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James Cameron wants you to believe. He wants you to believe that aliens are killing machines, humanity can defeat time-traveling cyborgs, and a film can transport you to a significant historical disaster. In many ways, the planet of Pandora in " Avatar " has become his most ambitious manner of sharing this belief in the power of cinema. Can you leave everything in your life behind and experience a film in a way that's become increasingly difficult in an era of so much distraction? As technology has advanced, Cameron has pushed the limits of his power of belief even further, playing with 3D, High Frame Rate, and other toys that weren't available when he started his career. But one of the many things that is so fascinating about "Avatar: The Way of Water" is how that belief manifests itself in themes he's explored so often before. 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.

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. One can tell that Cameron really cares most about the world-building mid-section of this film, which is one of his greatest accomplishments, so he rushes through some of the set-ups to get to the good stuff. Before then, we catch up with Jake Sully ( Sam Worthington ), a human who is now a full-time Na'vi and partners with Neytiri ( Zoe Saldana ), with whom he has started a family. They have two sons—Neteyam ( Jamie Flatters ) and Lo'ak ( Britain Dalton )—and a daughter named Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), and they are guardians of Kiri ( Sigourney Weaver ), the offspring of Weaver's character from the first film.

Family bliss is fractured when the 'sky people' return, including an avatar Na'vi version of one Colonel Miles Quaritch ( Stephen Lang ), who has come to finish what he started, including vengeance on Jake for the death of his human form. He comes back with a group of former-human-now-Na'vi soldiers who are the film's main antagonists, but not the only ones. "Avatar: The Way of Water" once again casts the military, planet-destroying humans of this universe as its truest villains, but the villains' motives are sometimes a bit hazy. Around halfway through, I realized it's not very clear why Quaritch is so intent on hunting Jake and his family, other than the plot needs it, and Lang is good at playing mad.

The bulk of "Avatar: The Way of Water" hinges on the same question Sarah Connor asks in the "Terminator" movies—fight or flight for family? Do you run and hide from the powerful enemy to try and stay safe or turn and fight the oppressive evil? At first, Jake takes the former option, leading them to another part of Pandora, where the film opens up via one of Cameron's longtime obsessions: H2O. The aerial acrobatics of the first film are supplanted by underwater ones in a region run by Tonowari ( Cliff Curtis ), the leader of a clan called the Metkayina. Himself a family man—his wife is played by Kate Winslet —Tonowari is worried about the danger the new Na'vi visitors could bring but can't turn them away. Again, Cameron plays with moral questions about responsibility in the face of a powerful evil, something that recurs in a group of commercial poachers from Earth. They dare to hunt sacred water animals in stunning sequences during which you have to remind yourself that none of what you're watching is real.

The film's midsection shifts its focus away from Sully/Quaritch to the region's children as Jake's boys learn the ways of the water clan. Finally, the world of "Avatar" feels like it's expanding in ways the first film didn't. Whereas that film was more focused on a single story, Cameron ties together multiple ones here in a far more ambitious and ultimately rewarding fashion. While some of the ideas and plot developments—like the connection of Kiri to Pandora or the arc of a new character named Spider ( Jack Champion )—are mostly table-setting for future films, the entire project is made richer by creating a larger canvas for its storytelling. While one could argue that there needs to be a stronger protagonist/antagonist line through a film that discards both Jake & Quaritch for long periods, I would counter that those terms are intentionally vague here. The protagonist is the entire family and even the planet on which they live, and the antagonist is everything trying to destroy the natural world and the beings that are so connected to it.

Viewers should be warned that Cameron's ear for dialogue hasn't improved—there are a few lines that will earn unintentional laughter—but there's almost something charming about his approach to character, one that weds old-fashioned storytelling to breakthrough technology. Massive blockbusters often clutter their worlds with unnecessary mythologies or backstories, whereas Cameron does just enough to ensure this impossible world stays relatable. His deeper themes of environmentalism and colonization could be understandably too shallow for some viewers—and the way he co-opts elements of Indigenous culture could be considered problematic—and I wouldn't argue against that. But if a family uses this as a starting point for conversations about those themes then it's more of a net positive than most blockbusters that provide no food for thought. 

There has been so much conversation about the cultural impact of "Avatar" recently, as superheroes dominated the last decade of pop culture in a way that allowed people to forget the Na'vi. Watching "Avatar: The Way of Water," I was reminded of how impersonal the Hollywood machine has become over the last few decades and how often the blockbusters that truly make an impact on the form have displayed the personal touch of their creator. Think of how the biggest and best films of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg couldn't have been made by anyone else. "Avatar: The Way of Water" is a James Cameron blockbuster, through and through. And I still believe in him.

Available only in theaters on December 16th. 

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence and intense action, partial nudity and some strong language.

192 minutes

Sam Worthington as Jake Sully

Zoe Saldaña as Neytiri

Sigourney Weaver as Kiri

Stephen Lang as Colonel Miles Quaritch

Kate Winslet as Ronal

Cliff Curtis as Tonowari

Joel David Moore as Norm Spellman

CCH Pounder as Mo'at

Edie Falco as General Frances Ardmore

Brendan Cowell as Mick Scoresby

Jemaine Clement as Dr. Ian Garvin

Jamie Flatters as Neteyam

Britain Dalton as Lo'ak

Trinity Bliss as Tuktirey

Jack Champion as Javier 'Spider' Socorro

Bailey Bass as Tsireya

Filip Geljo as Aonung

Duane Evans Jr. as Rotxo

Giovanni Ribisi as Parker Selfridge

Dileep Rao as Dr. Max Patel

• James Cameron

Writer (story by)

• Amanda Silver
• Josh Friedman
• Shane Salerno

Cinematographer

• Russell Carpenter
• Stephen E. Rivkin
• David Brenner
• John Refoua
• Simon Franglen

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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.

Before we meet those beings — in a sequence that has the quiet awe of a nature documentary — we are brought up-to-date with the characters from the first movie, whom we may have forgotten about. Jake Sully, the conflicted U.S. Marine played by Sam Worthington who was the hero of “Avatar,” has remade his life among the Na’vi. Like them, he is now tall, slender and blue, with a mane of dark hair and a braid that connects him to members of other species. He’s fluent in Na’vi (though most of the dialogue is rendered in English).

Jake and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) are raising a brood of biological and adopted children, whose squabbles and adventures bring a youthful energy to the sometimes heavy, myth-laden narrative. There are four Na’vi kids, a pair each of brothers and sisters. Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), the older son, walks dutifully in Jake’s brave shadow, while his younger brother, Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), is a rebel and a hothead, looking for trouble and often finding it.

Their sisters are the adorable Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss) and the teenage Kiri, whose birth mother was the noble human scientist Grace Augustine. One of the film’s genuinely uncanny effects is that Sigourney Weaver, who played Dr. Augustine in the first film, plays Kiri in this one, her unmistakable face digitally de-aged and tinted blue. Like her mother, the girl has a mystical, Lorax-like connection to the trees and flowers of Pandora.

Jake and Neytiri’s sitcom-worthy household is completed by Spider (Jack Champion), a scampish human boy left behind by Quaritch (Stephen Lang), Jake’s former Marine commander and one of the villains of the original “Avatar.” Quaritch returns to Pandora with a new mandate to colonize it, and a squad of Na’vi-ized fighters to carry out the mission. He has a long-simmering vendetta against Jake, and much of “The Way of Water” is concerned less with large-scale imperial ambitions than with personal dramas of loyalty and betrayal.

With a running time of more than three hours — about 10 minutes shorter than “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” by recent acclamation the greatest movie of all time — “The Way of Water” is overloaded with character and incident. The final stretch, which feels somehow longer than the rest of it, runs aground in action movie bombast, and suggests that even a pop auteur as inventive and resourceful as Cameron may have run out of ideas when it comes to climactic fight sequences. There are a lot of those, in the air and underwater, fistic and fiery, sad and rousing, nearly every one of which will remind you of stuff you’ve seen a dozen times before.

That’s too bad, because much of the middle of “The Way of Water” restores the latent promise of newness — no small accomplishment in an era of wearying franchise overkill. Afraid that Quaritch and his men will bring slaughter to the forest, Jake and Neytiri seek the protection of Ronal (Kate Winslet) and Tonowari (Cliff Curtis), chieftains of a reef-dwelling Na’vi clan.

The differences among the Na’vi — physical as well as cultural — add an interesting new dimension to the anthropology of Pandora, and to the film’s aesthetic palette. The viewer discovers this variety in the company of the younger characters, especially Kiri and Lo’ak. Their adaptation to new surroundings — being teased for their skinny tails and clumsy arms, getting in fights and making new friends — gives the movie the buoyant, high-spirited sincerity of young-adult fiction.

Cameron’s embrace of the idealism of adolescence, of the capacity for moral outrage as well as wonder, is the emotional heart of the movie. You feel it in a horrifying scene of tulkun slaughter that aspires to the awful, stirring sublimity of the last chapters of “Moby-Dick,” and also in the restlessness of Lo’ak, Spider and Kiri as they try to figure out their roles. The next sequels, I suspect, will give them more time for that, but may also encumber them with more baggage.

I’m curious, and inclined — as I was in 2009 — to give this grand, muddled project the benefit of the doubt. Cameron’s ambitions are as sincere as they are self-contradictory. He wants to conquer the world in the name of the underdog, to celebrate nature by means of the most extravagant artifice, and to make everything new feel old again.

Avatar: The Way of Water Rated PG-13. Almost blue. Running time: 3 hours 12 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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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.

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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.

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“The Way of Water” cost a reported $350 million, meaning that it would need to be one of the three or four top-grossing movies of all time just to break even. I think the odds of that happening are actually quite good. Cameron has raised not only the stakes of his effects artistry but the choreographic flow of his staging, to the point of making “The Way of Water,” like “Avatar,” into the apotheosis of a must-see movie. The entire world will say: We’ve got to know what this thrill ride feels like .

At its height, it feels exhilarating. But not all the way through. Cameron, in “The Way of Water,” remains a fleet and exacting classical popcorn storyteller, but oh, the story he’s telling! The script he has co-written is a string of serviceable clichés that give the film the domestic adventure-thriller spine it needs, but not anything more than that. The story, in fact, could hardly be more basic. The Sky People, led again by the treacherous Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang), have now become Avatars themselves, with Quaritch recast as a scowling Na’vi redneck in combat boots and a black crewcut. They’ve arrived in this guise to hunt Jake down. But Jake escapes with his family and hides out with the Metkayina. Quaritch and his goon squad commandeer a hunting ship and eventually track them down. There is a massive confrontation. The end.

This tale, with its bare-bones dialogue, could easily have served an ambitious Netflix thriller, and could have been told in two hours rather than three. But that’s the point, isn’t it? “The Way of Water” is braided with sequences that exist almost solely for their sculptured imagistic magic. It’s truly a movie crossed with a virtual-reality theme-park ride. Another way to put it is that it’s a live-action film that casts the spell of an animated fantasy. But though the faces of the Na’vi and the MetKayina are expressive, and the actors make their presence felt, there is almost zero dimensionality to the characters. The dimensionality is all in the images.

