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‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ Review: It’s Even More Eye-Popping Than ‘Avatar,’ but James Cameron’s Epic Sequel Has No More Dramatic Dimension

The underwater sequences are beyond dazzling — they insert the audience right into the action — but the story of Jake Sully and his family, now on the run, is a string of serviceable clichés.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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There are many words one could use to describe the heightened visual quality of James Cameron ’s original “ Avatar ” — words like incandescent, immersive, bedazzling. But in the 13 years since that movie came out, the word I tend to remember it best by is glowing . The primeval forest and floating-mountain landscapes of Pandora had an intoxicating fairy-tale shimmer. You wanted to live inside them, even as the story that unfolded inside them was merely okay.

Reviewed at AMC Empire, Dec. 6, 2022. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 192 MIN.

Production: A Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 20th Century Studios release of a 20 th Century Studios, Lightstorm Entertainment production. Producers: James Cameron, Jon Landau. Executive producers: David Valdes, Richard Baneham.
Crew: Director: James Cameron. Screenplay: James Cameron, Rick, Jaffe, Amanda Silver. Camera: Russell Carpenter. Editors: David Brenner, James Cameron, John Refoua, Stephen E. Rivkin. Music: Simon Franglen.
With: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Stephen Lang, Britain Dalton, Sigourney Weaver, Cliff Curtis, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Edie Falco, Jemaine Clement, Giovanni Rabisi, Kate Winslet.

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‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ Review: Big Blue Marvel

James Cameron returns to Pandora, and to the ecological themes and visual bedazzlements of his 2009 blockbuster.

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By A.O. Scott

Way back in 2009, “Avatar” arrived on screens as a plausible and exciting vision of the movie future. Thirteen years later, “Avatar: The Way of Water” — the first of several long-awaited sequels directed by James Cameron — brings with it a ripple of nostalgia.

The throwback sensation may hit you even before the picture starts, as you unfold your 3-D glasses. When was the last time you put on a pair of those? Even the anticipation of seeing something genuinely new at the multiplex feels like an artifact of an earlier time, before streaming and the Marvel Universe took over.

The first “Avatar” fused Cameron’s faith in technological progress with his commitments to the primal pleasures of old-fashioned storytelling and the visceral delights of big-screen action. The 3-D effects and intricately rendered digital landscapes — the trees and flowers of the moon Pandora and the way creatures and machines swooped and barreled through them — felt like the beginning of something, the opening of a fresh horizon of imaginative possibility.

At the same time, the visual novelty was built on a sturdy foundation of familiar themes and genre tropes. “Avatar” was set on a fantastical world populated by soulful blue bipeds, but it wasn’t exactly (or only) science fiction. It was a revisionist western, an ecological fable, a post-Vietnam political allegory — a tale of romance, valor and revenge with traces of Homer, James Fenimore Cooper and “Star Trek” in its DNA.

All of that is also true of “The Way of Water,” which picks up the story and carries it from Pandora’s forests to its reefs and wetlands — an environment that inspires some new and dazzling effects. Where “Avatar” found inspiration in lizard-birds, airborne spores and jungle flowers, the sequel revels in aquatic wonders, above all a kind of armored whale called the tulkun.

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‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ Review: James Cameron’s Sequel Is What the Theatrical Experience Was Made for

David ehrlich.

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To paraphrase a woman once known as Rose DeWitt Bukater: “Outwardly, I’ve spent the last 13 years insisting that only a total moron would ever bet against ‘ Avatar ‘ mastermind James Cameron . Inside, I was screaming.”

Screaming at the idea that modern Hollywood’s most all-or-nothing visionary was going to waste the twilight of his career — and possibly the last gasp of The Movies themselves — on a series of sequels to his least compelling work. Screaming at the notion that the only person with the resources and cachet to create massive new film worlds from scratch had decided to semi-permanently entrench himself in one that I’d already seen and wasn’t particularly itching to revisit. Screaming at the far-fetched prospect that he’d be able to mine fresh pockets of either from a planet that he’d previously (and vividly) terraformed into the most basic of settler-adoption space fantasies.

“Aliens,” “Terminator 2,” and even the disavowed “Piranha” sequel prove that Cameron has always had a gift for building radical new sights atop pre-existing bedrock, but I was skeptical that another epic worthy of his ego could be constructed on the bones of such brittle colonization tropes, or that the Na’vi offered him the opportunities he needed to revolutionize movie-going yet again (for better or worse).

On the latter point, of course, Cameron knew that it did. Pandora was conceived as a giant playground for the technology that he wanted to bring to movie theaters — and as the weapon that would force them to go digital or die — and Cameron’s plan for it always extended beyond lithe blue cat people selling the masses on saving the rainforest. His heart belongs to the ocean, after all, and the ones on Pandora are virtually impossible to beat.

Cameron has always treated story as a direct extension of the spectacle required to bring it to life, but the anthropocenic relationship between narrative and technology was a bit uneven in the first “Avatar,” which obscured the old behind the veil of the new where his previous films had better allowed them to intertwine. An out-of-body theatrical experience that makes its predecessor feel like a glorified proof-of-concept, “ Avatar: The Way of Water ” is such a staggering improvement over the original because its spectacle doesn’t have to compensate for its story; in vintage Cameron fashion, the movie’s spectacle is what allows its story to be told so well.

The adventures of Jake Sully (of the Jarhead clan) are probably never going to escape their sub-“Lawrence of Arabia” underpinnings or achieve the kind of popcorn-flavored poignancy that inspired this critic to list “Titanic” as one of the 10 greatest films ever made, but I’ll say this much: When “Avatar” ended, I couldn’t imagine caring about its characters enough to sit through a sequel, let alone four of them. When “The Way of Water” finally ebbed out to sea after 192 spellbinding minutes — receding into darkness with the gentlest of cliffhangers at the end of a third act defined by some of the clearest and most sensationally character-driven action sequences this side of “True Lies” — I found myself genuinely moved by the plight of Jake’s tall blue family, and champing at the bit to see what happened to them next. Never doubted Big Jim for a minute!

Here is a silly movie that works so well because it uses dazzling new tools to satisfy our nostalgia for classic entertainment. Seeing “Avatar: The Way of Water” in 3D VFR at High Dynamic Range doesn’t feel like watching any other movie you’ve seen before. This thing is a categorically and phenomenologically different experience than everything else that’s ever played at your local multiplex, including the original “Avatar” — it’s as many light years removed from the year’s other great blockbusters (“Nope,” “RRR,” and “Top Gun: Maverick”) as the extrasolar moon of Pandora is from Earth.

To some degree, that’s because “The Way of Water” iterates and improves upon technology that’s been tried before. As you would expect from an “Avatar” sequel, the main cast largely consists of 10-foot-tall aliens who mind-meld with nature through the anemone-like tendrils that wiggle out of their braids, only this time the Na’vi look more realistic than most of the human actors you’ll find in other Hollywood fare, especially during the ultra-vivid close-ups that Cameron uses to lend this film an emotional depth that its predecessor lacked the time and technology to achieve.

Like all great sequels, “The Way of Water” retrospectively deepens the original, and while that may not be much of a challenge here, it’s one that Cameron meets all the same. Now that the table-setting is out of the way and paraplegic-marine-turned-alien-clan-leader Jake Sully ( Sam Worthington ) has been at home in his new world and body for more than a decade, Cameron is free to move beyond $250 million “Pocahontas” fanfic and get a little freaky with the formula.

Jake and his Na’vi huntress mate Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) have produced four recom/Na’vi hybrid children when the sequel begins, which is enough to suggest that all of the “Avatar” series’ latent horniness is probably a bit less latent when Disney audiences aren’t watching. In fairness, the couple’s least annoying child was adopted when the Avatar that Sigourney Weaver ’s Dr. Grace Augustine used during the first movie somehow became pregnant while floating inside its test tube coffin after the scientist’s death.

And while the father’s identity remains something of a mystery, he must have been a pretty cool guy/spirit god because inquisitive teenage Kiri — also played by Weaver in one of the most affecting turns that performance-capture has ever made possible — instantly becomes the series’ best character (the other Sully kids range from “cute” to “under-written middle child” to “oh no it’s basically the idiot son from ‘War of the Worlds’”).

An outcast in a story teeming with them, Kiri depends on a degree of nuance that didn’t seem possible of the Na’vi in the previous film, and the character transcends her “chosen one” mystique with a warmth and curiosity that sets her apart from the rest of the cast, even as her interspecies hybridity and search for belonging find her in good company. She’s the bridge between human and Na’vi, analog and digital, that “Avatar” sorely needed, and her centrality to the next chapter of Cameron’s overarching narrative bodes well for the future of this franchise.

