of information he forgot to tell them about (just like the last time), are not held against him and are just thrown away because story abides in favor of his actions.

Jake in this movie has almost little to no depth or progression in the movie. The best the movie tries to do is offer him a character arc of him considering protecting your family not from fleeing from the fight, but by fighting the enemy head on. Wow, Jake, I wonder what took you so long to come up with that conclusion? It’s not like what we know of Jake from the last movie and in literally, the first act of the movie one year later where they sabotage a monorail to get weapons and him and Neytiri saved his children from Quaritch in an ambush. Nothing in this movie explores Jake’s character or makes him flawed, all he amounts to is doing what is best for the family and there isn’t much else to him other than that.

Zoe Saldana returns as Neytiri, and while she still gives out a striking performance as she did before, she shockingly is less of character than who she was in the original film. Now, to be honest, her character wasn’t exactly strong as it was before, but you could see the possibilities of where the film could take her and flesh her out. But she is given such minute material and serves only to fight in the big battle set pieces, become worried for her family or cry and mourn when something tragic happens.

The also movie brings back Sigourney Weaver, but not as Grace since she passed away in the last movie. Instead, she performs and motion-captures the character Kiri, who is the half-breed adopted daughter of Sully who was given birth to by the inanimate Avatar body of Grace, which I don’t even know how that is even possible or if the movie even explains it. She exists by some immaculate conception from a non-living body, because. She also acquires powers to talk to and control wildlife, adapts underwater for an unlimited time, There’s this idea that she is connected to Eywa who is the spirit the Na’vi worship, but the film doesn’t seem to do much with it as it is shown to set up for the next movie rather than unveil information about in this one.

Getting into the villains, for as abysmal that the secondary villains are like the Saturday morning cartoon bad guy who hunts whales and sea-life’s resources because he wants money and the military Avatar henchmen that are written like the second-rate cardboard cutout version of the crew from “Aliens”, there was one villain in the movie that Cameron could made much more fascinating and a well-rounded character, and that would be Stephen Lang as Col. Miles Quaritch. I was stunned when I heard that his character was going to be revived for this film since he died from the last movie, that I was curious to figure out how the film would explain his return. The reveal for his transplant into an Avatar body is a bit cheap for storytelling, but given how advanced technology is for humanity as shown in the film, it was something that was plausible, cheap, but plausible. And seeing how he has become an Avatar himself, perhaps he could’ve been an interesting and promising character if Cameron were to make improvements. But for how good Stephen Lang is in the movie, he’s still stuck with the stereotypical aggressive army villain trope as he was before.

Anytime the movie gets close to grow Quaritch and learn about his current ideals as him being an Avatar, questioning his morality and purpose, it ends up becoming wasted potential because of the execution on display. For example, there was a potentially a solid plot thread such as him and his interactions with his estranged son who Sully’s kids befriend and call ‘Spider’, as this could not only build Quaritch’s character and morality, but Spider to recognize that not everything is black and white, and for him to reflect on where he really belongs since he isn’t 100% accepted by Sully and Neytiri. The problem is that he barely has development or chemistry with his own son for most of the movie to make the father-son dynamic work, and when you think that both have a change in character and the end of the third act film, their resolution and the build to the resolution is a gigantic missed opportunity.

But after all that, aside from the CGI and acting which I have touched on briefly, does “Avatar: The Way of Water” have something else remarkable to offer? As a matter of fact, quite so. The musical score by Simon Franglen is a fairly good, predecessor’s score orchestrated by the late James Horner matching every tune well to every appropriate scene and tone the film provides. Not to mention that Russell Carpenter’s cinematography showcases such grandiose shots when it comes to filming the scenery of the islands, oceanic areas, including action sequences that James Cameron does admirably on, being well-choreographed and shot in steady mediums without a reliance on shaky-cam.

It’s been 13 years from delays and in production, and “Avatar: The Way of Water” is an latest example of spectacle over substance. I don’t understand why James Cameron believes that this is a franchise worth building around, because after all of the incessant hype and anticipation from film enthusiasts, what we are left is is one of the most bland, vapid, indifferent-feeling epics I have seen in years. If “Avatar” and the world of Pandora are your thing, have at it, the escapism is yours to bear. But I believe once you’ve hit a moment where you go into films expecting great stories and amazing characters with fantastic spectacle, production and entertainment value to boot, you’ll begin to recognize the efforts of superior work that have come out this year and the years before. Either way, this is two swings and two misses for Cameron’s exotic franchise-to be.

RATING: 1.5/5