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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Review: An exercise in Na’vi gazing, ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ will cure your moviegoing blues

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In “Avatar: The Way of Water,” the director James Cameron pulls you down so deep, and sets you so gently adrift, that at times you don’t feel like you’re watching a movie so much as floating in one. From time to time he brings you to the bottom of an alien sea, shot with stunning hyper-clarity in high-frame-rate 3D and teeming with all manner of surreally strange fish — all oddly shaped fins, decorative tentacles and other vestiges of an otherworldly, faintly screw-loose evolutionary timeline.

You can imagine the fun (and the headaches) that Cameron and his visual-effects wizards must have had designing this brilliant ocean-floor nirvana. You can also see an astronomical budget (reportedly north of $350 million) and an extraordinarily sophisticated digital toolkit at work, plus a flair for camera movement that, likely shaped by the director’s hours of deep-sea diving, achieves an exhilarating sense of buoyancy.

Much as you might long for Cameron to keep us down there — to give us, in effect, the most expensive and elaborate underwater hangout movie ever made — he can’t or won’t sustain all this dreamy Jacques-Cousteau-on-mushrooms wonderment for three-plus hours. He’s James Cameron, after all, and he has a stirringly old-fashioned story to tell, crap dialogue to dispense and, in time, a hell of an action movie to unleash, complete with fiery shipwrecks, deadly arrows and a whale-sized, tortoise-skinned creature known as a Tulkun. All in all, it’s marvelous to have him back (Cameron, that is, though the Tulkun is also welcome). He remains one of the few Hollywood visionaries who actually merits that much-abused term, and as such, he has more on his mind than just pummeling the audience into submission.

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Cameron wants to submerge you in another time and place, to seduce you into a state of pure, unforced astonishment. And he does, after some visual adjustment; the use of high frame rate (a sped-up 48 frames per second) tends to work better underwater than on dry land, where the overly frictionless, motion-smoothed look might put you briefly in mind of a Na’vi soap opera (“The Blue and the Beautiful,” surely). But then he can captivate you with something as lyrically simple — but actually, as painstakingly computer-generated — as a shot of his characters sitting beside the water at night, their faces and bodies reflecting the digital phosphorescence below. Any hack can make stuff blow up real good; Cameron makes stuff glow up real good.

In this long-running, long-gestating sequel to his 2009 juggernaut, “Avatar,” Cameron returns you to that distant moon called Pandora, though most of the action unfolds far from the first movie’s majestic floating mountains and verdant rainforests. We encountered that dazzling, soon-to-be-despoiled Eden through the eyes of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a square-jawed, soft-hearted ex-Marine sent by his ruthless corporate overlords to infiltrate the Na’vi, a powerful race of blue-skinned, yellow-eyed, cat-tailed humanoids who lived in astonishing oneness with all living things. Transplanted into his own genetically tailored Na’vi body, or avatar, Jake didn’t take long to switch allegiances and turn against humanity, having fallen hopelessly in love with Pandora’s beauty and also with a Na’vi warrior princess, Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña).

“Avatar” was a thrilling moviegoing experience and a pioneering showpiece for performance-capture technology, which allowed Cameron and his actors to endow their Na’vi characters with astonishingly detailed and lifelike gazes, gestures and physiognomies. The movie was also built on a consciously thin story, with thudding echoes of anti-imperialist westerns like “Dances With Wolves” and the fondly remembered eco-conscious animation “FernGully: The Last Rainforest.” But then, Cameron’s cutting-edge technophilia has always been married to, and complemented by, an unapologetic cornball classicism. And if it was easy to snicker at “Avatar’s” hippy-dippy sincerity, it was also easy to surrender to its multiplex transcendentalism, its world of synthetically crafted natural wonders. Here was the rare studio picture that seemed enlivened, rather than undermined, by its contradictions.

If anything, those contradictions hit you with even greater force in “Avatar: The Way of Water,” which fully and subtly immerses you in the Na’vi world from start to finish. The level of computer-generated artifice on display in every landscape and seascape is cumulatively staggering, in ways to which even the first movie, toggling insistently between Jake’s human and Na’vi experiences, didn’t aspire. Just as crucially, the stakes have risen, the emotions have deepened and the brand-extension imperatives that typically govern sequels are happily nowhere in evidence.

That might seem remarkable, considering that the “Avatar” series (at least three more movies are planned), like all properties of the former Fox Studios, now belongs to Disney, speaking of ruthless corporate overlords. But then, it’s no surprise that the director of “Aliens” and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” two of the most indelible sequels in action-cinema history, knows a thing or two about intelligent, expansive franchise building. And as “The Abyss” and “Titanic” bore out, Cameron also knows a thing or two about water, which is where this latest sequel finds its sweet spot: Welcome to Pandora’s beach.

But first, there’s a truckload of exposition to get through. As in the first movie, Jake obliges with the kind of grunting film-noir-gumshoe voiceover that reminds you, in ways more endearing than irritating, that snappy exposition will never be one of Cameron’s strong suits. (He co-wrote the script with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver.) Several years after shedding his own avatar and being reborn as a full-blown Na’vi, Jake has mastered his post-human way of life. He and Neytiri are parents to four Na’vi children: two teenage sons, Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) and Lo’ak (Britain Dalton); an 8-year-old daughter, Tuk (Trinity Bliss), and an adopted teenage daughter of mysterious provenance named Kiri. She’s played by Sigourney Weaver, a casting choice that naturally ties her to Dr. Grace Augustine, Weaver’s deceased scientist from the first movie, initiating a mystery that will presumably be unraveled further down the franchise road.

Weaver’s casting also raises some odd, potentially discourse-sowing questions about Kiri’s chaste (for now) bond with a young human male and fellow foundling named Spider (Jack Champion), who likes to run, bare of chest and foot, with the Sully clan. But if their friendship makes for an optimistic portrait of interspecies harmony, Cameron doesn’t linger on it for long. Instead, he unleashes a grave threat that drives Jake and Neytiri from their Omaticayan jungle home and sends them fleeing to the ocean, where they seek refuge with a civilization of Na’vi reef dwellers known as the Metkayina.

It’s a shrewd narrative gambit that not only refreshes the scenery (and how!) but also forces Jake, Neytiri and their family to adapt to an entirely new way of life, cueing a second-act training regimen that allows Cameron to show off every square inch of his aquatic paradise. (His key collaborators include his longtime cinematographer, Russell Carpenter, and production designers Dylan Cole and Ben Procter.)

Led by the kind, welcoming Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and his less hospitable wife, Ronal (a glaring Kate Winslet), the Metkayina are a highly evolved clan of water dwellers, as underscored by their aquamarine skin (in contrast to the Omaticayans’ cerulean tones), seashell-and-fishnet jewelry and intricate tattoos, reminiscent of Maori body art. They also boast unusually thick, long tails built for underwater propulsion. For Jake, Neytiri and especially their children, learning to navigate the watery wilderness just outside their new beach-bum paradise will prove a difficult challenge. It’ll also earn them some mockery from the locals, especially Tonowari and Ronal’s own teenage children, in a story that sometimes plays like a teen surfing movie by way of “Swiss Family Robinson.”

Even coming from a filmmaker used to setting intimate relational sagas against large-scale tragedy, the tenderness and occasional sentimentality with which Cameron invests this drama of family conflict and survival feels unusually personal. It can also feel a bit thinly stretched at three hours, but even that seems more an act of generosity than indulgence on Cameron’s part; his attachment to this family is real and in time, so is yours. Audiences expecting propulsive non-stop action, rather than the director’s customary slow build, may be surprised to find themselves watching a leisurely saga of overprotective parents and rebellious teens, biracial/adoptive identity issues and casual xenophobia. They’ll also be treated to some lovely whalespeak courtesy of those mammoth Tulkuns, who turn out to be engaging conversationalists as well as formidable fighters.

If you’re impatient, sit tight: The action is still to come, much of it dispensed by a snarling reincarnation of the first movie’s ex-military villain, Col. Miles Quaritch, here reborn — and played once more by the ferocious Stephen Lang — as a Na’vi avatar implanted with a surviving packet of the colonel’s memories. Bigger, badder and bluer than before, Quaritch 2.0 isn’t looking for unobtainium, the first movie’s stupidly, wonderfully named mineral MacGuffin. All he really wants is revenge against Jake and his family. (It’s personal for him, too.) His Na’vi transformation leaves only a handful of human characters, some of them old friends (Joel David Moore, Dileep Rao), though most of them are puny, inconsequential villains who rain down destruction on the Metkayina and their delicate ecosystem, only to reap destruction in return. Like its predecessor, “Avatar: The Way of Water” is both an environmental cautionary tale and a madly effective opportunity to root against our own kind; by the time the third act kicks in, you’ll be screaming for human blood.

Cameron’s return trip to Pandora has been long in the making and nearly as long in the mocking. Over 13 years of ever-shifting industry buzz about possible sequels, sequels to sequels and countless changes of plan, more than a few have expressed exasperation with the director’s ever-outsized ambitions and even cast doubt on the first “Avatar’s” pop-cultural legacy. It’s hardly the first time Cameron has been dinged in advance for an Olympian folly, and if the pattern holds, this latest and most ambitious picture will stun most of his naysayers into silence. “Never underestimate James Cameron” has become something of a mantra of late when, in fact, the underestimation is crucial. It’s part of the director’s hook, his wind-up showmanship, his belief that moviegoing can be a religious and even redemptive experience. The more he suffers, the more he can thrill us, and the more fully the wonder of cinema can be reborn.

You don’t have to buy into that self-mythologizing to surrender, even if only intermittently, to the lovely, uneven, transporting sprawl of “Avatar: The Way of Water.” Certainly it’s hard not to feel moved and even heartened by the conviction of Cameron’s filmmaking, the unfeigned sincerity with which he directs a young Metkayina woman to solemnly intone, “The way of water has no beginning and no end.” That could be interpreted as a dig at the running time, but it also nicely articulates Cameron’s sense of visual continuity. As with the first “Avatar,” the immersive fluidity he achieves here feels like an organic outgrowth from his premise, a reminder that all life flows harmoniously together.

Where it will flow next is a mystery, and it’d be disingenuous of me to suggest I’m not eager to find out. Until then, Pandora, so long, and thanks for all the fish.

‘Avatar: The Way of Water’

In English and Na’vi dialogue with English subtitles Rated: PG-13, for sequences of strong violence and intense action, partial nudity and some strong language Running time: 3 hours, 10 minutes Playing: Starts Dec. 16 in general release

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Take the plunge: Avatar's underwater scenes are immersive and extraordinary

Justin Chang

Filmmaker James Cameron returns to the world of the Na'vi people in Avatar: The Way of Water. 20th Century Films hide caption

Filmmaker James Cameron returns to the world of the Na'vi people in Avatar: The Way of Water.

I wouldn't call Avatar: The Way of Water one of the year's best movies, but it's undoubtedly one of the best movie-going experiences I've had in a while. I had more or less the same reaction to James Cameron's first Avatar in 2009.