The same can’t quite be said of Miles “Spider” Socorro (Jack Champion), a shredded human teenager who was born on Pandora before the events of the first film, and is so determined to be accepted by/as one of the Na’vi that he runs around in his skivvies with stripes of blue painted over his skin. He’s a Newt for a new generation, and his very old school Cameron-ian goofiness wouldn’t be so worrying if not for the fact that Spider is almost immediately revealed to be the late Col. Quaritch’s son.

Well late-ish, anyway, as the cigar-chomping Quaritch (Stephen Lang) is back in Na’vi form. Earth is uninhabitable, people need a new planet, and a tall blue clone of the genocidal colonist from the last movie is in charge of clearing out the hostiles from humanity’s new home. That nü-Quaritch isn’t human himself adds a curious dynamic to his mission — a wrinkle dramatized by a wonderful “Avatar” take on Hamlet’s “Alas poor Yorick” speech — as does the fact that his own child is fighting alongside the natives.

Whether Spider is a strong enough character to carry that kind of story weight remains to be seen, but the intention alone points the plot towards resonant notes of acceptance and belonging; notes that help “The Way of Water” pivot away from the colonialist overtones that its predecessor wasn’t prepared to handle, and instead towards broader questions about man’s destructive instinct for survival at all costs, in perpetuity, throughout the universe. Quaritch’s war against the Na’vi mirrors the one against his own nature, a war that Jake Sully finds worth fighting in the service of protecting the people he loves and the planet that sustains them.

With Quaritch determined to slaughter Jake’s entire clan in order to put his head on a pike, our hero makes the decision to leave the jungle and flee with his family to the distant atolls of Pandora. That’s where they seek refuge with the sea green Metkayina clan and try to adapt to the life aquatic as they wait for the inevitable third act showdown with Quaritch’s military goons (fingers crossed that Kate Winslet gets more to do in the third movie as the Metkayina’s chief matriarch).

It’s during the film’s leisurely middle stretch that Cameron pioneers the use of underwater performance-capture, which is the kind of thing that only sounds like a big tech bro wank until the moment you see it in action. If parts of the story’s first chapter suggest that audiences are in for a simple retread of a sci-fi adventure that everyone on our planet saw twice and pretends to have forgotten, any “been here, actually do remember this” déjà vu washes all the way off the minute the action finally plunges under the surface and submerges us in an oceanic world so clear and present that you might instinctively start holding your breath.

It’s the most rapturous, awe-inducing, only in theaters return to the cinema of attractions since Godard experimented with double exposure 3D in “Goodbye to Language,” whether swimming with schools of alien fish or introducing us to the four-eyed, 300-foot-long whale-like tulkun (who prove central to the plot and communicate in subtitled Papyrus), these scenes have more in common with VR or lucid dreaming than whatever rinky-dink CGI we’re forced to swallow with every new superhero movie, and Cameron lets us soak up every frame. If we can fall in love with this world and be compelled by the fight to save it, why can’t we do the same with our own?

Complicating the illusion in a way that alternately enhances “The Way of Water” and risks interrupting its flow is a variable frame rate that switches between 24 and 48fps from one shot to the next, as if God (or Eywa) were speed-ramping life itself. There are times when the magic of it all fails to transcend the motion-smoothed memories that may continue to haunt my fellow survivors of “Gemini Man” and “The Hobbit,” and it can seem as if the screen has once again been set to soap opera mode.

There are other times — and your mileage on this will itself prove variable — when it can seem as if there isn’t a screen at all, and that the action is unfolding right in front of you. Either way, almost everything you see looks real (avatar-ized Stephen Lang is the only aspect that caused my brain any cognitive dissonance), or at least it all looks equally unreal , which is the same thing as far as your eyes are concerned.

The experience simply isn’t comparable to whatever else is playing at the local AMC, and yet the most impressive thing about “The Way of Water” might be how it captures the age-old spirit of the multiplex so well that it doesn’t even need to star Tom Cruise. This is a Movie with a capital “M,” its $400 million tech and ecological messaging all in service of a tulkun-sized adventure so transportive that I quickly stopped caring how Cameron made it. It’s certainly always obvious that no one else could have or did, as “The Way of Water” finds new charm in many of the director’s most groan-worthy fetishes and cliches: Stiff heroes, mouth-foaming villains, military jerk-offs, the emasculating insults they spew like bullets (“cupcake,” “buttercup,” other tasty morsels like that), scruffy engineers wearing stupid t-shirts, and enough boomer chutzpah to raise the Titanic are all present and accounted for in unapologetic fashion. Edie Falco walking around in a giant exoskeleton? That’s just a free bonus.

Using cutting-edge technology to recreate something that always seems on the brink of being lost forever, “The Way of Water” effectively marries the “what the hell am I eating?” experience of gastronomy with the full-bellied satisfaction of the first Big Mac you’ve had after a brutal fast. Frustratingly — if also most exciting of all — this feast of a movie left me with the feeling that Cameron is still holding back. Massive and monumental as “The Way of Water” is, there’s little doubt that you’re being served the most expensive appetizer of all time.

Be that as it may, this serving is still more than enough to make your mouth water. By the time the film arrives at its harrowing finale (a sublime reminder that “James Cameron + sinking ships” is one of the best combinations the movies have ever come up with), I couldn’t believe how involved I was by this larger than life cartoon epic about characters I was ready to leave for dead 13 years ago.

Does it matter if “The Way of Water” doesn’t elicit the same response when I watch it at home? Not really — I know that it won’t. Does it matter that Cameron is continuing to “save” the movies by rendering them almost unrecognizable from the rest of the medium? His latest sequel would suggest that even the most alien bodies can serve as proper vessels for the spirits we hold sacred. For now, the only thing that matters is that after 13 years of being a punchline, “going back to Pandora” just became the best deal on Earth for the price of a movie ticket.

20th Century Studios will release “Avatar: The Way of Water” in theaters on Friday, December 16.

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Avatar: The Way of Water Critical Reactions Vary More Than the Frame Rates

It’s here. Earthling movie critics are officially versed in water and its ways as early reviews for Avatar: The Way of Water begin to come in. It’s no surprise that the technical aspects of James Cameron’s passion project remain marvelous , particularly in the rendering of alien aquatic life and action sequences. However, critical reaction to Cameron’s variable frame rate … varies. Then there are the more basic storytelling aspects in which the sequel appears to improve on the original, at least to some critics, who are invested in the story of Na’vi teens and Pandora’s hyperintelligent space whales. Others find the plot overly familiar and the dialogue rote. Below, critics who sat through three hours of Avatar: The Way of Water live to tell a whale of a tale.

“For starters, the effects work is unbelievable; I still haven’t entirely wrapped my head around the fact that none of this stuff actually exists, that it’s all a meticulously rendered digital environment. But, more important, Cameron hasn’t lost the ability to convey his dorky-sweet enthusiasm to the audience. It’s hard not to lose oneself amid the gentle, flowing cadences of this exquisitely created undersea universe, where the water enveloping the characters gradually becomes a metaphor for the interconnectedness of all living beings.” — Bilge Ebiri , Vulture

“But although I was not surprised that The Way of Water ’s visuals blew me away, I was shockingly invested in the emotional complications of the Sully family (many threads are left dangling for the already confirmed Avatar 3 ). Maintaining a sense of stakes will be necessary for the series going forward, especially if it plans on rolling out new entries at a quicker pace. But for The Way of Water , the decadence is more than enough—for cinemas that have been starved of authentic spectacle, finally, here’s a gorgeous three-course meal of it.” — David Sims , The Atlantic

“It’s the most rapturous, awe-inducing, only in theaters return to the cinema of attractions since Godard experimented with double exposure 3D in Goodbye to Language , whether swimming with schools of alien fish or introducing us to the four-eyed, 300-foot-long whale-like tulkun (who prove central to the plot and communicate in subtitled Papyrus), these scenes have more in common with VR or lucid dreaming than whatever rinky-dink CGI we’re forced to swallow with every new superhero movie, and Cameron lets us soak up every frame. If we can fall in love with this world and be compelled by the fight to save it, why can’t we do the same with our own?” — David Ehrlich , IndieWire

