movie reviews of avatar the way of water

Avatar: The Way of Water

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.

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

Writer (story by)

Amanda Silver
James Cameron
Josh Friedman
Shane Salerno
David Brenner
John Refoua
Stephen E. Rivkin

Cinematographer

Russell Carpenter
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Avatar: 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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James earl jones, authoritative actor and voice of darth vader, dies at 93, ‘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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Avatar: The Way of Water Might Be James Cameron’s Most Personal Film

James Cameron is never leaving Pandora. That much is certain after seeing Avatar: The Way of Water , his sequel to 2009’s ginormo-hit, Avatar . In the past, the director has teased the idea of making smaller, more personal projects after each of his big blockbusters. But The Way of Water makes clear that Cameron no longer needs to leave the confines of this (virtual) extrasolar moon in the Alpha Centauri system to create something closer to the heart. He can bend Pandora to his will, and now he’s bent it to make what might be his most earnest film to date.

Cameron has always been an artist divided: equal parts gearhead and tree hugger, swaggering stud and soft-focus softie. That’s the secret of his success as a showman. He has the authenticity and know-how to sell all that fake movie science and testosterone-fueled dialogue (not to mention the perversity and skill to pull off creatively violent set pieces), but he uses them toward explicitly emotional (read: family-friendly) ends. The Abyss nearly drowns in scientific jargon and macho bluster until it suddenly becomes a sweet movie about salvaging a failing marriage while peace-loving, glow-in-the-dark sea aliens save the Earth. Titanic is one-half wide-eyed teenage love story, one-half gnarly-death demo reel.

The first Avatar has this duality , too, on both a formal and narrative level. It’s a state-of-the-art environmental action movie, a film in which Hollywood’s best ones and zeros come together to sell a story about the dangers of runaway technology and our longing to become one with nature. At its center is a tough grunt who, tasked with impersonating an alien race in order to undermine them, ultimately transforms into an interstellar flower child, shedding his human body for good.

The existential divide that lies at the core of that picture has not disappeared. If anything, it’s expanded. If Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) spends much of that first movie trying to prove his bona fides to his new alien tribe, The Way of Water is filled with even more characters trying to claim their new identities while carrying shades of their former lives.

When we meet Jake again, he and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) have had three kids and effectively adopted two others: teenage Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), born in mysterious fashion to the dormant Na’vi avatar of Dr. Grace Augustine, Weaver’s late scientist character from the first film; and Spider (Jack Champion), a child born on the human base on Pandora who was too small to be transported back to Earth when the colonizers (or “sky people”) were driven off the moon. After a new round of sky people arrives, incinerating everything in their path, Jake comes to realize he’s being specifically targeted and flees with his family across the oceans of Pandora to Awa’atlu, a village of the Metkayina, a turquoise-colored reef people who regard the newcomers first with suspicion, then with contempt. (“They have demon blood!” one yells, noticing that Jake’s kids, unlike purebred Na’vi, have five fingers.) Soon, however, the Sully family, regarded as freaks by the others, start learning the ways of the Metkayina even as they’re told that, with their thin arms and weak tails, they will be useless in the water.

There’s a twisted kind of transformation happening on the bad guys’ side, too. Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the cigar-chomping, leathery (human) villain of the first film, is also back, now as a Na’vi avatar apparently created before the first film’s climactic attack just in case Quaritch Version 1.0 didn’t survive. So now the Na’vi-hating psycho from the first movie is back as a psycho Na’vi, and he has a personal vendetta against Jake and his family.

It might sound ridiculous, and it is ridiculous — Quaritch even gets to contemplate the remnants of his human skull at one point before blithely crushing it in his huge Na’vi hands — but we can also sense a greater purpose at work as we watch our villain trying to become more like a Na’vi with all the brute-force gracelessness one might expect from an unrepentant oorah blowhard. (“Yeah, colonel, get some!” his men yell in triumph when Quaritch finally manages to tame a banshee, one of the flying lizardlike creatures the Na’vi use to get around.) Just to make sure we get the point, Cameron cuts between Sully’s and Quaritch’s respective efforts to adapt. On the one side is generosity, openness, and humility in the face of nature. On the other side is pure macho supremacy.