It told a thin but trippy Dances with Wolves -ian story about the colonizers v. the colonized, but the world building was spectacular: It was thrilling to visit the faraway moon called Pandora, with its immersive, digitally created jungle landscapes. It was thrilling, too, to root for the towering blue-skinned Na'vi people, brought to life through Cameron's pioneering use of performance-capture technology, which translates actors' movements and facial expressions into computer-generated imagery.

And so it's great to return to Pandora, although since many years have passed since the events of the first movie, there is some clunky exposition to get through. Sam Worthington again plays Jake Sully, a former human now reborn as a Na'vi man, and Zoe Saldaña returns as the fierce warrior princess Neytiri. They have four Na'vi children, including an adopted teenage daughter, Kiri. She's played, through the magic of performance capture, by the decidedly not-teenage Sigourney Weaver . And Weaver, as you might recall, played a human scientist who was killed in the first Avatar .

How the older and younger Weaver characters are connected is one of the new movie's mysteries, but it's clear that Kiri is a child of unique gifts. In one scene, she tells Jake that she feels acutely in tune with Eywa, the powerful deity who maintains balance among all living things on Pandora, saying, "I hear her heartbeat. She's so close. She's just ... there. Like a word about to be spoken."

For some viewers, a little of this Mother Earth stuff will go a long way, though I've always found Cameron's cornball sincerity hard to resist. He may push the technological envelope, but he's an earnest, old-fashioned storyteller at heart. For all its visual sophistication and its three-hour-plus running time, Avatar: The Way of Water tells a simple, straightforward story about a family in danger.

The villain here is once again Jake's archenemy, Col. Miles Quaritch, played by a ferocious Stephen Lang. You might recall that he died in the first Avatar , but Cameron's science-fiction conceit is elastic enough to get over that hurdle. And this time, Quaritch himself has been resurrected as a Na'vi, making him even more fearsome and powerful. He has a score to settle, and so Jake and Neytiri take their kids and flee to the sea, where they hide out among a group of Na'vi beach dwellers.

The movie's second act is basically a charming riff on Swiss Family Robinson , as Jake and Neytiri receive a wary welcome from the community leaders, one of them played by a glaring Kate Winslet . The family is forced to adapt to an entirely new way of life. That means becoming much better swimmers and learning to communicate with the local wildlife, including a giant talking whale-like creature called a Tulkun.

It may sound silly, but this is where the movie soars to life. Cameron knows a thing or two about underwater peril, as his movies Titanic and The Abyss bear out. He's also an accomplished diver, and here, he plunges you into the watery depths and surrounds you with the most surreal-looking alien fish specimens you've ever seen.

In these moments, I didn't feel like I was watching a movie so much as floating in one. In addition to the 3D, which I do recommend, Cameron has tried to heighten the level of detail by shooting at an unusually fast 48 frames per second. It looks a little too smooth at times, especially on dry land, but the effect is stunning underwater. I almost wished the movie would never leave the ocean floor, that it could just sustain this Jacques-Cousteau-on-mushrooms vibe for three hours.

'Avatar': Big-Picture Visions, Stirringly Realized

But that's not the Cameron way. He sometimes breaks his own spell by cutting away to Quaritch, which often feels jarring and not that interesting. And as superb as Cameron's eye is, his dialogue remains as tin-eared as ever. But everything does come together in the movie's action-heavy final act, which features extraordinarily well-orchestrated set-pieces both above and below water.

Quaritch is joined by some deadly human fighters too, and Avatar: The Way of Water encourages us — successfully — to root against humanity for all the destruction it's unleashed on the world. We've seen that before, including in the first Avatar , but it speaks to Cameron's real achievement, which is to bring us into total identification with these computer-generated Na'vi characters. I don't know if that will be enough to sustain the Avatar series over three upcoming sequels, but I'm already looking forward to another trip to this alien moon. Until then, Pandora, so long, and thanks for all the fish.

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Avatar: The Way of Water review: A whole blue world, bigger and bolder than the first

Thirteen years on, James Cameron takes Pandora under the sea in an astonishing, at times overwhelming sequel.

In The Terminator , Arnold Schwarzenegger's cyborg assassin is famously sent back from 2029 to rain death and cool Teutonic one-liners on the good people of 1984. For nearly four decades now, that film's creator, James Cameron , has also seemed like a man outside of time, an emissary from a near-future where movies look like something we've only imagined them to be: liquid metals, impossible planets, boats bigger than the Ritz. Avatar: The Way of Water (in theaters Friday) brings that same sense of dissociative wonder. What fantastical blue-people oceania is this? How did we get here? And why does it look so real ?

The answer to that first question, as several hundred million fans of the original 2009 Avatar already know, is a mythical place called Pandora. The next two land somewhere between vast technology, sweat equity, and God (and, at this New York press screening at least, a slightly smudgy pair of 3D glasses). The Way of Water is, indeed, spectacularly aquatic, though not quite in the way that the six-time Oscar winner's eerie deep-sea thriller The Abyss was, or even the vast, ruthless North Atlantic that swallowed Leonardo DiCaprio and 1,500 other doomed souls in his Titanic . This is circa-2022 James Cameron, which is to say he makes it seem a lot like 2032 — a world so immersive and indubitably awesome, in the most literal reading of that word (there will be awe, and more awe, and then some more) that it feels almost shockingly new.

It's also very much a Cameron movie in that the plot is, at root, blood simple: good, evil, the fate of the free world. Former Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington ) has permanently shed his human form to become full Na'vi, the extreme ectomorphs with Smurf-colored skin whose peaceful pantheistic ways have long clashed with their would-be conquerors from Earth, the rampaging, resource-greedy "sky people." There's still an American military base there, led by the brusque, efficient General Frances Ardmore (a bemused Edie Falco , incongruous in a uniform). But the Na'vi largely run free, hunting and cavorting and swooping through the air on their dragon-bird steeds, singing the songs of the rainforest and raising little blue babies with swishy tails.

Jake and his Na'Vi princess, Neytiri ( Zoe Saldaña ), now have three offspring of their own, along with an adopted teenage daughter named Kiri ( Sigourney Weaver ), the child of the late Dr. Grace Augustine (whom Weaver plays once again in flashbacks), and an orphaned human boy called Spider (Jack Champion), a loinclothed Mowgli they treat more like a stray cat than a son. Jake is the stern patriarch, still a soldier to the bone, and Neytiri is the gentle nurturer; the children, beneath their extraterrestrial skin, are just happy, jostling kids. But when the DNA imprint of Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) is recovered by science after his fiery defeat in the first film and poured into the healthy body of an Avatar, the resurrected officer vows revenge: While Ardmore & Co. continue to efficiently strip-mine Pandora, he will settle for nothing less than his former protegé's dishonorable death.

And so Sully and his family are forced to flee, hiding out among the reef-people clan of Metkayina. The taciturn chieftan ( Fear the Walking Dead 's Cliff Curtis ) and his wary wife (congratulations if you can tell that's Kate Winslet ) are reluctant to let strangers into their world, especially when they come trailing danger and forest dirt behind them. Socially, most Metkayina are only as welcoming as they strictly need to be, and the Sully family soon finds that living in harmony with the sea also means a steep learning curve for land-bound Na'vi — new customs, new modes of transportation, new ways of breathing.

But that, of course, is where Cameron and his untold scores of studio minions get to shine: The world both above and below the waterline is a thing to behold, a sensory overload of sound and color so richly tactile that it feels psychedelically, almost spiritually sublime. The director, who penned the script with married screenwriting duo Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver ( Jurassic World , Mulan ), tends to operate in the grand, muscular mode of Greek myth (or if you're feeling less generous, the black-and-white clarity of comic books). The storytelling here is deliberately broad and the dialogue often tilts toward pure blockbuster camp. (Not every word out of the colonel's mouth is "Oorah," but it might as well be; Jake speaks fluent Hero Cliché, and the Na'vi boys say "bro" like they just escaped from Point Break .)

And yet the movie's overt themes of familial love and loss, its impassioned indictments of military colonialism and climate destruction, are like a meaty hand grabbing your collar; it works because they work it. The actors, performing in motion capture, do their best to project human-scale feelings on this sprawling, sensational canvas, to varying degrees of success. Saldaña's mother-warrior makes herself ferociously vulnerable, and Weaver somehow gets us to believe she's an outcast teen; Worthington often sounds like he's just doing his best to sound 10 percent less Australian. Even the non-verbal creatures — bioluminescent jellyfish as delicate as fairy wings; whales the size of aircraft carriers, with four eyes and flesh like an unshelled turtle's — have an uncanny anthropomorphic charm, stealing several moments from their speaking counterparts.

By the third hour, Cameron has shifted into battle mode, and the movie becomes a sort of rock opera, or a sea-salted Apocalypse Now ; the "Ride of the Valkyries" thunder rarely feels far behind. The scale of mortal combat in those moments is, one could say, titanic, though it turns out to be a more personal reckoning for Sully and his family too. The final scenes are calculated for maximum impact and not a little bit of emotional manipulation; at 192 minutes, the runtime is almost certainly too long. It's strange, maybe, or at least wildly uncritical, to say that none of that really matters in the end. The Way of Water has already created its own whole-cloth reality, a meticulous world-building as astonishing and enveloping as anything we've ever seen on screen — until that crown is passed, inevitably, in December 2024, the projected release date for Avatar 3 . Grade: A–

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Avatar: The Way of Water First Reviews: A Magical, Visually Sublime Cinematic Experience Well Worth the Wait

Early reviews of james cameron's long-in-the-making sequel say it feels like an immersive theme park thrill ride with interesting characters, breathtaking action, and a better story than the first..

TAGGED AS: First Reviews , movies , news

The first of Avatar’ s sequels is finally here, 13 years after the release of the record-breaking original. For those who’ve been anxiously looking forward to Avatar: The Way of Water and those who have been doubting its necessity, the good news is that the movie is worth the wait and another work of essential theatrical entertainment from James Cameron. The first reviews of the follow-up celebrate its expected visual spectacle as well as its slightly improved script and new cast members. You’re going to want to return to Pandora after reading these excerpts.

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

Does it live up to expectations?

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, Screen Rant

Spending more than a decade pining for Pandora was worth it. Cameron has delivered the grandest movie since, well, Avatar . – Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post

This latest and most ambitious picture will stun most of his naysayers into silence. – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

Is it better than the original?

Like all great sequels, The Way of Water retrospectively deepens the original. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

Avatar: The Way of Water is as visually exhilarating and sweepingly told as its predecessor; the plot is more emotionally vigorous. – Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post

(Photo by ©Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)

So it’s not just more of the same?

Any “been here, actually do remember this” déjà vu washes all the way off the minute the action finally plunges under the surface. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

[It is] meticulous world-building as astonishing and enveloping as anything we’ve ever seen on screen. – Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

The brand-extension imperatives that typically govern sequels are happily nowhere in evidence. – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

Does it have a better script?

The sequel’s story is spread a bit thin, though there is certainly more depth than the first film. – Mae Abdulbaki, Screen Rant

In terms of narrative sophistication and even more so dialogue, this $350 million sequel is almost as basic as its predecessor, even feeble at times. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

The story is still just okay. – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

Will we care enough about the story and characters regardless?