“Maybe Cameron reacquainted himself with the work of Sam Raimi. Maybe he’s drinking from the same cup as S.S. Rajamouli , who made the magnificent, absolutely ludicrous Indian import RRR . In The Way of Water , Cameron leans all the way into manic mayhem, smash-cutting from one outrageous image to the next. The final act of this movie shows off a freeing attitude he’s never fully embraced before in his action — even action that’s strikingly similar, like the massive sinking ship sequence in Titanic . James Cameron has some expertise in this arena, but this time out, it feels like he’s having a lot more fun.” — Jordan Hoffman , Polygon

“This wildly entertaining film isn’t a retread of Avatar , but a film in which fans can pick out thematic and even visual elements of Titanic , Aliens , The Abyss , and The Terminator films. It’s as if Cameron has moved to Pandora forever and brought everything he cares about. (He’s also clearly never leaving.) Cameron invites viewers into this fully realized world with so many striking images and phenomenally rendered action scenes that everything else fades away.” — Brian Tallerico , RogerEbert.com

“Cue another immersive, action-packed adventure, but this time with a more nuanced message. Whereas Avatar bashed its audience on the head with repeated references to spirituality and the balance of life, Way Of The Water is primarily about family (though there is one gut-wrenching scene that makes for a most effective anti-hunting advert). It finds a believable way to bring back characters from the first movie, and sets up the overarching plot for future instalments. This is sharp, considered storytelling.” — Ali Shutler , NME

“The submarine world of this film is, in its way, its chief character and its whole point. The move from land- to sea-based existence is the way a new film was created. But the sea world is imagined with a lot of cliche. Frankly, there isn’t a single interesting visual image and the whole thing has the non-briny smell of a MacBook Pro. Finding Nemo was more vivid.” — Peter Bradshaw , The Guardian

“How much you care about the fate of a bunch of outsize blue people will depend on your appetite for a sci-fi survival story that draws from classic Westerns while upping the stakes with the threat of genocide. Either way, this is a big movie, monumental even, that justifies its three hours-plus of screen time and its mammoth financial investment.” — David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

“It’s best to not think too hard about certain things — for example, at least one immaculate conception — and just weather others, as in one long bit akin to an extremely cruel animal documentary. And while the visual effects are on the whole pretty fantastic, the film every so often resembles a video game or a theme-park ride that seems sort of wonky compared to the more sumptuous parts.” — Brian Truitt , USA Today

“And while his VFX team has done a remarkable job blooming emotion on their green and blue visages, the lackluster writing gives these performances suffocatingly little to play with. The likes of Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Winslet, and Interview with a Vampire scene-stealer Bailey Bass are squandered in paper-thin roles, of women who are either beatific in awe of nature or baring their teeth in tears. These are not people but poster girls either of bliss or pain. And so their emotional journeys feel hollow, even as we can see their worlds falling apart.” — Kristy Puchko , Mashable

“Edie Falco thanklessly barks exposition in fatigues, a scientist randomly reveals that he possesses the key to eternal life, and the finale resorts to cheap bathos before setting up forthcoming sequels. Whenever it’s not losing itself in kinetic mayhem, The Way of Water is interminable and full of itself—and ultimately, that turns out to be most of the time. In the first of his many functional voiceovers, Jake intones, ‘The most dangerous thing about Pandora is that you may come to love her too much.’ That’s clearly true for Cameron, but he should speak for himself.” — Nick Schager , The Daily Beast

“ Avatar: The Way of Water explores enough new story beats, and raises the stakes for its characters through tension to justify the continuation of the first film’s narrative. Engaging, enjoyable, and one of the most beautiful films of the year, The Way of the Water is a transformative movie experience that energizes and captivates the senses through its visual storytelling, making the return to Pandora well worth the wait.” — Mae Abdulbaki , ScreenRant

“But it’s worth saying this: When Cameron’s 3D cauldron of spells is at a high boil, the end result is nothing less than an upgrade on reality. At its best, you find yourself resenting the edges of the screen, for keeping you from feeling fully immersed in this world.” — Liz Shannon Miller , Consequence

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Avatar 2 marks a dramatic step forward for director James Cameron

But The Way of Water is a step back for the endlessly distracting HFR presentation

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There are two thoughts that you never want to cross your mind at a movie theater. One is “Did I just step in gum?” The other is “Is this supposed to look this way?”

Avatar: The Way of Water , James Cameron’s fundamentally enjoyable and exciting sequel to the 2009 blockbuster Avatar , is meant to represent a major technological advance in cinematic exhibition. Time will tell whether that’s the case. But the fact is that many viewers will have a vexing experience if they see the picture in what’s considered the optimum format.

The first press screenings of the long-delayed 192-minute opus, which reportedly cost somewhere between $250 million and $400 million to make, were held at theaters equipped to project the film in a high frame rate (HFR). You may have experienced this with Gemini Man , Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk , or Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy. It’s fair to say that HFR hasn’t really taken off, unlike the wave of 3D that temporarily changed the cinema landscape when Avatar was released. But director/explorer Cameron boasted in October that he’d found a “simple hack” that would work as a game-changer. In short, he used advanced technology to essentially toggle The Way of Water between 48 frames per second and the traditional 24.

On paper, this sounds like a nice compromise. But three-plus hours of the shifting dynamic, without the ability to just settle into one or the other, is actually worse than simply watching an entire HFR movie. To use an old expression, you can’t ride two horses with one behind. And this is all the more upsetting because so much of the film is truly splendid.

Avatar: The Way of Water tells a simple but engaging story in an imaginative, beautiful environment. It’s more than three hours long, and it unfortunately takes close to a full third of that time to get rolling. But once it does — once former human Marine turned Pandoran native Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), his Na’vi mate Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), and their brood of four half-Na’vi, half-Avatar children take refuge from the forest in a watery part of the world — the sense of wonder hits like a tidal wave.

The story setup is simple: Sky People (the rapacious, militarized humans of the Resources Development Administration) are back on Pandora after the events of Avatar , and this time, they want something even more unobtainable than the element unobtainium. No spoilers, but let’s say that extracting this stuff from Pandora isn’t just dangerous, it’s a crime against everything the Na’vi hold dear. Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), reborn in a cloned Na’vi Avatar body, is leading the charge to kill that turncoat/insurgent Jake Sully, and won’t let anything stand in his way. Oorah!

In the second hour, the action picks up. Jake and Neytiri’s family becomes a collective fish out of water, almost literally, moving in with an aquatic tribe of Na’vi and adapting to its aquatic lifestyle. This is where Cameron’s rich soak in his invented world is most fulfilling. There’s about an hour of just floatin’ around a reef. The Sully kids have scuffles with the local bullies; the oddball daughter learns how to plug her hair into sponges and reefs; the adorable runt puts on translucent floaty wings and zooms around. It goes on for a quite a while, and the display of visual creativity is breathtaking.

Hour three is when things get wild. Cameron, an action director with few equals, is in conversation with himself, upping the stakes and testing his own resume. There’s a thrilling, emotional chase, and then a daylight battle sequence that’s propulsive, energetic, and original. It involves a gargantuan sea beast coming in off the top rope in a way that left my theater cheering.

Cameron isn’t generally known as a comic director, but there’s always been a humorous element to his action sequences. Think of Jamie Lee Curtis caterwauling and mugging during the causeway rescue in True Lies , or Robert Patrick’s T-1000 rising up from behind a soda machine as killer checker-patterned goop in Terminator 2: Judgment Day . What, we weren’t supposed to laugh at that first reveal of Sigourney Weaver in the mech suit in Aliens ? But the battle in the last third of The Way of Water is different.

Maybe Cameron reacquainted himself with the work of Sam Raimi. Maybe he’s drinking from the same cup as S.S. Rajamouli , who made the magnificent, absolutely ludicrous Indian import RRR . In The Way of Water , Cameron leans all the way into manic mayhem, smash-cutting from one outrageous image to the next. The final act of this movie shows off a freeing attitude he’s never fully embraced before in his action — even action that’s strikingly similar, like the massive sinking ship sequence in Titanic . James Cameron has some expertise in this arena, but this time out, it feels like he’s having a lot more fun.

It’s unlikely that The Way of Water will be a financial watershed on the same level as 2009’s Avatar . The 3D tech was so new back then, and the world-building and the use of CGI environments were both so unprecedented. It was a once-in-a-lifetime move forward for film technology and immersive storytelling. Much like Disney’s recent sequel Disenchanted , The Way of Water is arriving in a cinematic environment that was completely reshaped by its predecessor — and there are no tricks here that move filmmaking forward in the same way.

