Avatar: The Way of Water
Avatar: The Way of Water is a visual marvel that struggles to match its technical achievement with storytelling of equal ambition. Worth seeing once, on the biggest screen possible.
The original Avatar has always occupied an unusual position in the cultural memory. It is simultaneously the highest-grossing film in the history of cinema and a title that prompts a kind of reflexive embarrassment in people who acknowledge having seen it, as though the experience of watching it was impressive but the act of admitting that you took part in that cultural event that is somehow compromising. The critique that attached itself to the film in the years following its 2009 release, that the story was derivative and the characters forgettable, is accurate enough as far as it goes. What it tends to minimize is the degree to which James Cameron understood exactly what he was making. Avatar is a technology demonstration in the form of a narrative film, a proof of concept for what photorealistic CGI and immersive 3D filmmaking could achieve, with a story constructed to move audiences through environments rather than to challenge or surprise them. It worked on its own terms completely, and the 4K restoration has not diminished the achievement. Avatar: The Way of Water is the sequel to that film, arriving thirteen years later, and it makes the same trade-offs in roughly the same proportions: extraordinary visual ambition in the service of a story that does not match it.
Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) has been living among the Ometicaya clan for over a decade, permanently embodied in his Na'vi avatar, and has built a family with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). Their children include three of their own and two adopted: Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), born mysteriously from the avatar of the late Dr. Grace Augustine, and Spider (Jack Champion), the human son of the resurrected Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) who was too young to evacuate Pandora with the other humans and has grown up among the Na'vi. When the RDA returns to Pandora with new intent and Quaritch pursues a personal vendetta against Jake, the Sully family is forced to leave their forest home and seek refuge among the Metkayina, a reef-dwelling Na'vi clan whose relationship with Pandora's oceans introduces an entirely new visual environment. Britain Dalton, Trinity Jo-Li Bliss, and Cliff Curtis also star.
The refugee narrative is the film's smartest structural choice because it solves the same problem the original film solved with the same elegant logic. By displacing the Sully family from their established environment and dropping them into the Metkayina's ocean territory as outsiders who must learn a new way of life, Cameron recreates the conditions of discovery that made the first film's world-building work. You are seeing the ocean through the eyes of characters who do not yet know it, which means the extended sequences devoted to exploring the sea life and the bioluminescent underwater ecosystems register as wonder rather than indulgence. On a first viewing, those sequences are the film's most purely cinematic achievement. The motion capture technology applied to underwater performance is a massive advance over what existed previously, and the results are immersive in ways that make the three-hour-plus runtime feel shorter than a less visually ambitious film of similar length.
The narrative problems arrive in the second half and are real enough to warrant honesty about. Neytiri is significantly underserved, defined almost entirely by her role as mother and reactive participant in events that the plot constructs around Jake and the children rather than around her. In a film that spends substantial time on family dynamics, the marginalization of the character who made the first film's emotional center work is a meaningful loss. The mystery surrounding Kiri's parentage is set up with enough deliberateness that its resolution will be obvious to most viewers well before the film arrives at it, and the screenplay's simultaneous insistence on treating it as a mystery and providing concrete evidence pointing toward the obvious answer wastes screentime on misdirection that does not misdirect. Several plot threads introduced in the first two acts do not resolve in ways that feel complete, which suggests a filmmaking strategy that is comfortable front-loading setup for a sequel rather than closing its own loops.
The third act presents a specific visual problem in its climactic confrontation, a nighttime battle between Na'vi characters in similar environments and similar physical profiles that is difficult to track spatially. Who is doing what to whom, and where everyone is positioned relative to each other, becomes visually confusing in ways that undercut the emotional stakes the film has been building toward. It is a staging problem more than an effects problem, and it is a notable failure in a film whose visual intelligence has been otherwise exceptional.
None of this changes the fundamental recommendation, which is to see Avatar: The Way of Water in the largest format available to you, in 3D if possible, before it leaves theaters. The experience of watching it in the right context is categorically different from watching it at home, in a way that has become rare enough to be worth specifically seeking out. Cameron is making the argument, as he did in 2009, that the theatrical experience of visual spectacle is irreplaceable, and he is right. Just be prepared to make your peace with a story that does not quite rise to the images carrying it.