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. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

The movie’s overt themes of familial love and loss, its impassioned indictments of military colonialism and climate destruction, are like a meaty hand grabbing your collar; it works because they work it. – Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

Watching The Way of Water , one rolls their eyes only to realize they’re welling with tears. – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

I’m sorry, but as I watched The Way of Water  the only part of me that was moved was my eyeballs. – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

Are there any standout performances?

Saldaña and Winslet have poignant moments…and Dalton and Champion are standouts among the young newcomers. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

The most dynamic portrayal probably belongs to Lang, whose Quaritch is so relentless in his pursuit of Jake that he becomes a force of nature. – Tim Grierson, Screen International

How is the action?

The open-water clash that dominates the final hour is a commandingly sustained feat of action filmmaking. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Any hack can make stuff blow up real good; Cameron makes stuff glow up real good. – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

Are the visuals as spectacular as they’re supposed to be?

One can’t say enough good things about the film’s visuals — each frame is more breathtaking and magical than the last. – Mae Abdulbaki, Screen Rant

The world both above and below the waterline is a thing to behold, a sensory overload of sound and color so richly tactile that it feels psychedelically, almost spiritually sublime. – Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

What’s most astonishing about The Way of Water is the persuasive case it makes for CGI. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

(Photo by Mark Fellman/©Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)

But how is that high frame rate?

It’s a rather soulless feel, as it was in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films. But it can make you feel like you’re sharing the same space with the characters. – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

While the approach can sometimes prove distracting, the film is far more persuasive than Ang Lee’s recent experiments in the form. – Tim Grierson, Screen International

The use of high frame rate (a sped-up 48 frames per second) tends to work better underwater than on dry land, where the overly frictionless, motion-smoothed look might put you briefly in mind of a Na’vi soap opera. – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

Does it feel like more than just your average movie?

At times you don’t feel like you’re watching a movie so much as floating in one. – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

There are times when it can seem as if there isn’t a screen at all, and that the action is unfolding right in front of you. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

It’s truly a movie crossed with a virtual-reality theme-park ride. – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

Do we need to see it in a theater?

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 . – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

Will it leave us excited for Avatar 3 ?

Where it will flow next is a mystery, and it’d be disingenuous of me to suggest I’m not eager to find out. – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

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

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'Avatar: The Way of Water' review: Prepare for a visually stunning return to Pandora

Thirteen years after director James Cameron's  original blockbuster “ Avatar ,” it’s worth the long voyage back to Pandora just for the alien space whales.

The first of four planned sequels to the 2009 sci-fi epic, “Avatar: The Way of Water” (★★★ out of four; rated PG-13; in theaters Friday) bests the original film in almost every way. It’s a gorgeous and stunning thing to look at, with awesome sights of underwater fauna, and the new movie is an emotionally charged outing that again dips into themes of colonization while adding environmental issues and relatable family drama.

“Way of Water” doesn’t have the most complex plot ever, however, and not everything goes swimmingly, though most viewers probably won’t care when they’re watching big blue characters ride nifty creatures while swooping and diving in thrilling fashion. (Sorry, parents, your youngsters might now be asking for a space whale for Christmas.)

Do moviegoers still care about 'Avatar'?  James Cameron is about to find out

Cameron's latest effort is set more than a decade after former Marine Jake Sully (played via motion capture by Sam Worthington), his Na’vi love Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and their indigenous clan drove the humans off the lush moon of Pandora. In the ensuing years, Jake and Neytiri had three children – including warrior-in-training sons Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) and Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) and young daughter Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss) – and adopted teen girl Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), with feral human kid Spider (Jack Champion) also a part of their pack.

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Their peaceful existence is disrupted by mankind once again when a much bigger force, led by General Frances Ardmore (a scenery-chomping Edie Falco), lands on Pandora looking to take it over as a replacement for the increasingly unlivable Earth. This time, the humans have also created their own 9-foot-tall cloned Na’vi soldiers, including one with the DNA and memories of original movie villain Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), last seen taking two fatal arrows in the chest from Jake and Neytiri.

'Avatar 2': James Cameron talks big sequel's 'leap of faith'

Jake is No. 1 on the bad guys' most wanted list, leading him and his loved ones to seek a new home and keep their clan safe. They ultimately find sanctuary with a village of Na’vi reef people, led by Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and the pregnant Ronal (Kate Winslet), though Quaritch’s goon squad and a legion of human-piloted machinery, from high-tech shark subs to robotic crab suits, are in hot pursuit. 

Water is a huge theme this time around, inspiring some of the headier philosophical points (“The way of water connects all things” is a running mantra). The ocean is also where much of the coolest stuff happens: There are plenty of fights and flights of fantasy, but the most thrilling sequence in the film's hefty three hours and 12 minutes features troubled middle child Lo’ak befriending an outcast Tulkun, a whale-like creature that can communicate with Na’vi, in the most heartwarming way possible.

'Avatar: The Way of Water': Check out the breathtaking first teaser trailer for James Cameron's sequel

The second “Avatar” brings back most of the first film’s main characters plus a swath of newcomers, yet it’s the youngsters, especially Kiri and Lo'ak, who really drive the sequel’s strong coming-of-age story.

They bring a sense of freshness when “Way of Water” leans familiar running the original movie’s plot points back, such as Quaritch 2.0 learning to jibe with Pandoran creatures a la Jake or humans going to extreme lengths for a precious resource. (Thankfully, this time it’s not the awkwardly named Unobtanium.)

10 movies you must see this holiday season:  From 'Black Panther: Wakanda Forever' to 'Avatar 2'

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.

While Cameron is a master of franchise sequels, “Way of Water” doesn’t measure up to his classics, “Aliens” and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” But thanks to new personalities and vivid wildlife, on the whole, this latest trip does prove, perhaps surprisingly to some after such a long period between movies, that there’s still some gas in the “Avatar” tank after all.

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‘avatar: the way of water’ review: james cameron’s mega-sequel delivers on action, emotion and thrilling 3-d visuals.

Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldaña return to Pandora with a Na’vi family to protect as the “Sky People” menace follows them to a bioluminescent ocean hideout.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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James Cameron knows his way around a sequel. With Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgment Day , he showed he could build on the strengths of franchise starters with brawny action, steadily ratcheted tension and jaw-dropping technological invention. He’s also a storyteller very much at home in H2O, harnessing both the majestic vastness of the oceans and the icy perils of the deep in Titanic and The Abyss .

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In terms of narrative sophistication and even more so dialogue, this $350 million sequel is almost as basic as its predecessor, even feeble at times. But the expanded, bio-diverse world-building pulls you in, the visual spectacle keeps you mesmerized, the passion for environmental awareness is stirring and the warfare is as visceral and exciting as any multiplex audience could desire.

Box office for Disney’s Dec. 16 release is going to be monstrous, while simultaneously whetting global appetites for the three more Avatar entries Cameron has announced.

What’s most astonishing about The Way of Water is the persuasive case it makes for CGI, at a time when most VFX-heavy productions settle for a rote efficiency that has drained the movies of much of their magic. Unlike other directors who have let technological experimentation at times smother their creative instincts — Robert Zemeckis and Ang Lee come to mind — Cameron thrives in the artifice of the digital toolbox.

Working in High Dynamic Range at 48 frames per second, he harnesses the immersive quality of enhanced 3-D to give DP Russell Carpenter’s images depth and tactile vibrancy. Skeptics who watched the trailer and dismissed the long-time-coming Avatar sequel as a videogame-aesthetic hybrid of photorealism and animation that ends up looking like neither may not be entirely wrong. But the trippy giant-screen experience, for those willing to give themselves over to it, is visually ravishing, particularly in the breathtaking underwater sequences.

The story picks up more than a decade after Marine veteran Jake Sully ( Sam Worthington ) began living on the extrasolar moon Pandora in the Indigenous Na’vi form of his genetically engineered avatar. He and his warrior wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) have raised a family in the meantime, including teenage sons Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) and Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), their tween sister Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss) and adopted daughter Kiri ( Sigourney Weaver ), the biological child of the late Dr. Grace Augustine’s avatar.

Spider (Jack Champion) — a human child orphaned by the “Sky People” conflict and too young to be put into cryosleep when the colonists and their military security force were packed off to Earth at the end of the first movie — spends more time among the Na’vi than he does in the lab facilities with the science nerds. While his connection to the Pandorans runs deep, he’s a walking preview of conflict to come in future installments as his loyalties are divided. The identity of his dad doesn’t remain a mystery for long.

Jake is the respected leader of the Omaticaya clan, whose peaceful existence among the lush forests is threatened when the invaders return to Pandora. Their mission this time is not just to mine the moon for the valuable mineral “unobtainium,” whatever that is, but also to establish Pandora as a human colony, given that Earth is becoming uninhabitable.

Heading the security squad is a face with a familiar snarl and an arsenal of hardass folksy snark, Colonel Miles Quaritch ( Stephen Lang ). But since he was killed by Neytiri’s arrows last time around, it’s now his larger, faster Na’vi avatar (don’t ask), accompanied by a similar bunch of re-engineered big-foot blue grunts. “A Marine can’t be killed,” says Quaritch. “You can kill us, but we’ll just regroup in Hell.”

It goes somewhat against the goal of establishing a new habitat for humanity that their interstellar vehicles incinerate vast expanses of greenery wherever they land, but that just shows that revenge is the only thing Quaritch cares about. The recombinant colonel has acquired none of the spirituality or the respect for nature of the Na’vi people in his new form, and with his disdain for “half-breeds,” he’s even more like a Wild West villain with fancy hardware than before.

When it becomes clear to Jake after some tense encounters that Quaritch is coming after his family, he relinquishes Omaticaya leadership and relocates with the brood to a distant cluster of islands inhabited by the Metkayina clan. The chief, Tonowari (Cliff Curtis), and his pregnant shamanic wife, Ronal ( Kate Winslet ), reluctantly offer the refugees sanctuary, aware of the obvious risk to their community.

Anyone too hung up on consistency might wonder why the Na’vi adults all speak in an unidentifiably exotic accent while their offspring tend to sound like they’ve stepped right out of a CW teen series. Tsireya, in her cute macrame bikini top, appears to have been keeping up with the Kardashians. But you either go with it or you don’t, and there’s a soulful sweetness to the scenes of domestic family life and adolescent interaction that’s warmly engaging.

With the resemblance of the Metkayinas’ intricate tattoos to Maori body art and even a war chant with protruding tongues not unlike the haka ceremony, Cameron seems to be paying tribute to the Indigenous people of the Avatar productions’ host country, New Zealand. The design work on the beautiful Metkayina people themselves is impressive, physiologically distinct from the Omatikayas in various ways that indicate how they have adapted to ocean life.

“Water has no beginning and no end,” says Tsireya, with a reverence that no doubt reflects Cameron’s own feelings. The director has been a deep-sea geek since he graduated from the Roger Corman special effects shop with his seldom-mentioned feature debut Piranha II . That fascination has continued not only through The Abyss and Titanic but also in his ocean documentaries, giving the new film a full-circle feel as we share his intoxication with an unspoiled environment full of power, splendor and mystery.