The closest Cameron comes is that shifting HFR trick, which winds up being more of a distraction than a bonus. Think about the change you notice at the perimeter of the screen when watching a Christopher Nolan or Mission: Impossible movie in an IMAX theater. The material shot in the large IMAX format blows out to fill the whole frame, changing the aspect ratio. The back and forth of the masking at the top and bottom can be intrusive. Eventually, you get used to it, or you recognize it isn’t that big a deal. The change back and forth with HFR — an enormous screen toggling with a “motion smoothing” effect — is not something the eye and brain can get used to.

What’s more, this is Avatar. Most of the time, what’s in the frame is computer-generated imagery (a telepathic alien whale the size of an aircraft carrier, primed for vengeance!), so it already looks unusual. If the whole movie were in HFR, perhaps one would settle in, but jumping between the two — often from shot to shot in the same action sequence, or even within the same shot , as it is being projected in some cinemas — is simply an aesthetic experiment that fails.

This is not just being picky. The changes mean that the tempo of the action on screen looks either sped up or slowed down as the switches occur. Shots in higher frame rate couched between ones that are lower (and there are many) look like a computer game that gets stuck on a render, which then spits something out super fast. To put it an old-school way, it looks like The Benny Hill Show .

It’s just fascinating that Captain Technology, James Cameron, would want it this way. And it’s unfortunate. Because the entire message of the Avatar films is about environmentalism and preservation, about respecting the world as it is. It seems like Pandora’s creator would recognize that sometimes the best move is to leave well enough alone, instead of looking for ways to fix something that didn’t need fixing in the first place.

Avatar: The Way of Water will be released Dec. 16 in theaters.

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“Avatar: The Way of Water,” Reviewed: An Island Fit for the King of the World

Fifteen years separated “The Godfather Part II” from “Part III,” and the years showed. The series’ director, Francis Ford Coppola , enriched the latter film with both the life experience (much of it painful) and the experience of his work on other, often daring and distinctive films with which he filled the intervening span of time. By contrast, James Cameron , who delivered the original “ Avatar ” in 2009, has delivered its sequel, “ Avatar: The Way of Water ,” thirteen years later, in which time he has directed no other feature films—and, though he doubtless has lived, the sole experience that the new movie suggests is a vacation on an island resort so remote that few outside visitors have found it. For all its sententious grandiosity and metaphorical politics, “The Way of Water” is a regimented and formalized excursion to an exclusive natural paradise that its select guests fight tooth and nail to keep for themselves. The movie’s bland aesthetics and banal emotions turn it into the Club Med of effects-driven extravaganzas.

The action begins about a decade after the end of the first installment: the American-born Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) has cast his lot with the extraterrestrial Na’vis, having kept his blue Na’vi form, taken up residence with them on the lush moon of Pandora, and married the Na’vi seer Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), with whom he has had several children. The couple’s foster son, Spider (Jack Champion), a full-blooded human, is the biological child of Jake’s archenemy, Colonel Miles Quaritch, who was killed in the earlier film. Now Miles has returned, sort of, in the form of a Na’vi whose mind is infused with the late colonel’s memories. (He’s still a colonel and still played by Stephen Lang.) Miles and his platoon of Na’vified humans launch a raid to capture Jake, who, with his family, fights back and gets away—all but Spider, whom Miles captures. The Sully clan flees the forests of Pandora and reaches a remote island, where most of the movie’s action takes place.

The island is the home of the Metkayina, the so-called reef people, who—befitting their nearly amphibian lives—have a greenish cast to contrast with Na’vi blue; they also have flipper-like arms and tails. They are an insular people, who have remained undisturbed by “sky people”—humans. The Metkayina queen, Ronal (Kate Winslet), is wary of the newcomers, fearing that the arrival of Na’vis seeking refuge from the marauders will make the islands a target, but the king, Tonowari (Cliff Curtis), welcomes the Sullys nonetheless. Unsurprisingly, the foreordained incursion takes place. An expedition of predatory human scientists arrive on a quest to harvest the precious bodily fluid—the sequel’s version of unobtainium—of giant sea creatures that are sacred to the Metkayina. The invading scientists join the colonel and his troops in the hunt for Jake, resulting in a colossal sequence that combines the two adversaries’ long-awaited hand-to-hand showdown with “ Titanic ”-style catastrophe.

The interstellar military conflict is the mainspring of the story, and a link in what is intended to be an ongoing series. (The next installment is scheduled for release in 2024.) But it’s the oceanic setting of the Metkayina that provides the sequel with its essence. Cameron’s display of the enticements and wonders of the Metkayina way of life is at once the dramatic and the moral center of the movie. The Sullys find welcoming refuge in the island community, but they also must undergo initiations, ones that are centered on the children and teen-agers of both the Sullys and the Metkayina ruling family. This comes complete with the macho posturing that’s inseparable from the cinematic land of Cameronia. Two boys, a Na’vi and a Metkayina, fight after one demands, “I need you to respect my sister”; afterward, Jake, getting a glimpse at his bruised and bloodied son, is delighted to learn that the other boy got the worst of it. Later, when, during combat, trouble befalls one of the Na’vi children, it’s Neytiri, not Jake, who loses control, and Jake who gives her the old locker-room pep talk about bucking up and keeping focus on the battle at hand. The film is filled with Jake’s mantras, one of which goes, “A father protects; it’s what gives him meaning.”

What a mother does, beside fighting under a father’s command, is still in doubt. Despite the martial exploits of Neytiri, a sharpshooter with a bow and arrow, and of Ronal, who goes into battle while very pregnant, the superficial badassery is merely a gestural feminism that does little to counteract the patriarchal order of the Sullys and their allies. Jake’s statement of paternal purpose is emblematic of the thudding dialogue; compared to this, the average Marvel film evokes an Algonquin Round Table of wit and vigor. But there’s more to the screenplay of “The Way of Water” than its dialogue; the script (by Cameron, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver) is nonetheless constructed in an unusual way, and this is by far the most interesting thing about the movie. The screenplay builds the action anecdotally, with a variety of sidebars and digressions that don’t develop characters or evoke psychology but, rather, emphasize what the movie is selling as its strong point—its visual enticements and the technical innovations that make them possible.

The extended scenes of the Sullys getting acquainted with the life aquatic are largely decorative, to display the water-world that Cameron has devised, as when the young members of the family learn to ride the bird-fish that serve as the Metkayina’s mode of conveyance; when one of them dives to retrieve a shell from the deep; and when the Sullys’ adopted Na’vi daughter, Kiri (played, surprisingly, by Sigourney Weaver, both because she’s playing a teen-ager and because it’s a different role from the one she played in the 2009 film), discovers a passionate connection to the underwater realm, a function of her separate heritage. The watery light and its undulations are attractions in themselves, but the spotlight is on the flora and fauna with which Cameron populates the sea—most prominently, luminescent ones, such as anemone-like fish that light the way for deep-sea swimmers who have a spiritual connection to them, and tendril-like plants that grow from the seafloor and serve as a final resting place for deceased reef people.

Putting the movie’s design in the forefront does “The Way of Water” no favors. Cameron’s aesthetic vision is reminiscent, above all, of electric giftwares in a nineteen-eighties shopping mall, with their wavery seascapes expanded and detailed and dramatized, with the kitschy color schemes and glowing settings trading homey disposability for an overblown triumphalist grandeur. It was a big surprise to learn, after seeing the film, that its aquatic settings aren’t entirely C.G.I. conjurings—much of the film was shot underwater, for which the cast underwent rigorous training. (To prepare, Winslet held her breath for over seven minutes; to film, a deep-sea cameraman worked with a custom-made hundred-and-eighty-pound rig.) For all the difficulty and complexity of underwater filming, however, the movie is undistinguished by its cinematographic compositions, which merely record the action and dispense the design.

Yet Cameron’s frictionless, unchallenging aesthetic is more than decorative; it embodies a world view, and it’s one with the insubstantiality of the movie’s heroes, Na’vi and Metkayina alike. They, too, are works of design—and are similarly stylized to the point of uniform banality. Both are elongated like taffy to the slenderized proportions of Barbies and Kens, and they have all the diversity of shapes and sizes seen in swimsuit issues of generations past. The characters’ computer-imposed uniformity pushes the movie out of Uncanny Valley but into a more disturbing realm, one featuring an underlying, drone-like inner homogeneity. The near-absence of characters’ substance and inner lives isn’t a bug but a feature of both “Avatar” films, and, with the expanded array of characters in “The Way of Water,” that psychological uniformity is pushed into the foreground, along with the visual styles. On Cameron’s Edenic Pandora, neither the blues nor the greens have any culture but cult, religion, collective ritual. Though endowed with great skill in crafts, athletics, and martial arts, they don’t have anything to offer themselves or one another in the way of non-martial arts; they don’t print or record, sculpt or draw, and they have no audiovisual realm like the one of the movie itself. The main distinctions of character involve family affinity (as in Jake’s second mantra, “Sullys stick together”) and the dictates of biological inheritance (as in the differences imposed on Spider and Kiri by their different origins).