Although they’re roundly mocked for their incompetence in the ways of the sea, Jake’s kids make honest attempts to bond with the mostly uncooperative Metkayina and their whalelike compatriots, the tulkun. And here Cameron can’t help himself. A longtime ocean nut, he’s created these imaginary seas, and he’s going to spend every minute of screen time he can exploring their digital wonders. But something else emerges during these sequences. If the first Avatar is remarkable because it shows us wondrous lands nothing like our own, The Way of Water is remarkable because it shows us that this world is, in fact, very much like our own. In creating Pandora’s forest world for the original movie, Cameron clearly borrowed liberally from existing marine ecosystems. And on land, floating tentacular spirits and bioluminescent creatures do in fact look otherworldly. But now, in this underwater setting, they look lovely, and, weirdly, almost ordinary. Indeed, among the many previous Cameron titles this new picture recalls (including, notably, Titanic ), foremost are his documentaries about undersea exploration, Ghosts of the Abyss (2003) and Aliens of the Deep (2005).

These languorously dreamy, whale-filled sequences constitute The Way of Water ’s make-or-break middle, when viewers will either become supremely bored or supremely enchanted. As an ocean obsessive myself , I was totally enraptured, but I suspect others will be onboard too. For starters, the effects work is unbelievable; I still haven’t entirely wrapped my head around the fact that none of this stuff actually exists, that it’s all a meticulously rendered digital environment. But, more important, Cameron hasn’t lost the ability to convey his dorky-sweet enthusiasm to the audience. It’s hard not to lose oneself amid the gentle, flowing cadences of this exquisitely created undersea universe, where the water enveloping the characters gradually becomes a metaphor for the interconnectedness of all living beings.

Good thing, then, that there are now living beings to care about. One of the (valid) knocks against the first Avatar is that the characters feel like cutouts, there largely to serve as vessels for exploring the fantastical setting. This time around, it feels as if Cameron has taken the criticism to heart. As a result, he spends a decidedly blockbuster-unfriendly amount of time establishing Jake’s family’s dynamics, the parents’ hopes and fears and the kids’ restlessness. Teenage rebels, outcast anxiety, warring cliques, budding intertribal romances, domineering parents — it’s all there. We get a montage of births, family portraits, kids’ changing heights carved on posts, even glimpses of “date night” with Jake and Neytiri.

Meanwhile, Jake’s military training still remains, and he runs his family like a hard-ass officer, using terms like fall in and dismissed when talking to his children, all the while expecting to be called “sir.” (When he grounds one of his sons, he literally grounds him: “No more flying for a month.”) Neytiri chastises Jake for being too hard on his boys. “This is not a squad. It is a family,” she reminds him as he sits there, grimly cleaning his gun. Again, why return to Earth to tell your stories when you can bring your Earth stories to Pandora? At times, one wonders if The Way of Water might be, among other things, Cameron’s version of a kitchen-sink family drama. Ultimately, all that time spent with these characters pays off. An early instance of Jake’s sons disobeying his orders feels fairly unremarkable; when it happens again later, we feel far more invested in these kids’ survival. By the end of the movie, all that talk of family actually starts to ring true.

None of this is particularly original, of course, but Cameron’s forte has never been originality. He likes to present familiar stories in bright new variations with more force and authority than ever before. In this sense, he resembles a silent-movie director, happy to play with archetypes and common tales and myths but in ways designed to captivate even the most jaded viewers. Cameron isn’t afraid to be corny because he can back up the outsize emotions with both sincerity and ruthlessness.