Just as the flying ikrans and leonopteryxes swooped through the glowing skies of Pandora in the first movie, the sequel finds wonder in the creatures gliding over the exquisitely detailed reefs and ocean depths in this new environment. The Metkayinas ride on dragon-like aquatic mammals called ilus and skimwings. In one enchanting touch, Tsireya shows the newcomers how to attach a kind of stingray as a cape that allows them to breathe underwater. The ocean peoples’ most sacred bond is with the gigantic tulkun, highly intelligent whale-like creatures that provide 300 feet of bait for Quaritch to lure Jake out of hiding in the maze of islands.

You might roll your eyes at soggy dialogue referring to a tulkun as a “spirit sister” and “composer of songs,” but sequences in which these sentient giants become prey are profoundly moving. That section introduces new characters in mercenary sea captain Scoresby (Brendan Cowell) and Resources Development Administration marine biologist Dr. Ian Garvin (Jemaine Clement), who looks on squeamishly as the magnificent creatures are hunted for one of the most valuable commodities in the universe.

“Family is our fortress,” Jake says, and while certain dynamics — like the golden-child eldest son and the undisciplined second-born who can never live up to his example — feel pedestrian, the characters all are sufficiently fleshed-out and individualized to keep us invested. That’s especially true once tragedy strikes and the ongoing attack allows no time to fall apart after a devastating loss.

The good guys-vs.-villains story (scripted by Cameron, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver) isn’t exactly complex, but the infinite specifics of the world in which it takes place and the tenderness with which the film observes its Indigenous inhabitants make Avatar: The Way of Water surprisingly emotional. While much of the nuance in the cast’s work is overshadowed by CG wizardry, Saldaña and Winslet have poignant moments, Weaver has solid foundations on which to build continuing involvement, and Dalton and Champion are standouts among the young newcomers.

I missed the heart-pounding suspense and tribal themes of James Horner’s score for the 2009 film, but composer Simon Franglen capably maintains the tension where it counts. Even more than its predecessor, this is a work that successfully marries technology with imagination and meticulous contributions from every craft department. But ultimately, it’s the sincerity of Cameron’s belief in this fantastical world he’s created that makes it memorable.

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Avatar: The Way of Water Review: The Movie Event of 2022 Delivers

By Tyler Treese

The essentialness of seeing a movie in a theater is often overblown, as it’s the quality of the art itself that will ultimately resonate. Yet occasionally, there are films that scream out to be watched on the biggest and best screen possible. Avatar: The Way of Water is certainly one of those, as James Cameron’s second venture into Pandora is filled with thrills, grand sights, and the most effective 3D I’ve ever experienced.

However, beyond all of the spectacle, what’s most impressive about The Way of Water is its themes and appreciation of both life and nature. However, these themes are bolstered by a family element, which is explored just as thoroughly throughout the film’s 192-minute runtime (which breezes by as long as you didn’t drink too much beforehand). While the wondrous world of Pandora can be viewed as idealistic, the film never shies away from the messiness of life and the connections we form with one another while also reminding us of how easy happiness can be achieved.

In the 13 years between the films, Jake Sully has been busy with Neytiri, as they now have a full clan of children. While each of the four children plays a pivotal role, it is the younger son Lo’ak (played by Britain Dalton), who has trouble adjusting to their new island life and feels like a screw-up due to his father’s high expectations, that really serves as the emotional core for the movie. Lo’ak’s loneliness and finding sanctuary in his bond with nature are as beautiful on-screen as it is touching on an emotional level as the underwater sequences in the movie are truly gorgeous.

Also brilliant in the film is Sigourney Weaver, who plays a dual role due to flashbacks as Dr. Grace Augustine and new scenes as Kiri, who was somehow birthed from Augustine’s Na’vi form. While it’s sort of goofy that Weaver is playing a teenager, she gives an energetic and youthful performance and it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role. There are also many similarities between Kiri and her mother, which is clearly by design rather than a lack of range, and the character raises many questions that will likely serve as a core point of Avatar 3 .

At the core of The Way of Water ‘s conflict is once again Colonel Miles Quaritch, who returns as an even bigger threat than in the original as he now is in an Avatar body with his memories and personality uploaded into the form. Is the science behind the return silly? Sure, but so was the entire conceit of the first film, and Stephen Lang’s performance is so intense and sensational that it’s near-impossible to get hung up on how realistic any of the universe’s pseudo-science is.

Complicating matters is that Quaritch’s son, Miles, was too young to be transported back to Earth and was raised on Pandora with the Na’vi and the few human scientists that were allowed to stay on the planet. This results in one of the most intriguing relationships in the entire movie. The Avatar of Quaritch is not technically the father of Miles, who now goes by “Spider” and is remarkably adept to life on Pandora despite being human, yet there’s still an undeniable connection between father and son. Their relationship is a complicated mess from the start, especially since Quaritch is a murderous monster, but undeniably human and relatable.

Avatar 2 builds wonderfully throughout and peaks in its final 45 minutes with some of the best action of Cameron’s career. The scale is grand, the stakes are immense, and the final battle at sea is filled with incredible moments and even some humor. While there’s still unfinished business by the end and things don’t wrap up quite as cleanly as the original, this chapter still feels complete and fully satisfying.

Avatar: The Way of Water is the one film you truly must see in theaters this year. It’s remarkable getting to see a master of the craft still doing what only he can do, which is blending this level of spectacle with heart and technical marvel. While the world of Pandora might still be the film’s greatest character, the Sully family captivates and charms just as much in this heartfelt sequel.

SCORE : 10/10

As ComingSoon’s  review policy  explains, a score of 10 equates to “Masterpiece.” This is the rare release that transcends genre and must be experienced by all fans of the medium.

Tyler Treese is ComingSoon and SuperHeroHype's Editor-in-Chief. An experienced entertainment journalist, his work can be seen at Sherdog, Fanbyte, Rock Paper Shotgun, and more. When not watching the latest movies, Treese enjoys mixed martial arts and playing with his Shiba Inu, Kota.

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Avatar: the way of water is a deep, delightful dive back into pandora, share this article.

Out of any of his contemporaries, filmmaker James Cameron has always found ways to break the invisible glass between his audience and his movies. Immersion is one thing, but Cameron’s films collapse your reality. One moment, you’re a doomed passenger aboard the Titanic. Another, you’re fending for your life from hungry Xenomorphs. The screen is always more a suggestion than a barrier.

Avatar: The Way of Water is his visual zenith. Thirteen years after transporting moviegoers to Pandora, Cameron now dunks them into the planet’s teeming oceans. The most beautiful dreams can’t really capture what it’s like to swim off Cameron’s imagined Metkayina reef. The best movies make imaginary worlds feel real. Avatar: The Way of Water makes the auditorium feel like the dream, and Pandora’s aquatic wonderland feel like home. There really hasn’t ever been something quite like this.

Disney/20th Century Studios

The debate of Avatar ’s legacy always forgot that first sight of Pandora’s forests. That film pushed the boundary of computer-generated worldbuilding, but its plot became as hacked up as an axe-throwing board. However, Cameron always knew his foundation was sturdy. No Smurf or Fern Gully jokes could give you back the breath you lost the first time you stepped foot in the most-realized movie world of the century this side of Middle Earth. Cameron always knew that the easiest ways to change the visual game was to root the story in most basic tropes. He was going to have all his fun playing God while familiarity filled in the gaps.

Avatar: The Way of Water finds Cameron challenging himself as a storyteller all while setting the new bar of visual storytelling. Once you dive into Pandora’s oceans, you can’t go back. Filmmakers across the world are going to be pulling their hair out as to how they’re going to make their big-budget studio films feel this natural. While some may nitpick the hyperrealism of high frame rate projection, Pandora’s beaches feel like destinations instead of computer-generated wizardry. You’re going to wonder when these shores will pop up on a leg of The Amazing Race . Kevin Feige is going to have to go into hiding with how good Avatar: The Way of Water looks. It makes the latest Avengers film look like it was released around the time of Young Sherlock Holmes .

On visual splendor alone, there really might not be a more believable impossibility than swimming among the sea creatures of the new Avatar film. If you find the right IMAX 3D screen, you might as well pack a bathing suit and scuba gear. Your theater is about to take water, and your skin is about to turn blue. Cameron and co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver level the film’s worldbuilding with a refreshingly complicated story of families and trust. Right away, the Jake Sully clan (now complete with kids) is sent on the run when the humans head back to Pandora, this time for permanent residence. Sully’s old nemesis, the thought-dead, Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang, stellar in his first mo-cap performance) wants blood for blood, now rebooted in the body of the blue-skinned aliens he once reviled.

The Sully family’s running finds them taking refuge with the Metkayina clan, Na’vi creatures more adept to their waterfaring home. The film’s middle portion almost amounts to a hangout movie, replete with plenty of time to swim around Pandora’s ocean floor and meet all the alien fish, whale-like tulkuns and sentient coral reefs. The Sullys struggle to fully integrate with their costal cousins, which pulls their family unit tighter as their world gets irrevocably smaller.

The film veers into an effort to both protect the Sullys from Quaritch’s revenge tour and the tulkuns from human hunters who want to mine their brain goo for the folks back on a deteriorating Earth. You’d probably guess it all ends in a water battle for the ages, and you’d assume correct. It’s everything Cameron does well as a filmmaker combined with some narrative complexities that make moral grey as tantalizing as all of Pandora’s other colors.

In a year already chocked full of fantastic blockbusters, Avatar: The Way of Water dives in at the last moment and takes the sponge cake. Cameron’s breathtaking sequel will make even the most aquaphobic want to slap on some water wings and jump into Cameron’s big blue world. Years from now, you’re going to be telling your grandkids about the first time you went swimming in Pandora. It’ll probably be lame for them with wherever movies are in their time. For us, it’s a new wave.

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‘Avatar: The Way of Water’: Long, loud, eye-popping and forgettable

The highly anticipated sequel to James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ is a sometimes-beautiful bore

It’s been 13 years since the original “Avatar,” one of the most overrated and forgettable “important” movies of the 21st century. So forgettable that viewers will be forgiven for not quite remembering who’s who and what’s what in “Avatar: The Way of Water,” a sequel few people asked for, outside of the franchise’s obsessive auteur, James Cameron, and pandemic-era theaters desperate to lure audiences back into the habit of big-screen moviegoing.

As “ Top Gun: Maverick ” proved earlier this year, as long as a sequel is smart, well-written, beautifully cast and stylishly executed, it can take all the time it needs getting here. “The Way of Water” doesn’t necessarily check all those boxes, but what it does right will offer spectators moments of awe, full-body immersion and genuine beauty. Cameron, co-writing here with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, from a story he collaborated on with Jaffa, Silver, Josh Friedman and Shane Salerno, has never been known for his subtle narrative or sophisticated dialogue: “The Way of Water” is frequently clunky and ham-handed in its storytelling, and the words spoken by its characters — human, humanoid and in between — aren’t particularly memorable. But there’s no denying the power of images that can only be described as transporting — literally and figuratively.