Cameron’s new island realm is a land without creativity, without personalized ideas, inspirations, imaginings, desires. His aesthetic of such unbroken unanimity is the apotheosis of throwaway commercialism, in which mystery and wonder are replaced by an infinitely reproducible formula, with visual pleasures microdosed. Cameron fetishizes this hermetic world without culture because, with his cast and crew under his command, he can create it with no extra knowledge, experience, or curiosity needed—no ideas or ideologies to puncture or pressure the bubble of sheer technical prowess or criticize his own self-satisfied and self-sufficient sensibility from within. He has crafted his own perfect cinematic permanent vacation, a world apart, from which, undisturbed by thoughts of the world at large, he can sell an exclusive trip to an island paradise where he’s the king. ♦

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'Avatar': Big-Picture Visions, Stirringly Realized

Kenneth Turan

Behind Enemy Lines: With Earth in trouble, humans are off to Pandora — and the native Na'vi are ready to fight for their home. Genetically hybridized and assigned to infiltrate them, combat veteran Jake Sully (Sam Worthington, left) goes native himself when he meets Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). WETA/20th Century Fox hide caption

Director: James Cameron
Genre: Science Fiction/Adventure
Running Time: 160 minutes

Rated PG-13 With: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez

(Recommended)

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You've never experienced anything like Avatar, and neither has anyone else. Its shock-and-awe tactics restore a sense of wonder to the moviegoing experience that has been missing for far too long.

The year is 2154, and Planet Earth is in big trouble — big enough that people are going all the way to Pandora, six light-years away. The Na'vi — blue-skinned, 10-foot (computer-generated) creatures who live on the exotic moon — are not happy about that, which is why the speech the head of human security gives to his forces sounds less like a warning than a death sentence .

Listening to that speech is partially paralyzed combat veteran Jake Sully. He's come to Pandora to become the human mind inside an avatar — a genetically engineered hybrid between humans and the Na'vi. But once hothead Jake crosses the security barrier from the heavily protected base to enter Pandora proper, he can't help but be wowed by the vividness of the fantastical creatures there — flying dragons, anvil-headed rhinos and such.

You'll be wowed too: The creative intensity on display in Avatar is so potent, we're barely troubled by the same weakness for flat dialogue and characterization that put such a dent in Titanic. Those qualities are here, no mistake about that, but because of the nature of the story, they don't matter as much.

That's because to see Avatar is to feel like you understand filmmaking in three dimensions for the first time. In Cameron's hands, 3-D is no forced gimmick. It's a way to create an alternate reality and insert us so seamlessly into it that we feel like we've actually been there.

Avatar may be the most expensive and accomplished Saturday matinee movie ever made. But if spectacle and adventure are reasons you go to the movies, Avatar is something you won't want to miss. (Recommended)

Avatar (2009)

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Avatar: The Way of Water First Reactions: We Never Should Have Doubted James Cameron

Critics on social media say the long-awaited sequel is a visually astounding technical marvel (as expected), but also a complex, emotionally resonant story with breathtaking action..

TAGGED AS: First Reactions , movies

Here’s what critics on social media are saying about Avatar: The Way of Water :

How does it compare to the original?

Light years better than the first. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

Considering how I found Avatar to be all style, no substance, I’m completely taken aback by how much Avatar: The Way of Water rules. – Ross Bonaime, Collider

Avatar: The Way of Water is better than its predecessor in that there’s more going on with the story and characters and its ASTOUNDING technological advancements. – Courtney Howard, Fresh Fiction

I like The Way of Water more than Avatar 2009, if for nothing else because it has less in-your-face white saviorism than the original. – Amon Warmann, Empire Magazine

About on par with the first. – Clayton Davis, Variety

(Photo by 20th Century Studios)

So we should we have trusted James Cameron from the beginning?

James Cameron truly doesn’t miss. – Germain Lussier, io9.com

Avatar: The Way of Water might be James Cameron’s sweetest, gentlest, most personal film. Possibly even his most emotional. It revisits all his greatest hits, but it’s always totally sincere. He is never leaving Pandora. He loves this family. By the end, I did, too. – Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine/Vulture

James Cameron is that dying breed of filmmaker who can package the most accessible of human emotions & a beautifully coherent story inside a spectacular & innovative Hollywood package. – Tomris Laffly, AV Club

James Cameron now has not two but THREE of the best sequels ever made. – Kevin L. Lee, AwardsWatch

Yeah never bet against James Cameron. – Mike Ryan, Uproxx

How is the story?

As for the story, it’s A LOT of movie… a mighty effective exploration of community and family dynamics. – Perri Nemiroff, Collider

It is the story this time that’s the beating heart. It’s more personal, complicated, emotional. – Kevin L. Lee, AwardsWatch

Cameron really puts the focus on character this time–which does even more for building this world than VFX. – Ross Bonaime, Collider

It does suffer from a thin story and too many characters to juggle, yet James Cameron pulls it together for an extraordinary final act. – Ian Sandwell, Digital Spy

James Cameron’s dialogue still struggles but his storytelling soars as he emotionally invests us in the new characters and creatures. – Matt Neglia, Next Best Picture

It’s a better, more complex story than the first with solid emotion but the characters could grow a bit more. – Brandon Davis, ComicBook.com

And how are the visual effects?

Unsurprisingly, Avatar: The Way of Water is a visual masterpiece with rich use of 3D and breathtaking vistas. – Ian Sandwell, Digital Spy

Avatar: The Way of Water is one of the most visually stunning films I have seen. – Tori Brazier, Metro.co.uk

It is absolutely mind-boggling that none of this stuff exists. I can’t wrap my head around it… At some point you remember that it’s all VFX, and your brain collapses. – Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazin/Vulture

I’ve never seen anything like this from a technical, visual standpoint. It’s overwhelming. Maybe too overwhelming. Sometimes I’d miss plot points because I’m staring at a Pandora fish. – Mike Ryan, Uproxx

It’s so impressive on a technical level, it’s like almost offensive? – Kevin L. Lee, AwardsWatch

I had faith James Cameron would raise the bar w/ the effects but these visuals are mind-blowing. One stunning frame after the next. But the thing I dug most is how the technical feats always feel in service of character & world-building. – Perri Nemiroff, Collider

What about the action?

The action is pretty incredible (especially in the final act). – Amon Warmann, Empire Magazine

The action is breathtaking. – Kevin L. Lee, AwardsWatch

[It has] some of the most impressive sustained action scenes I’ve ever seen. – Germain Lussier, io9.com

Are there any standout performances?

The performances are incredible too, especially by all the kids. – Germain Lussier, io9.com

The kids are stars. – Clayton Davis, Variety

The newcomers are major standouts, particularly Britain Dalton as Lo’ak. – Perri Nemiroff, Collider

Credit to Sam Worthington for honing his acting skills over the past thirteen years. A world of difference here. – Rob Hunter, Film School Rejects

Is the film too long?

Avatar: The Way of Water , being more than 3 hours long, is both fulfilling and indulgent. – Brandon Davis, ComicBook.com

[It] earns every minute of its running time. – Tomris Laffly, AV Club

A lot of people have been asking me if Avatar: The Way of Water feels long, and oddly enough… not really? It’s a HUGE movie – not just visually, but in terms of all the storylines it’s juggling too – but there’s never a moment where I wasn’t wholly engaged. It’s hypnotic, honestly. – Zoë Rose Bryant, Next Best Picture

Do we need to see it in a theater?

Easily one of the best theatrical experiences in ages. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

There’s no overstating how visually impressive Avatar: The Way of Water is in Dolby 3D. – Brandon Davis, ComicBook.com

What about the high frame rate?

This is the first movie I’ve ever seen use the high frame rate trick that I’ve actually liked. Yeah, leave it to James Cameron to crack that one. – Mike Ryan, Uproxx

The high frame rate was hit and miss for me. – Amon Warmann, Empire Magazine

Watching Avatar: The Way of Water reminds me of the first time I watched anything on an OLED television, but also double that. The frame rate is so high I wished I was. – John Negroni, InBetweenDrafts

Should we be excited for more Avatar sequels?

