Avatar: The Way of Water
Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) in Avatar: The Way of Water
13 years after the release of James Cameron’s Avatar, we’re finally back in the world of Pandora. The Way of Water is a behemoth. Lasting a whopping 192 minutes and costing upwards of (at least) $350 million USD, many have claimed that this is the gargantuan to finally bring back the ‘real’ blockbuster after a decade of nothing but episodic caped fare. I can assure you that, whilst way more visually compelling than the grey paste and shoddy CGI put into numerous franchise projects, The Way of Water is a disappointing, unsatisfactory slog. Months of twitter telling you to “never bet against Jim!”, and this is what we get: another bloated big budget affair.
To be frank, many critics have unfairly raised an eyebrow at the narrative here and its similarity to its predecessor. That’s dishonest, the story *is* different… it’s just worse, is all. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) has a family now with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), they live a peaceful and fruitful life until the humans return. And it gets more unfortunate for the Sully’s, as the rough-edged Quaritch (Stephen Lang) has returned as a clone, a Na’vi with the memories of his deceased counterpart.
The first hour of this long-awaited sequel is rather enjoyable. A decently paced first act with some exciting action set-pieces and a solid foundation for the rest of the film. It’s about midway through that I realised things weren’t going so swimmingly (pun intended). It gets overly saturated, real fast. I’ll concede that this can be lovely to look at, but the high frame rate underwater imagery lacks the more organic, composed feel of the Na’vi rainforests. The visuals are so overbearing, that some of the latter-half action sequences felt more like a Halo level than a tangible part of a movie.
This is some of Cameron’s worst dialogue to date, with endlessly boring and uninteresting platitudes on family. If you wanted a break from the formula, this isn’t it. All the flashy visual tenacity and overzealous pondering can only go so far, and this ends up right where I didn’t want it to end up, another careless modern blockbuster that has bored me to tears and knackered me death.