“The Way of Water” catches up with “Avatar’s” protagonist, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a decade after he’s decided to retire from service with the Marines and take up residence on Pandora (the planet he was sent to colonize), become a member of the native Na’vi tribe and marry Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). As “The Way of Water” opens, we’re introduced to Jake and Neytiri’s spirited children: sons Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) and Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), as well as a little girl named Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss). They’ve also adopted Kiri, a sensitive adolescent whose mother, Grace Augustine, was played by Sigourney Weaver in the first “Avatar.” Here, by way of both digital wizardry and her own vocal gifts, Weaver delivers an impressively convincing portrayal of her younger self as a curious, tuned-in girl with profound powers to connect with the universe.

Meet the people who never stopped thinking ‘Avatar’ was cool

Kiri is one of the fully realized characters in “The Way of Water,” which centers on Jake’s efforts to save his family when rapacious forces once again threaten the peaceable kingdom of Pandora. The gung-ho leader of that hegemonic mission is another familiar face: Quaritch (Stephen Lang), Jake’s ally turned nemesis who was vanquished but has been reconstituted to resemble the towering blue-skinned ectomorphs who inhabit Pandora.

For the first 45 minutes or so, “The Way of Water” busies itself with introducing, reintroducing, explaining and setting up — and also establishing the idyllic family life Jake is trying to hard to preserve. Once he’s forced to flee the forest, the Sullys take refuge with the Metkayina people, whose seaside redoubt resembles the Maldives with way more fantastical flora and fauna.

Here are the movies everyone will be talking about this holiday season

It’s at this point that the visual wonders of “The Way of Water” come fully into frame, with Cameron and his visual effects team creating gorgeous underwater vistas of corals, undulating filaments, neon-colored plant life and creatures that float, soar, lunge and balletically breach. The most exhilarating moments of the film come by way of Kiri’s explorations of her new habitat and the adventures of her siblings, who befriend similarly feisty but finned and green-skinned Metkayina kids (their parents are played by Cliff Curtis and Kate Winslet). “Finding Nemo” has nothing on the world that Cameron builds undersea, with a far more vibrant color palette and arresting detail than he evinced in the first installment.

The irony of “The Way of Water” is that, for all its kid-centric action, it’s most likely far too intense for anyone under 10. While the Sullys learn how to hold their breath and Lo’ak befriends a whalelike leviathan who’s just as misunderstood as he is, Quaritch is on their trail, leaving nothing but suffering and destruction in his wake. Once he colludes with a greedy boat captain, played with sleazy relish by Brendan Cowell, the twin evils of militarism and capitalism create a thrashing, deeply disquieting tableau of gruesome cruelty and carnage — violence that reaches its peak in a loud, protracted fight sequence that forms the movie’s cacophonous climax.

If wanton destruction punctuated by moments of psychedelic visual splendor and New Age-y philosophizing is your bag, “The Way of Water” provides plenty of value. But as far as the computer-generated techniques have come in the intervening years, there are sequences that are shockingly unattractive, especially live-action scenes whose high frame rate gives them the cheesy, motion-smoothed look of a bad soap opera.

Opinion: Does the world really want an ‘Avatar’ sequel?

The action in “The Way of Water” is ultimately overwhelming, betraying an uncomfortable truth about Cameron: He might preach environmentalism and balance, calling on Indigenous peoples for their gentle worldviews and material culture. But at heart, he’s just as aggressive and all-commanding as the bad guys he portrays with such oorah swagger. As the annihilation reached its punishingly fevered pitch at a recent screening, the crashes and rumbles and explosions weren’t just deafening, they were palpable to the point that I wondered who was kicking my seat. Then I realized: It was James Cameron all along.

PG-13. At area theaters. Contains sequences of strong violence and intense action, partial nudity, and some strong language. 192 minutes.

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• DVD & Streaming

Avatar: The Way of Water

• Action/Adventure , Drama , Sci-Fi/Fantasy , War

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In Theaters

• December 16, 2022
• Sam Worthington as Jake Sully; Zoe Saldaña as Neytiri; Sigourney Weaver as Kiri; Stephen Lang as Colonel Miles Quaritch; Kate Winslet as Ronal; Cliff Curtis as Tonowari; Edie Falco as General Frances Ardmore; Brendan Cowell as Captain Mick Scoresby; Jemaine Clement as Dr. Ian Garvin; Jamie Flatters as Neteyam; Britain Dalton as Lo'ak; Trinity Jo-Li Bliss as Tuk; Bailey Bass as Reya; Filip Geljo as Aonung; Duane Evans Jr. as Rotxo; Jack Champion as Spider

Home Release Date

• March 28, 2023
• James Cameron

Distributor

• 20th Century Studios

Movie Review

Pandora’s a nice place to visit. But you wouldn’t want to plunder there.

Humankind should’ve learned that lesson back in the first Avatar movie. With our own planet nearly exhausted and humans greedy for the Pandora-based metal of unobtanium, we homo sapiens set up shop on Pandora and quickly discovered the planet didn’t want us there. Lots of people died. Most of the rest were expelled. A few scientists remained (as long as they promised to be very, very nice), and a couple of them actually kinda transferred souls —telling their human bodies goodbye and becoming one of the blue, 10-foot-tall Na’vi.

But humans are a stubborn lot. Like heroes in a moderately creepy 1980s romcom, they take Pandora’s firm “no” as the planet just playing hard to get. And if Pandora’s complex ecosystems get in the way? Well, just set ‘em on fire. Burn a nice large area for humanity to mine and pave and build parking garages on in their quest to bring the whole of this lush, green land to heel.

But before that work can truly begin, the invading humans need to take care of one big blue thorn: Jake Sully.

Sully was one of folks who decided being Na’vi was preferable to being human, and that a life in Pandora was just too good to pass up. He’s got a wife now—the fierce, loving Neytiri—and a minivan’s worth of kids (though the minivan would certainly need some extra headroom). He’s also been leading a guerilla war against humankind’s latest efforts at exploitation.

Who better to lead the charge against pesky Jake than his one-time boss, Colonel Miles Quartich?

OK, so technically, the colonel died in the last movie. But before Quartich was killed, he saved (essentially) his brain on (essentially) a thumb drive, allowing to plug in his own essence into a Na’vi avatar.

Yep, that’s right: Sully might’ve gotten the best of the colonel last time around. But now, Quartich is just as big as Jake. Just as blue. Just as able to plug his braided hair into Pandora’s planetary hard drive as Jake is.

And this time, it’s personal .

Positive Elements

Sullys stick together. Such is the mantra that Jake has passed on to his four kids, and we see it play out time after time.

Jake feels the weight of fatherhood particularly heavily. “A father protects,” he tells us. “It’s what gives him meaning.” So when Jake learns that Quartich and his squad of human-brained Na’vi are after him and his family, he makes the difficult decision to move—to escape to a more watery realm on Pandora. It’s a painful uprooting, but Jake insists, “Wherever we go, this family is our fortress.” And when the Sullys do settle into an unfamiliar village that operates in unfamiliar ways, The Sully kids have each other’s backs—sometimes at huge personal risk.

An example of the family’s cohesive camaraderie: When some local teens pick on Kiri—Jake and Neytiri’s dreamy, adopted daughter—brothers Neteyam and Lo’ak fly to her defense. And while neither Jake nor Plugged In condone the violent way that defense is made, we still applaud that sort of loyalty.

But eventually—and through a lot of hard work—Jake, Neytiri and their children become integral parts of their new community, too. The entire village shows a willingness to fight and sacrifice for each of its members (including its non-Na’vi members). And even neighboring villages do their best to protect Jake and his family at great personal and communal cost.

We should note that most of Jake’s kids—in the early stages of adolescence, it seems—are processing their own roles within the family and community. Lo’ak, Jake’s second-oldest son, often feels like a disappointment to his ever-demanding father. Kiri feels like an outcast. But in many ways, these two characters form the bedrock on which The Way of Water is built, with each bringing special skills and moxie to the narrative party. The message the movie seems to be sending: Not fitting the norm can be a pretty good thing. All of us are different, and those differences can make us stronger.

Spiritual Elements

Pandora’s culture is deeply spiritual—but it’s not at all Christian. Rather, the planet’s inhabitants worship and sometimes pray to Eywa, a sort of an environmentally based goddess (think of it almost like Mother Nature on spiritual steroids). Neytiri, for instance, thanks the “Great Mother” when her son avoids a fate that could’ve been a catastrophe. Others pray in life-threatening situations. Pandora’s whole religious system feels pantheistic: Everything on the planet is connected to Pandora’s central spiritual heart, simultaneously separate and part of a whole spiritual being. The Na’vi literally plug into Pandora’s environmental motherboard to connect more closely with its creatures and even experience memories and visions.

We also hear some vaguely spiritual talk predicated on water, repeated almost like a mantra. “The way of water has no beginning and has no end,” it begins. The planet’s water gives and receives, it is “before birth” and “after death.” A scientist tells us that some of Pandora’s biggest inhabitants—whale-like creatures called tulkun —are said to have huge spiritual centers in their brains (to go along with their superior intelligence).

The movie also hints at some sort of divine or immaculate conception. Kiri, Jake and Neytiri’s adopted daughter, was the birth daughter of (and I realize this sounds a bit confusing) the avatar of Dr. Grace Augustine, who kinda-sorta died in the last movie and whose Na’vi avatar still floats floating in a capsule of liquid. That avatar got pregnant—no one’s sure how. Now, Kiri seems to have an extra-special connection with Pandora, manipulating creatures in ways that no one else can do.

We hear references to Sully and his kin as having “demon blood.” The closing song makes reference to sin.

Sexual Content

As mentioned, Grace’s avatar is floating in what looks like a capsule of water, and at one juncture we see her breasts (including a bit of nipple).

But let’s be honest: The Na’vi are not known for their modesty, and there’s a lot of blue skin on display. Critical bits are mostly covered by tiny bits of fabric or leather or hair (or strategic camera angles, since tiny kids sometimes wear nothing at all), but viewers will be exposed to an unrelenting stream of blue CGI buttocks throughout.

Also of note: One character, Spider, is a human teen boy living the Na’vi lifestyle. He wears, essentially, a loincloth throughout the entire movie.

When the Sullys move to their watery new home, Lo’ak develops a crush on Reya, the village chieftain’s daughter. When Reya’s trying to teach Lo’ak and his siblings how to slow their heartbeats (in order to breathe underwater longer), she places her hand on his stomach to help calm him. It has just the opposite effect: “Your heart is beating fast,” Reya says, as Lo’ak’s brother and sister look at each other knowingly.

When a bad guy captures, Kiri and tells her to “move along, buttercup,” Kiri responds by saying, “I’m not your buttercup, perv.”

Sully and Neytiri enjoy a brief moment of canoodling together sans kids on a “date night,” as they call it—until, that is, the arrival of human spacecraft interrupts them. Elsewhere, a grown female Na’vi is very pregnant, though that hardly slows her down or keeps her from fighting when the time comes.