I can’t *wait* to see Avatar 3 . that’s basically all I wanted out of this and it delivered in a big way. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

I don’t know if the world needs Avatar 3 , 4 , and 5 , but I’m glad we got Avatar 2 . – Tori Brazier, Metro.co.uk

Avatar: The Way of Water opens in theaters everywhere on December 16, 2022.

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Avatar 2 Is History’s Most Costly Nature Documentary

The sequel’s drama may not be as compelling as its fictional marine wildlife, but wait till you get a load of these space whales..

In late 2009, when James Cameron’s record-breaking blockbuster Avatar was released, the relationship of the average movie viewer to digital technology was subtly but profoundly different than it would be 13 years later. Smartphones had existed for a few years, but they were nowhere near as ubiquitous nor as powerful in shaping everyday behavior as they have since become. (Like many people I knew, I bought my first one that year.) Social media, too, was a relatively new cultural force: 2009 was the year that Facebook’s user count first began to surpass that of MySpace, and also the year Twitter became a key organizing tool in the Iran uprising known as the “Green Revolution” (or, sometimes, the “Twitter revolution”). When the first Avatar came out, the notion of virtual reality still seemed cool and somehow philosophical, a Matrix -style upending of dull everyday reality, rather than the banal product it has become in the age of Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse, a joyless zone where, Zuck promises, one day we will get to go to work meetings in the guise of our bland cartoon selves, maybe even with legs .

Avatar: The Way of Water is the first of four projected Avatar sequels, and the first film of any kind Cameron has directed since the original came out. All that time he has been immersed in Pandora, the utopian planet he invented, not only planning and shooting the first two sequels at once but consulting on the creation of Avatar -related attractions and rides for Disney theme parks. In the nonfictional realm, Cameron also became a deep-sea explorer, using some of his massive profits from the first Avatar to construct a single-person submarine in which he became the first person to descend alone to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the earth’s ocean floor.

When it comes to water, in short, the director of Titanic and The Abyss has a well-established penchant for going hard, which is why the most satisfying stretches of his new 3-hour-plus epic about the imperiled Na’vi people are those that take place in and around the oceanic home of the Metkayina people, a Na’vi tribe that lives in close contact with the sea and has evolved to survive for long periods underwater. The design of the teal-green Metkayina characters is beautifully differentiated from the familiar giant-blue-cat look of the Omaticayas, the forest-dwelling tribe that was the focus of the first film, and there are some transporting sequences in which members of both tribes explore the marvels of Pandora marine life: sentient whale-like creatures called tulkun, shimmering schools of bioluminescent fish, and a wonderfully imagined pink stingray that, attached to the shoulders of a swimmer like fairy wings, enables the user to breathe underwater. Rendered in crisp 3D with details to discover in every corner of the frame, these sequences are thrilling to watch, even if—or maybe because—they bring the film’s mostly pedestrian story to a halt.

If this review, too, seems to have taken its time to get around the actual plot of Avatar: The Way of Water , that’s because the experience of viewing the movie often seems only tangentially connected to the story of Jake Sully (a motion-captured Sam Worthington), the human hero who at the end of the first film had his consciousness uploaded into a genetically engineered Na’vi body, and his Na’vi family. He and his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) have three biological children: golden-boy eldest son Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), perpetual screwup Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), and adorable tween Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss). They also have an adopted teenage daughter, the daydream-prone Kiri (played, in a clever bit of age-blind casting, by 73-year-old Sigourney Weaver, who played the character’s mother in the first film). To round out the cute-kid ensemble there is Spider (Jack Champion), a human boy who was abandoned by the colonizing forces that left Pandora at the end of the first film and who has grown up as a kind of self-sufficient wild child.

This azure Brady Bunch has lived in peaceful harmony with their forest surroundings for what looks to be, from the children’s ages, around 15 years when Pandora is once again invaded by the marauding Earthlings the Na’vi call “Sky People.” The leader of the new colonizing forces, bent on extracting value from Pandora’s ecosystem and, most particularly, on tracking down and killing Jake Sully, is an upgraded version of the first movie’s villain. Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who was killed at the end of Avatar , has sneakily uploaded his own consciousness to some sort of futuristic hard drive and had it reimplanted in a genetically engineered Na’vi body. (All this is somewhat hastily clarified in a data dump as the movie begins, and you don’t need to grasp all the specifics in order to understand that big blue bad guy wants to kill big blue good guy and, if possible, his big blue family as well.)

To hide out from the murderous invaders, the Sullys trek across Pandora to the Metkayina’s watery kingdom, where they are at first greeted with mistrust by the tribal leader Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and his pregnant shaman wife Ronal (Kate Winslet) but are gradually accepted into the community and taught the eponymous “way of water,” including spiritual pilgrimages to a sacred underwater tree and psychic bonding with the hyper-intelligent tulkun. (One character informs us that these whale-like beasts have not only their own music and mathematics but their own philosophy, creating in this viewer at least the desire for a future spinoff set at a tulkun university.) The mid-film sequences that familiarize both the Sullys and the audience with the biodiversity of Pandoran marine life are gorgeous, imaginative, and placid. When the movie cuts back to the doings of the earthly bad guys, including Edie Falco as a no-nonsense commander in an Alien -style mech exoskeleton, it’s a jarring reminder that this dreamy utopian planet does indeed contain conflict beyond the bullying of teens daring each other to swim farther out than their parents allow.

In the final third of the film, the battle between the earthlings and the Na’vi takes over the story, with a series of exciting if not always logical action set pieces that includes a heart-pounding chase on a whaling vessel and an extended sinking-ship sequence that may bring to mind another movie about a certain doomed ocean liner. Neither dialogue nor character development are the strong points of this visually dazzling plunge, but you don’t need fine shadings of meaning to grasp the stakes of these scenes. Not unlike Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy—which, like The Way of Water , was filmed mainly in New Zealand with the help of the WETA visual-effects workshop— Cameron’s Avatar movies are grand-scale event pictures that are still somehow as simple as storytelling gets.

“The most dangerous thing about Pandora is that you may grow to love her too much,” Jake Sully tells us in voiceover near the film’s beginning, and even if not every viewer runs the risk of falling as far down the Mariana Trench of Na’vi lore as James Cameron has, The Way of Water is nothing if not a triumph of world-building. Fans of fantasy, speculative sci-fi, and YA romance are sure to be drawn in by the flying-crocodile-riding adventures of the squabbling teens who are for all practical purposes the movie’s main characters. A stickler for logic might question why, while their parents are heard speaking with a Na’vi accent, the next generation are all shown addressing one another in the frat-boy slang of American suburban teenagers, with lots of “bro,” “dude,” and “This is sick!” And I would be interested to read the thoughts of a critic of color, especially someone of indigenous origin, on the racialized traits of various Pandoran characters, including the Na’vi women’s cornrow braids and, in an unfortunate styling choice, the blond dreadlocks of the feral white boy Spider. Cameron’s loving gaze upon the world of his own creation is complicated by his exoticized idealization of what he clearly sees as the Na’vi’s spiritual superiority to humans and their role as preservers of their world’s ecological balance. His passion is infectious and his enthusiasm for environmental causes commendable, but the movie’s metaphysical and sociological aspirations sometimes come off as cringe-inducingly similar to those that might be expressed by a white lady running a healing-crystal shop in a seaside town.

At times—as with the intermittent high-frame-rate scenes that unexpectedly drop us into a hyperreal visual world that I for one found distracting—Cameron seems almost to have overspent, like a host laying out a football-field-length table with more food than his guests can even visually take in all at once, let alone eat. But the beauty of the world he creates, evoked in lush detail by cinematographer Russell Carpenter, is enough, most of the time, to make you forgive the hokiness of the screenplay by Cameron, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver. This 3-hour-and-10-minute movie cost something in the realm of $350 million, much of it poured into special effects. As Cameron has been boasting in press interviews, it will need to be one of the top-grossing movies of all time merely to earn its budget back. Given that this seems sure to be one of the few must-see-it-in-a-theater movie releases of the year, and that the tickets will be sold at a higher price point than those for your average 2D blockbuster, it seems like a safe bet that Avatar: The Way of Water will set another box-office record. What that will mean for the future of moviegoing is a lot less clear than the pristine oceans of Pandora, but if you want to get a peek at what might be coming next, you might as well dive in.

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Common sense media reviewers.

