2170. Sixteen years have passed since Jake Sully aided the Na'vi in repelling the human incursion on Pandora, forcing most of them to return home to Earth. With the resource situation on Earth deteriorating, humankind returns to Pandora with a vengeance, establishing a major presence and using specially-grown Na'vi clones inhabited by personality downloads of Colonel Quaritch and his men to hunt down and kill Sully. Sully and his family relocate to the coastal Metikayina clan to seek refuge, but it's not long before the war comes to this new tribe.
Avatar was the most financially successful movie of 2009 and, indeed, all time (despite briefly losing the title to Avengers: Endgame, before a canny re-release saw it reclaim the crown). Remarkably, despite having voluminous notes for a sequel, director-writer James Cameron chose not to proceed immediately with more films. Instead, he spent a lot of time in pre-production, developing scripts and ideas. He eventually came up with plans for four sequels, beginning shooting in 2017 and filming all of the second and third films back-to-back, along with some material from the fourth film.
In the meantime, Avatar's legacy seemed to almost immediately dim. With no sequels, prequels or ill-advised spin-offs featuring minor side-characters, the movie fell out of the popular consciousness and the Marvel Cinematic Universe became the biggest thing at the box office. For many years Avatar has existed as a meme, its very name being mentioned inevitably resulting in immediate chortling references to Dances with Wolves and Ferngully, and how the sequels would inevitably crash and burn.
The Way of Water, the first up of this sequel series, perhaps inevitably crushed such predictions with ease, becoming the third highest-grossing movie of all time (and three of the top four are all James Cameron joints). "Never bet against James Cameron," became its own, rebutting meme instead.
Enough of the context, what of the film? Avatar: The Way of Water is very much "moar Avatar." If you hated the first film, there will be little here to change your mind. If you loved it, you'll probably love this one even more. For those who were middling on it, The Way of Water improves a lot of things about the first film to make it a somewhat stronger prospect. The visuals of the first film were incredible but advances in CG technology have just about managed to start taking the shine off some of them (even if 99% of movies still look worse, thanks to rushed production schedules). The Way of Water is effortlessly superior, the CG is photo-realistic in almost every shot, the visual design is sumptuous and Cameron uses excellent direction to make sure we read and comprehend what's going on in every frame. Cameron is also still the master of action, bringing his Aliens and Terminator 2-honed skills to bear in epic battle sequences which outshine anything in the first film and where everything from the geography of an undersea chase sequences to the choreography of a single combat scene are well-handled.
When it comes to story and character - things the first film was only adequate at - the movie is a bit more of a mixed bag. For the most part, it's fine. There's a lot of new characters to meet here, with Sully and Neytiri producing three children and adopting two more, and that's before we even meet the massive new water tribe. Cameron establishes character and emotion with brisk efficiency, although a few characters do get more development, particularly rebellious son Lo'ak and walking mystery box Kiri. The characters are solid enough to get the job done, and the performances are all pretty good. Neytiri is the one character sold a little short, with relatively little to do other than cry, hiss and occasionally do that jumping through the air firing her bow in slow motion thing. Even Stephen Lang's splendid scenery-chewing villain spiel is let down a little by his performance almost entirely being restrained to CG.
As a piece of storytelling art, The Way of Water will not be winning any major awards, but as a sheer visual spectacle and feast, it's highly compelling. The worldbuilding of Pandora takes a big step up here with the introduction of a second sentient species, and the underwater scenery whets the appetite for someone to make a movie version of subsurface video game masterpiece Subnautica.
Where the film enters shaky ground is its pacing. For most of its first two-thirds, this is pretty good, with the film rotating between action setpieces, character-building moments and worldbuilding vignettes in a fairly compelling manner (and better than the first movie, which had to slow down for its long-winded romance plot). What lets it down is longest, most drawn-out grand finale since Peter Jackson turned the concluding two-page battle from The Hobbit into an entire two-and-a-half hour movie by itself. This finale is divided into two parts, a massive battle sequence which segues into a tense disaster movie sequence. Both of these are brilliantly-directed and either would have made a great finale, but by putting them both sequentially into the film, Cameron over-eggs the pudding. Over a third of the movie's already-stupendous length is dedicated to this finale, which is definitely too much.
There is still a lot to enjoy here. James Cameron has built a career on building incredible worlds, delivering mind-blowing visuals, and orchestrating action setpieces you will remember for decades, and he delivers on all of that here. The story could be a little stronger and a little more original, and the ending could have been truncated by a good twenty minutes without losing much, and as Cameron sequels go, the placings of Aliens and T2 in the pantheon are not exactly being troubled by this movie, but it's still an enjoyable slice of epic cinema of the kind we don't see enough of these days.
Avatar: The Way of Water (****) is available to watch worldwide on physical media and streaming services. A third film is already in the can and will be released in December 2024.