Violent Content

The Way of Water , like the first Avatar movie, is essentially a war flick, and we see plenty of violence. Indeed, the last hour of the film is one constant battle.

Bullets rattle out of machine guns and sometimes find their mark, leading to bloody injuries and painful deaths. While the Na’vi use these more modern-day weapons, many use more indigenous tools: Neytiri’s favorite is her bow, from which she shoots arrows with distinctive, telltale fletching. Several find their mark—sometimes the heads of opponents, sometimes through vehicle windshields on the way to the chest. Knives and axe-like weapons are also favorite implements: One man suffers a spike-blow to the head. Several characters are impaled by spears.

Various machines and vehicles explode, sometimes killing or injuring others in the process. People might fly up and out of said vehicles, surely pulled by gravity to their dooms. (One man is thrown from a boat and has his arm severed for good measure: We see both fly.)  A number of people drown or nearly drown, and at least one man is crushed by what appears to be a gigantic anemone. Someone has what appears to be an epileptic seizure underwater and nearly dies.

But perhaps the movie’s most jarring death isn’t that of a human or Na’vi at all, but rather a whale-like tulkun. Hunters pierce the animal’s hide with skewers carrying fast-inflating balloons, which bring the animal to the surface. Then it’s smacked in the chest with a massive explosive harpoon. The tulkun tries to flee, but eventually exhausts itself and dies. The hunters later go inside the beast’s cavernous maw and drill into its brain, draining a valuable liquid from the creature. (The rest of the carcass is apparently wasted.) Later, we discover that the tulkun’s calf also died.

The tulkun are assaulted with sonic cannons and depth charges. (We’re told that the creatures have never “even lifted a fin” against their attackers, but one tulkun decides to go against the species’ pacifistic ethos with devastating consequences.)

Sully’s kids fight with other teens. Fists are thrown and tails are pulled. The fight leaves Lo’ak and Neteyam bloodied, but the other teens (a Sully boy insists) suffered much worse. (When Sully later makes Lo’ak apologize to the other teen leader, he does, after a fashion: “I’m sorry I hit you—so many times,” he says.)

An animal is shot and killed; we see its carcass floating in the water. Countless more die on the humans’ return to Pandora, caught in an overwhelming inferno. Knives cut into the chests of a couple of people—ceremonial deaths, it would seem (even though the flesh wounds aren’t particularly serious).

Village buildings are set on fire. The lives of several people and Na’vi are threatened. Someone is strapped into a sort of torture device, leaving him with a bloody nose after the ordeal. A gigantic fish-like monster tries to gobble up a swimmer before it is killed itself. A tulkun sports a metallic hook of sorts in its fin, which a Na’vi friend kindly removes. A shark-like undersea creature relentlessly hunts one of the Na’vi.

Crude or Profane Language

One f-word and about 15 s-words. We also hear “a–,” “b–ch,” “b–tard,” “crap,” “g-dd–n,” “d–n,” “h—” and the British profanities “bloody” and “bugger.” Jesus’ name is abused once. We hear some name-calling, too, including one sibling calling another “penis face.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

A tulkun hunter tells a marine biologist on the team that his hunting pays for the scientist’s research. “That’s why I drink,” the scientist tells him. Someone makes a quip about someone else owing her a beer.

Other Negative Elements

Colonel Quaritch, the movie’s most notable big bad, is a proud and fierce U.S. Marine, as is the rest of his team. They do some pretty despicable things during this movie and form the spear point of humankind’s desire to plunder and colonize Pandora. And while the colonel’s character takes on some subtler shades as the movie goes on, The Way of Water certainly casts the military in a poor light.

Whatever else you think of James Cameron, let’s acknowledge at least this: The guy knows how to make a buzz-worthy movie.

His greatest strength lies in world-building—bringing moviegoers into exotic realms and making them feel as though they’re there. Be it the long-lost elegance of the Titanic or the gritty confines of a blue-collar spaceship in Aliens , Cameron invites you in—making it all feel so real. (In the case of the Avatar movies, the 3D doesn’t hurt.)

But while Cameron is a first-class tour guide in his own made-up worlds, those worlds are not necessarily ones that should be visited.

Avatar: The Way of Water swims into its PG-13 rating by the skin of its oddly pronounced incisors. Language alone pushes the envelope. The occasional blood spatter or flying limb doesn’t do the film any favors, either. And then, of course, there’s all that CGI skin. Yes, it’s all fake, but I hesitate to think of all the Rule 34 Na’vi GIFs that might be floating out on the internet. Nor would I be that surprised if the impossibly lithe, impossibly thin Na’vi (who, after all, make their human counterparts look like clumsy Minecraft figures) might unintentionally inspire an eating disorder or two.

But even if all that’s navigable, I’d encourage you to consider two more points before toting the whole family to watch. One, the tulkun hunt—a jarring scene for any young animal lover (especially one with a love of whales). And two, Pandora’s spiritual system that pushes away Christianity and hugs a nature-based pantheism. Forget the biblical model of stewardship: It sidesteps the Creator and instead worships the creation. And that is pretty much the definition of idolatry.

Cameron has a way of upending Hollywood expectations. The original Avatar is still the highest-grossing movie worldwide of all time—and it is said that The Way of Water will have to exceed that to make a profit. It could do just that.

But while Pandora is as beautiful as ever, The Way of Water might not be the way that many families would care to go.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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Movie Review – Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

December 17, 2022 by Robert Kojder

Avatar: The Way of Water , 2022.

Directed by James Cameron. Starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Kate Winslet, Cliff Curtis, Edie Falco, Jemaine Clement, Brendan Cowell, Jack Champion, Jamie Flatters, Britain Dalton, Trinity Bliss, Bailey Bass, Filip Geljo, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Matt Gerald, Duane Evans Jr., Chloe Coleman, Keston John, Toby Mortimer, and Jeremy Irwin.

Set more than a decade after the events of the first film, learn the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri, and their kids), the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive, and the tragedies they endure.

Early in Avatar: The Way of Water , Na’vi leader Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) briefly narrates events between films, introducing him and Neytiri’s (Zoe Saldana) four children (of varying ages ranging from young adult to teenager to child) while summing up recent life on the moon Pandora. During this sequence, Jake mentions that after a short time, listening to and speaking Na’vi became as natural as doing so in English, with the film’s subtitles instantly fading away while shifting from one language to the other. In the grand narrative scheme of this 3+ hour epic, it doesn’t seem like anything important, and it’s not, but it is a reminder of how efficient and economic director James Cameron is at storytelling and world-building, seamlessly expressing an evolution of these characters and their lives. 

That’s also useful to know because James Cameron (working with screenwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, all conceiving the story alongside Josh Friedman and Shane Salerno, with multiple installments left to go) is cramming every second of those three hours with eye-popping visuals, character beats, and spectacular action set pieces. Screened for awards consideration in High-Framerate 3D (although I highly recommend forgoing the janky HFR, as the experience is most likely more fluid and prettier without it), it takes less than five seconds to feel in remarkably capable hands, those of a gifted visual storyteller like there never has been and possibly never will be again.

James Cameron popularized 3D with Avatar , with countless filmmakers and franchises attempting to replicate that marvelous feat and typically failing (aside from a few memorable shots in Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil adaptations and Robert Rodriguez’s Alita: Battle Angel , which James Cameron produced, I’m hard-pressed to think of any other time the format actually felt impressive, showy, and dazzling). So if one hasn’t seen that film in quite some time, it’s instantaneously jarring in the best possible way to find one’s bearings here inside 3D with unparalleled depth, vibrancy, and graceful movement (it’s hard not to feel like you’re swinging and leaping through the forest like the Na’vi).

As such, I admit to finding myself missing bits and pieces of dialogue establishing the new characters within the Sully family; shots of Pandora from cinematographer Russell Carpenter are that immersively captivating, accentuated by a wondrous score from Simon Franglen. It’s like playing a video game where you want to get off the story-based path and soak in the environments, flora, fauna, majestic creatures, and the detail of the character renders (the motion capture here is unbelievably lifelike). Fortunately, it’s still simple enough to get a handle on who each of the children is (among several other new characters), but it’s a testament to the mind-blowing craftsmanship that one is comfortable letting James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water wash all over yourself for the overwhelming, grandiose sensory experience it is. The characters and themes break through emotionally anyway because James Cameron ultimately knows how to balance the two.

Case in point, following the re-emergence of Stephen Lang’s villainous Miles Quaritch as a Recom (avatars using memories and DNA of dead people) with a similarly fashioned new squad, hunting down the Sully clan, albeit this time with intentions of colonizing Pandora since Earth is quickly becoming uninhabitable (although these films take place over 100 years into the future, it’s difficult to shake that James Cameron is angling for a real-life analogy here), Jake faces a choice of whether to stay and fight to defend the land or protecting his family by fleeing to a new home.

Without getting into the touching emotional core regarding familial duties and the right choices, the Sully family does traverse to the Pandora reefs, hoping to ingratiate themselves inside the Metkayina clan (they are a greenish-blue, with an amphibious resemblance and scaly makeup) led by Kate Winslet’s Ronal and her Olo’eyktan husband Tonowari (Cliff Curtis), a group with a profound connection to water, lyrically summed up. While introducing their children and several other characters, Avatar: The Way of Water slows down to marvel at the ocean, and its many lovely creatures, with copious amounts of astonishing scenes, shot underwater for real (the technology on display here is next-level insane.) As far as the oceanic village itself, the closest comparison that comes to mind is Besaid from Final Fantasy X , although far more ambitious in scope.

Anyway, even if the characters often feel minimally developed with surface-level complexity, no doubt stunted by scattershot messy storytelling with far too much to explore and provide layers to even with a 3+ hour running time, the performances find the emotion and heart of the story. The script occasionally feels as if an edgy teenager wrote it (there are once again some random and out-of-place swearing insults that sometimes don’t even properly resemble how anyone would talk), but it simultaneously knows how to build up a big fight feel and convey heavy stakes. There is urgency and many moments where characters genuinely feel in danger, and in some cases do die, because this is blockbuster filmmaking with guts.

Making up for shortcomings in characterization are the ideas James Cameron and company are going for; there’s an exploration of what it means to be family as one of the children is not Jake or Neyteri’s, but the biological daughter of Sigourney Weaver’s avatar, now a teenager named Kiri searching for her place in the world and an answer as to the identity of her biological father. However, the real mind-fuck (at least for me, considering I went into this movie blind) is that Kiri is also played by Sigourney Weaver, who delivers an organically moving performance (again, the motion capture is stunningly expressive).

Then there are brothers Neteyam and Lo’ak (played by Jamie Flatters and Britain Dalton, respectively) in the middle of a sibling rivalry, as the latter is oftentimes reckless and endangers his brother and sisters while the former is more rational, resourceful, and combat-skilled. The offspring also hangs around human child Spider a winningly feral Jack Champion, bringing to mind The Jungle Book ), a leftover from the previous war with the sky people. It also shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out his origins and who he is related to, and once that is revealed, it allows the script to show off a different family dynamic. Lo’ak also happens to have an additional finger, earning him the label of freak, which serves as the launching point for another heartfelt subplot as he comes across a misunderstood gargantuan whale missing one of its fins that everyone else claims is violent and murderous.