Action-heavy epic has dazzling effects, familiar story.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Overall, movie's message is that we could all stan

Several characters make difficult but moral choice

Although humans on the base are racially diverse,

Characters (supporting and extras) die due to expl

Many longing looks between Jake's avatar and Neyti

The word "s--t" is used several times. Language al

No product placement in the movie, but dozens of t

Sigourney Weaver's character, Grace, smokes cigare

Positive Messages

Overall, movie's message is that we could all stand to learn something from a population that's different from our own. Strong environmental and pro-peace themes. Some viewers may see the message of occupying a foreign land to usurp their cultural riches as a commentary on Western imperialism or United States' involvement in global politics.

Positive Role Models

Several characters make difficult but moral choices. Jake chooses to support the Na'vi even though it's against orders to do so and means he must fight (and kill) fellow human soldiers. Neytiri, Grace, and Trudy all make personal sacrifices to help the clan; they're strong, courageous, assertive characters. (In both human and Na'vi populations, female characters are brave and important -- even the Na'vi mating ritual requires that both partners equally accept/choose each other.) On the flip side, the Colonel and corporate boss Parker are portrayed as bloodthirsty and greedy.

Diverse Representations

Although humans on the base are racially diverse, majority of main characters are White. They use offensive terms and stereotypes when talking about the Indigenous population of Pandora, and the military engages in imperialist violence. These scenes, intended to encourage racial/ethnic equality and show value of treating other groups with respect, only partially succeed because, while the Na'vi ultimately triumph, they do so only by following the guidance of outsiders. Violent human colonizers are ultimately ejected from Pandora, but film glosses over how the Na'vi environment and population have been permanently damaged by even well-meaning human scientists and allies. Main character Jake has a visible disability: He uses a wheelchair and is initially teased and treated as an inconvenience. But he easily moves around the base in his wheelchair and asserts control over himself when others try to touch or move him without his consent. Women and female Na'vi characters are important in the story, hold prominent social roles such as scientists and spiritual leaders. No body size diversity. All romantic relationships are between male and female Na'vi.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Characters (supporting and extras) die due to explosions, bullet wounds, arrows (some treated with toxins), precipitous falls, asphyxiation. Several intense scenes involving frightening Pandoran animals and plants, as well as tension between Jake's rogue group of pro-Na'vi humans and the rest of the humans sent to Pandora.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Many longing looks between Jake's avatar and Neytiri, which eventually leads to kissing and a marital "mating" ritual (kissing and touching are seen on screen). Na'vi clothing makes parts of their humanoid bodies visible. Jake and Neytir's relationship is briefly referred to as "getting tail."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

The word "s--t" is used several times. Language also includes "bulls--t," "bitch," "goddamn," "piss," limp-d--ked," "hell," "oh my God," "ass," and insults like "stupid," "ignorant," etc. Degrading language is used to describe disabled people, such as "cripple." Slurs such as "savages," "roaches," and "blue monkeys" are used to describe the Na'vi.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

No product placement in the movie, but dozens of tie-in merchandising deals tied to the title -- including toys and books aimed at young kids.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Sigourney Weaver's character, Grace, smokes cigarettes and somewhat glamorizes the activity.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that James Cameron 's sci-fi epic Avatar is about humans colonizing the planet Pandora, home to the Na'vi. The movie is long (at 161 minutes) and intense, with several effects-heavy battle and hunting sequences that show the devastation of imperialist violence and the right that Indigenous groups have to protect themselves and their land. These scenes include missile-launching military aircraft, neurotoxin-laced arrows, scary Pandora-dwelling fauna and flora, and lots of explosions. Salty wartime language includes many uses of "s--t," "bitch," and more. As in his previous films, Cameron infuses the action-driven story with strong female characters who are important to the plot, and crafts a morality tale about treating others with respect centered in a romantic relationship. Main character Jake uses a wheelchair in his daily life and a Na'vi "avatar" body to interact with local populations, and the human-Na'vi relationship in question gets a bit complicated because the human is actually using his Na'vi avatar. Na'vi clothing makes parts of their bodies visible from time to time. The romantic leads have chemistry that's sometimes sensual. (Note: Fans of the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender should know that this movie is in no way connected to that show or the movie based on it.) To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parents say (256)
Kids say (649)

Based on 256 parent reviews

Very well done. Make sure you are not only an older teen, but a mature one too. Watch the family edition.

What's the story.

In the 22nd century, Marine Jake Scully ( Sam Worthington ), who uses a wheelchair, embarks on a corporate-run, military-backed experiment in which he and a select group of academics -- led by Dr. Grace Augustine ( Sigourney Weaver ) -- can fully control avatars that look exactly like the Na'vi: the lean, blue-skinned native population of a distant world called Pandora. On his first outing as his AVATAR, Jake is saved by Na'vi Neytiri ( Zoe Saldana ) and then captured by her clan. They decide to spare Jake's life as long as he agrees to learn the Na'vi ways from Neytiri. He does, but then he's told by villainous Colonel Quaritch ( Stephen Lang ) that he'll be spying on the Na'vi to make it easier to remove them from their home, an ancestral tree that's rooted above a deposit of an unbelievably valuable substance called "Unobtainium" (pun intended). As Jake becomes more and more involved with Neytiri and her people, he's forced to choose between following orders and respecting the Na'vi's wishes.

Is It Any Good?

James Cameron , director of the highest-grossing movie ever made ( Titanic ), risked a rumored $500 million on a spectacular futuristic sci-fi epic whose main characters are blue aliens and settings are mostly CGI. The good news for epic movie lovers everywhere is that Avatar was a massive success. It's more like the story of Dances with Wolves crossed with the breathtaking visual effects of Lord of the Rings and the love story of Titanic , with a splash of the assimilation to a native culture aspect of Apocalypse Now thrown in. Even though Cameron seems to have gone to the same hammy dialogue school of screenwriting as George Lucas , he can certainly immerse viewers in a thoroughly enjoyable spectacle. Every shot of Pandora is amazingly detailed, from floating mountains to flying beasts to the feline-featured Na'vi, who are inspired by several Indigenous cultures. The movie's scale is undeniably impressive.

Cameron owes a huge debt to his movie's female characters, all of whom are much more interesting than the stereotypical men -- especially the outlandishly evil Quaritch and Giovanni Ribisi 's greedy corporate overseer. Weaver and Michelle Rodriguez (as soldier Trudy Chacon), like Aliens ' Ripley or Terminator 's Sarah Connor, could take on anything or anyone, and Saldana follows up a memorable turn as Uhura in Star Trek with another strong performance as Neytiri. It's quite a feat to create romantic electricity between fictional alien creatures, but Saldana and Worthington manage it surprisingly well. If you allow yourself to get lost in Cameron's Pandora, it's impossible not to root for the Na'vi (or Neytiri and Jake). Part sci-fi, part romance, all James Cameron, this is the sci-fi epic that will suck everyone in.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Avatar 's revolutionary special effects. Do they overwhelm or support the movie's story? How does the portrayal of the Na'vi affect the movie's emotional impact?

What themes does Cameron consistently work into his films? Compare the strong female characters in Avatar , Terminator , and Titanic . Any similarities?

What political messages is Cameron exploring in the movie? How are its themes relevant to what's going on in today's world? Do you think these messages will stand the test of time?

Why is it important to respect different cultural groups and treat their traditions and practices as valid and important?

How do the Na'vi and human allies use teamwork to achieve their goals? Why is that an important character strength ?

Movie Details

In theaters : December 18, 2009
On DVD or streaming : April 22, 2010
Cast : Michelle Rodriguez , Sam Worthington , Sigourney Weaver , Zoe Saldana
Director : James Cameron
Inclusion Information : Female actors, Latino actors, Black actors
Studio : Twentieth Century Fox
Genre : Science Fiction
Topics : Activism , Magic and Fantasy , Science and Nature , Space and Aliens
Character Strengths : Teamwork
Run time : 161 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : intense epic battle sequences and warfare, sensuality, language and some smoking
Last updated : May 18, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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In honor of the passing of Roger Ebert, here's his review of The Last Airbender, "an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented."

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, black writers week, space cadet.

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You can almost hear the elevator pitch: “ Legally Blonde ” in space, an under-rated ditz who doesn't dress or talk like the snobbish types with the gilded resumes but shows she has the right stuff. Then maybe add a little bit of “The King’s Man” for some action, and here we are. Emma Roberts plays Rex, happily “living the Florida life”: parties on the beach, wrestling gators, tending bar (she’s very good at remembering a lot of different complicated drink orders), and, sometimes, wistfully watching NASA rocket launches. She used to watch them with her late mother and dream of someday riding in one of those rockets as an astronaut, flying to the stars.

