Avatar: The Way of Water: Movie Review

Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Cliff Curtis, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Winslet

Director: James Cameron

There's both good news and bad news about the much-awaited, long-delayed Avatar sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water.

The good news is the sense of spectacle is once again prevalent in director James Cameron's latest, a film that's so eager to show off its technical depth and breadth throughout. But that's also the bad news - it spends so much time running scenes that seem to exist solely to help your jaws drop to the ground, it forgets about doing anything more than presenting a remotely serviceable, yet cliched, revenge-driven plot.

In the return to Pandora, Sam Worthington's Jake Sully is living his best blue-lived life with his wife Neytiri (Saldana) and their brood of kids, including the human Spider. But when the "sky people" return to Pandora with a desire to mine it for their next world as Earth is dying (an idea presented as a throwaway line and then little else) and with a thirst for revenge against Sully, the brood is forced on the run.

Leaving the forests behind and trying to join the Metkayina, an amphibious race headed up by their chief Tonowari (a venerable Cliff Curtis), Sully soon finds their quest for a new Eden can't last forever and there are inadvertent consequences brought down upon the newcomers.

While Cameron's decried those who claim Avatar: The Way of Water will be too long, there's no denying the plot is stretched so thin through a prism of such cliches, it can't help but feel its weight. Even if at its heart, it's about family, the burden of being a parent and the watching of your children blossom, learn and make their own mistakes.

Sub-stories of the rival families' kids bonding and scrapping mesh with a tale about the hunting of a whale-like species and one Na'vi's friendship with such a creature; and the military grunts espouse such banal and unimaginative dialogue, it's like watching the very worst of an 80s action movie, writ with an environmental and anti-imperialist narrative coursing through its veins.

No matter how immersive the underwater sequences are, and how much the creatures glow and pulse in their high frame rate resolution, after a while the sensory overload gives way to a feeling of almost tedium, as it feels like you're watching a theme park simulator at a marine park. Cameron's done excellently at coralling his digital troops into fusing the world of the water with his visions from the likes of The Abyss and subsequent Titanic docos.

This may be a third dimension writ large, but it lacks the dramatic heft needed to provide the emotional elements and story beats throughout. In many ways, it feels like an experience, rather than a movie, a double-edged sword that's both damning and worthy of praise as it plays out. Characters lack the depth that's provided by the FX wizardry and High Frame Rate resolution and even the film's strongest emotional beats seem to have come from a discarded Free Willy script. And Neytiri, once so integral to proceedings, feels sidelined here throughout.

It's a disappointment - as it inevitably could only have been - and while Cameron spends a lot of time creating imagery and sculpting the underwater world of Pandora, it exists solely to dazzle rather than engage. Early hints of colonisation, deforestation and destruction both of the land and sea hang in the air, providing dramatic fruit for the plucking, but discarded for the sake of dazzling your eyes.

Yet when the spectacle comes together, it does so with such visual aplomb and technical dazzle that it almost manages to overlook it's a rewrite of the final battles of the first film some 13 years ago - and a retake on the spectacle of Cameron's own Titanic. Swooping battle sequences with their hyper-realism  and action scene edges combine thrillingly to produce something that shows the digital art at its very best. Even if it does take 150 minutes to reach that stage.

Perhaps the best thing that can happen in the upcoming sequels that lie in waiting is to take the world of Pandora and its visualisation from Cameron's hands and give it to others. 

There's no denying there's been the upscaling of the world-building and the upskilling of the digital execution - but that won't be enough now to keep making the franchise a success. It's in desperate need of moving away from being just exemplary big screen spectacle, and time to add in the emotional depth that'll prove so fruitful to its characters.