As for Quaritch, his new body allows James Cameron to showcase a more sinister and primal depiction of connecting with the land and aerial creatures by taming force rather than spiritually. James Cameron cares deeply about land and ocean and protecting the world at all costs, so much so that portions of Avatar: The Way of Water seem to exist just to bask in its magnificence. Regarding the action set pieces, the film is an amalgamation of James Cameron’s entire filmography, with shots not just evoking Titanic (a relentlessly tense battle sequence set on a sinking ship) but also Aliens and the Terminator movies (a forest fire rages across Pandora with the same exact cinematography as seen for T2 ‘s Judgment Day sequence). Nevertheless, the underwater battles are unquestionably incredible, eliciting “how the hell was this accomplished” movie magic.

When it comes down to it, there’s much messiness to the narrative and much left to discover about these characters (including plot points set up for payoffs in future sequels), but that also has to be weighed against whatever is lost in translation while being floored by the spectacle of Avatar: The Way of Water . It certainly demands two viewings: one just to experience the insane technological accomplishments while feeling the emotion from natural story beats (sure, it’s nothing new, but James Cameron knows how to drive that home into something extraordinarily exciting that transcends familiarity), and another to home in on the characters themselves.

Either way, the journey puts most Hollywood blockbusters of the past ten years to shame, so let’s rejoice that we don’t have to wait ten more years for James Cameron to dazzle us again. Every image of Avatar: The Way of Water oozes personality and is bursting with life; that’s the way of masterful filmmaking from a living legend.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★  / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check  here  for new reviews, follow my  Twitter  or  Letterboxd , or email me at [email protected]

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How to Watch the Avatar Movies in Order - A Streaming Guide

Shaurya Singh Thapa

Official JustWatch writer

Director James Cameron is no stranger to blockbuster franchises having broken out with the success of the Terminator movies . The Avatar franchise continued Cameron’s success and ambitious sci-fi vision further, starting with 2009’s Avatar and continuing with the 2022 sequel Avatar: The Way of Water . If you wish to go on a trip to the vibrant planet of Pandora, our guide will take you through all the Avatar movies in order and where you can stream them right now. We'll also show you where to watch Avatar movies legally online for free.

How to watch the Avatar movies in chronological order

Avatar (2009)

Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

Avatar 3 (2025)

Avatar 4 (2029)

Avatar 5 (2031)

The Avatar movies can fortunately be streamed in the same order as their release date. While only two Avatar movies have been released so far, director and co-writer James Cameron has been working on putting out three more sequels for the foreseeable future.

The first Avatar movie introduced viewers to the world of Pandora, a world inhabited by the nature-worshiping Na'vi alien race. When forces from Earth exploit their resources, a human-turned-Na'vi Jake Sully leads the aliens in an all-out war for their survival. Sam Worthington starred as Jake while Zoe Saldana portrayed the Na'vi fighter and Jake’s love interest Neytiri. The ensemble cast also included Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Rodriguez, and Stephen Lang as the ruthless military villain Miles Quaritch.

The 2009 film was a record-breaking blockbuster. Once the highest-grossing movie of all time, Avatar was released in 3D and made the medium more mainstream for theatrical releases. The movie’s Oscar-winning visual effects and motion-capture technology continue to be influential.

More than a decade later, Cameron returned to the franchise with Avatar: The Way of Water. The 2022 hit continued Jake Sully and Neytiri’s adventures. As they start a new family on Pandora, they must give up their hopes as the Earth’s technologically-advanced military strikes again. Seeking refuge in a new watery world, Jake and Neytiri must not only protect their race but also their adolescent children. Doubling as an action epic and a family drama, The Way of Water reintroduced Stephen Lang and Sigourney Weaver in slightly different characters while also introducing Cameron’s Titanic star Kate Winslet as the water clan’s leader Ronal.

The future Avatar movies will continue to explore the Na'vi and other Pandoran clans’ struggles against Earth’s Resources Development Administration (RDA) with Cameron having simultaneously shot Avatar 3 after The Way of Water. While Avatar 3 (formal title not yet announced) awaits a 2025 release, the fourth and fifth movies are expected to hit theatres by 2029 and 2031.

Where can I watch Avatar movies online?

Below you can find the latest streaming information for all the Avatar movies in order. This also includes offers to watch, buy, or rent the movies on Indian streaming platforms.

In the 22nd century, a paraplegic Marine is dispatched to the moon Pandora on a unique mission, but becomes torn between following orders and protecting an alien civilization.

Avatar: The Way of Water

Set more than a decade after the events of the first film, learn the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri, and their kids), the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive, and the tragedies they endure.

The third entry in the Avatar franchise.

Sequel of Avatar 3 (2025). The plot is unknown.

Sequel of Avatar 4 (2029) and last movie of the "Avatar" saga. The plot is unknown.

Will There Be an Earth Avatar Series Release Date & Is It Coming Out?

W ondering about the release date of Earth Avatar Series ? The animated series will take place in the Avatar universe, 100 years after the events of The Legend of Korra. It will follow the adventures of an Earthbender who will inherit the title of Avatar. With a new set of supporting characters, the titular character will be seen continuing Aang’s and Korra’s journey.

Here’s all the Earth Avatar Series release date information we know so far, and all the details on when it is coming out.

Is there an Earth Avatar Series release date?

The Earth Avatar Series release date is expected to arrive by 2025 .

The makers of the original Avatar series have officially confirmed a spin-off show that will come out in 2025. The news was conveyed by Avatar News through an exclusive report back in 2022. While the show will take place in the same universe as Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, it is set to center around the Avatar successor of Aang and Korra. A movie with the aforementioned Earth Avatar as the protagonist has also been announced. However, no further update has been given on the film, which is expected to be released in 2027.

This date is an estimation based on the information we have at the time of this writing.

Avatar: The Last Airbender serves as the opener to the franchise that will host the upcoming series. In the 2005-released animated show, Zach Tyler voices the leading character of Aang. He is joined by Mae Whitman, Jack De Sena, Dante Basco, Mako, and Dee Bradley Baker, among others, who rounded off the cast roster.

Where is Earth Avatar Series coming out?

Earth Avatar Series is anticipated to come out on Paramount Plus in 2025.

This is because Paramount Plus and Nickelodeon co-own Avatar Studios, the production company responsible for expanding the Avatar universe. ComingSoon will provide an update once the official streaming details are announced.

The official synopsis for Avatar: The Last Airbender reads:

“In a war-torn world of elemental magic, a young boy reawakens to undertake a dangerous mystic quest to fulfill his destiny as the Avatar, and bring peace to the world.”

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‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ Review: A Live-Action Adaptation that Brings Hope to the Franchise

The Avatar has returned. Released on Thursday, Feb. 22, Netflix’s new live-action adaptation of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” strikes a perfect balance between paying homage to the 2005 Nickelodeon animated series and reimagining the storylines in a compact eight-episode series accessible for new viewers and die-hard fans alike. Full of visually striking fight scenes and a more mature tone than its cartoon predecessor, the complexity of the series’ fantasy world truly shines in this adaptation. Yet, the biggest triumph of the new series is the fidelity to beloved characters, brought to life by a superbly cast ensemble of actors.

From the first scenes of episode one, viewers are thrust into the political intrigue of a war waged by Fire Lord Sozin (Hiro Kanagawa) — the power-hungry tyrant at the helm of the Fire Nation — against the Earth Kingdom, Water Tribes, and Air Nomads. Unlike its animated predecessor, the new series fleshes out Aang’s (Gordon Cormier) experience as a young airbender learning that he is the next Avatar, the only person who can master all four elements. However, Aang disappears soon after, frozen in an iceberg with his loyal — and thanks to CGI — incredibly fluffy sky bison named Appa.

One hundred years later, Aang emerges from the ice to two unsuspecting Water Tribe teens, fledgling waterbender Katara (Kiawentiio) and her older brother Sokka (Ian Ousley). The three set out on a journey across the four nations to ultimately bring Aang to the Northern Water Tribe where he must warn its leaders of an impending Fire Nation attack, and hopefully hone his water bending skills.

As these newfound friends set out on their quest, the banished heir to the Fire Nation Throne, Prince Zuko (Dallas Liu), and his unwaveringly jovial Uncle Iroh (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee) follow in hot pursuit. While many of the beloved “filler” episodes of the original show fall to the wayside in this new adaptation, the new 45-60 minute episodes contain far more exposition. Among the most riveting scenes are flashbacks for Liu’s emotionally scarred portrayal of Zuko.

Despite the sudden departure of original creators Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino due to creative differences after two years of development for Netflix, the remaining showrunner Albert Kim succeeded in capturing much of the original magic of the animated series. Notably, Konietzko and DiMartino are now working together to create new animated sequel movies under their newly created Avatar Studios.

Admittedly, the pacing of Kim’s series feels slightly disjointed as a result of several different groups of characters accomplishing entirely separate plot points. For instance, much of the middle of the season follows the main trio’s journey in Omashu, which absorbs adventures that originally took place over the course of many episodes and separated by journeys to different locations throughout the Earth Kingdom.

This decision is jarring for fans familiar with the original series, and potentially bewildering for those without background knowledge of the show’s world, minor characters, and original plot. The merging of storylines contributes to the new series’ darker, more mature tone, evoking a sense of intrigue that raises the stakes for each of the main characters. In the series’ defense, collapsing many storylines to occur simultaneously is truly the only feasible strategy to make time for consistent call-backs to the original series over the course of fewer episodes.

Many fan-favorite moments are given new life with special effects, and the live actors bring the scenes further to life. The perfectly goofy yet decidedly less useless rendition of season one’s Sokka still falls for the intense and witty Kyoshi warrior Suki (Maria Zhang). Katara’s epic duel with sexist water bending Master Pakku (A Martinez) is recreated almost shot-for-shot, completing her early character development from timid and apprehensive to confident in her new-found power. Even the cabbage merchant (James Sie) makes his comedic return in the Omashu episode. Much to fans’ relief, there is still a band of roving musicians to serenade Sokka and Katara upon entering the famed “Secret Tunnel.”

On a more serious note, Uncle Iroh’s backstory is also fleshed out in more detail. Several scenes, including his past as a Fire Nation General and the loss of his son, Lu Ten, bring an added and much-appreciated humanity to a character who without special narrative attention would be in danger of appearing as a bumbling old man.

Yet another triumph is in the series’ costumes , designed by Farnaz Khaki-Sadign whose work was informed by real forms of cultural dress to make the fantasy world feel all the more believable. The attention to detail in the show not only accurately recreates the original animation, but also brings the cultural influences and inspirations of the world to the forefront of the series’ striking visuals and elaborate sets.

With promise of a second and hopefully third season to finish out the story progression, this revival of a cult-classic series rises to the monumental task at hand — appeasing existing fans with easter egg references and true-to-character depictions, while also generating excitement from new fans who will be left wanting more after the cliff-hanger at the end of season one.

—Staff writer Katy E. Nairn can be reached at [email protected] .

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