Rex graduated from high school with a full scholarship to college but stayed home when her mother was diagnosed with cancer. After that, she stayed home to support her father ( Sam Robards ). Somehow, ten years went by. At her college reunion, she begins to wonder what her life might have been like if she had pursued her original dream, especially after she sees her classmate, Toddrick Spencer ( Sebastián Yatra ), now a tech billionaire whose company flies customers into the lower levels of space.

Despite not having any of the educational or experience requirements for the space program, Rex decides to apply to NASA. She asks her friend Nadine (the delightfully ditsy Poppy Liu of “Hacks”) for help with the formatting, and Nadine beefs up the resume with some fake credentials and submits it without telling Rex.

When Rex is accepted, she has no idea that NASA thinks she is a PhD and a pilot. By the time she realizes it, she thinks that because she has kept up with her studies and survived while most of the legitimately credentialed candidates are kicked out, she believes it is too late to tell them the truth.

Writer/director Liz W. Garcia plays it safe here, with a result that has no surprises but is effectively entertaining, thanks largely to Roberts’ performance, which she seems to be enjoying so much it would be impossible not to enjoy it with her. Despite some poor decisions and some overdone costume choices – we know she’s a bit on the trashy side, but there are too many airbrushed t-shirts and drugstore hair accessories – Roberts makes Rex an appealing heroine, creative, committed, and a team player who wants everyone to do well.

That helps to make up for what surrounds her. See if you can figure out where these set-ups are going: Rex has endearingly quirky fellow astronaut candidates (unfortunately, and relentlessly referred to as As-Cans), plus one an uptight, hyper-competitive blonde mean girl ( Desi Lydic ). One of Rex’s supervisors is a nerdy but very handsome guy with a classy British accent ( Tom Hopper ) who does not know how to have fun. Rex’s deception is discovered, and she is sent home before final decisions are made, but when a crisis occurs … yeah. You guessed right.

Despite the utterly predictable failure to make As-Can happen, two random colonoscopy references, jokes about disabilities, and a shameful waste of Gabrielle Union as one of the NASA program leaders, the storyline has some engaging details. Rex specializes in solving problems, whether mechanical or human. The script gives her a chance to come up with ideas that might not pass muster at NASA or obey the laws of physics, but they remind us of how grounded and resourceful she is. Her MacGyver-esque mechanical skills are fun to watch but her generosity in helping others keeps us on her side.

Nell Minow is the Contributing Editor at RogerEbert.com.

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COMMENTS

Avatar movie review & film summary (2009)
Watching "Avatar," I felt sort of the same as when I saw "Star Wars" in 1977. That was another movie I walked into with uncertain expectations. James Cameron's film has been the subject of relentlessly dubious advance buzz, just as his "Titanic" was. Once again, he has silenced the doubters by simply delivering an extraordinary film. There is still at least one man in Hollywood who knows how ...
Avatar: The Way of Water movie review (2022)
Cameron invites viewers into this fully realized world with so many striking images and phenomenally rendered action scenes that everything else fades away. Maybe not right away. "Avatar: The Way of Water" struggles to find its footing at first, throwing viewers back into the world of Pandora in a narratively clunky way.
Avatar: The Way of Water
Set more than a decade after the events of the first film, "Avatar: The Way of Water" begins to tell the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri, and their kids), the trouble that follows them ...
Cameron is recrowned King of the World
Cameron is recrowned King of the World. Roger Ebert December 16, 2009. Tweet. The thing about James Cameron is, he can get his mind around a project the size of "Avatar" and keep his cool. If it requires the development of untested technology, he takes the time to work on it. If he wants to create aliens human enough to be sexy and yet keep ...
Movie Review: 'Avatar: The Way of Water'
Filmmaker James Cameron's sequel to the biggest worldwide box office hit of all time, "Avatar: The Way of Water," has been in the works for more than a decade.
Review: James Cameron's Spectacular Avatar: The Way of Water
Movie Review: In James Cameron's 'Avatar: The Way of Water,' Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) flee with their families to a distant ocean land to get away from the ...
'Avatar: The Way of Water' Review: Eye-Popping, but ...
In James Cameron's sequel, the underwater sequences are dazzling, but the story of Jake Sully and his family is a string of serviceable clichés.
'Avatar: The Way of Water' Review: Big Blue Marvel
Way back in 2009, "Avatar" arrived on screens as a plausible and exciting vision of the movie future. Thirteen years later, "Avatar: The Way of Water" — the first of several long-awaited ...
Avatar
James Cameron's Academy Award®-winning 2009 epic adventure "Avatar", returns to theaters September 23 in stunning 4K High Dynamic Range. On the lush alien world of Pandora live the Na'vi, beings ...
Avatar: The Way of Water Review: A Theatrical Experience for the Ages
Even Cameron diehards were skeptical about going back to Pandora, but "The Way of Water" is a staggering improvement over the original.
What Critics Think of 'Avatar: Way of Water': Review Roundup
Early reviews are out from critics on James Cameron's 'Avatar: The Way of Water,' describing the technological advancements and new characters.
Avatar 2 review: a thrilling epic that gambles on how you watch it
James Cameron finally completed Avatar: The Way of Water, which returns Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, and Stephen Lang to the Na'vi world of Pandora. It's a thrill ride that leans into ...
"Avatar: The Way of Water," Reviewed: An Island ...
Richard Brody reviews James Cameron's "Avatar: The Way of Water," a heavy-on-the-C.G.I. sequel starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, and Kate Winslet.
'Avatar': Big-Picture Visions, Stirringly Realized
Avatar may be the most expensive and accomplished Saturday matinee movie ever made. But if spectacle and adventure are reasons you go to the movies, Avatar is something you won't want to miss.
Avatar: The Way of Water Review
James Cameron's long-awaited sequel to 2009's groundbreaking Avatar is beached by many of the same shortcomings.
Avatar (2009)
In its initial release, Avatar garnered mass positive reviews and went on to break multiple box office records in various markets. Worldwide, it became the highest-grossing movie of all time and bagged multiple awards in its genre including The Oscars. The story follows a paraplegic Marine who replaces his deceased twin brother to the distant moon Pandora on a unique mission but soon finds ...
Avatar: The Way of Water
More than a decade has passed since James Cameron blew away audiences with Avatar, and now the first sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, appears to be doing the same thing. Critics have seen the follow-up, which returns to the world of Pandora with even more ambition than the original, and it appears to be another technical and visual marvel. Does it also improve upon the story, characters, and ...
Avatar 2 review: The Way of Water works best as history's most
Avatar: The Way of Water is the first of four projected Avatar sequels, and the first film of any kind Cameron has directed since the original came out. All that time he has been immersed in ...
Avatar Movie Review
Our review: Parents say ( 256 ): Kids say ( 649 ): James Cameron, director of the highest-grossing movie ever made ( Titanic ), risked a rumored $500 million on a spectacular futuristic sci-fi epic whose main characters are blue aliens and settings are mostly CGI. The good news for epic movie lovers everywhere is that Avatar was a massive success.
r/entertainment on Reddit: Ebert on Avatar: It takes a hell of a lot of
Ebert on Avatar: It takes a hell of a lot of nerve for a man to stand up at the Oscarcast and proclaim himself King of the World. James Cameron just got re-elected.
The Last Airbender movie review (2010)
"The Last Airbender" is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here. It puts a nail in the coffin of low-rent 3D, but it will need a lot more coffins than that.
In honor of the passing of Roger Ebert, here's his review of The Last
In honor of the passing of Roger Ebert, here's his review of The Last Airbender, "an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented."
Movie reviews and ratings by Film Critic Roger Ebert
It doesn't move or feel like any other prison movie, or movie about theater students, that I've seen, and its commitment to the truth of its characters -- and of life itself -- is rare and precious. Movie reviews and ratings by Film Critic Roger Ebert | Roger Ebert
Space Cadet movie review & film summary (2024)
The script gives her a chance to come up with ideas that might not pass muster at NASA or obey the laws of physics, but they remind us of how grounded and resourceful she is.

‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ Review: It’s Even More Eye-Popping Than ‘Avatar,’ but James Cameron’s Epic Sequel Has No More Dramatic Dimension

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Reviewed at AMC Empire, Dec. 6, 2022. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 192 MIN.

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Very well done. Make sure you are not only an older teen, but a mature one too. Watch the family edition.