And all those drifting passages of communion with whales and patient portraits of characters seeking to belong set up the film’s spectacular final act with its seafaring battles full of harpooning, strangling, slicing, crushing, and drowning as well as one particularly crowd-pleasing amputation. But the sentimentality hasn’t entirely dissipated; the savagery has a purpose, and it’s a surprisingly cathartic one. Cameron’s divided self finds its fullest expression on Pandora not just because he can create vast new worlds and matrices of spiritually interconnected beings but also because he can fight battles he can’t fight elsewhere. For even here, he’s ultimately telling an Earth story. He channels his (and our) inchoate rage at the devastation of the natural world, and he delivers a fantasy of revenge — albeit one set on a strange shore in a distant galaxy, one that just happens to look like a heightened, trippy version of our own.

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Avatar: The Way of Water Reviews

James Cameron’s long-awaited blockbuster sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, is a big, boisterous, beautiful return to Pandora.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 13, 2024

Avatar: The Way of Water, the long awaited sequel to Cameron’s Avatar - the highest grossing film of all time - was ultimately mesmerizing and a mind-blowing immersive visual experience taking audiences on a epic adventure unlike anything seen before.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jul 8, 2024

Overall, Avatar: The Way of Water is a colossal disappointment on a story and character level, saved only by its stunning visuals (at least when they’re not too garish).

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Jul 7, 2024

The first Avatar was a spectacular display of technical prowess. It utilized Cameron’s brilliant populist instincts to capture the imagination of the planet. By comparison, The Way of Water feels like a pale imitation.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Jul 3, 2024

Did I think this movie would be made? No. Did I think it would crack my Top 10? Also no. But here we are.

Full Review | Feb 27, 2024

'Avatar: The Way of Water' pops with well-rendered images and vibrant colors. It's like you’re witnessing Cameron film a National Geographic documentary on an alien planet. It evokes all the senses.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jan 9, 2024

James Cameron's Avatar sequel has stunning visuals that get elevated on a big IMAX screen. However, the plot is less than engaging, the dialogues are clunky, and you wish it was shorter.

Full Review | Oct 4, 2023

The preservation of our woods is the central topic of the first Avatar film and the topic of Avatar: The Way Of Water is ocean preservation. To summarize, don’t doubt James Cameron.

Full Review | Sep 26, 2023

The special effects are breathtaking...Like all sequels, the original was a bit better.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Aug 10, 2023

Technology used to make the film is so compelling and masterful that everything else is an afterthought.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Aug 9, 2023

Whatever may be wrong with it, Avatar: The Way of Water is pure, unabashed cinema, with some of the most glorious visuals ever put to screen and an endlessly absorbing soundtrack.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 6, 2023

The Way of Water is somehow even better than its already masterful antecedent.

Full Review | Aug 2, 2023

The Way of Water clearly sets itself apart from other blockbusters, building on 13 years of preparation to deliver a memorable cinema experience. A visually, technically breathtaking adventure, particularly in the truly stunning underwater sequences.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 25, 2023

The Way Of Water is not just one of the best sequels ever created… it’s a god damn masterpiece. Breathtaking, visually stunning, & epic in every single way. I’m truly speechless by what James Cameron has crafted

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Would you like to go on venture number three in the world of Pandora? After the first one, I would have said, “no, thanks”, but now, bring it on.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Jul 25, 2023

As with the first film, it’s impossible to deny that audiences will be treated to a visual feast in The Way of Water, but those looking for a more character-driven movie will be left adrift in the open water.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

Unlike every CGI-heavy theme park ride, the fact that the spectacle and the action sequences never undermine the narrative or emotionally stirring moments is mind-boggling.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 23, 2023

We’re nowhere close to Cameron at his best, but I feel we’re approaching something worth experiencing.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Jun 20, 2023

We can accept a barebones revenger because it lets us reacquaint ourselves with Pandora. Cameron is easing us back in with a conflict we don't need to expend too much energy on so we can absorb everything else in the background.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | May 12, 2023

I’ll say this for James Cameron: At this point, he can slap his name on an old print of Plan 9 From Outer Space, re-release it as Avatar 3: The Way of Outer Space, and incessantly hype it until it crosses the billion-dollar mark and racks up the awards.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 18, 2023

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Movie Reviews

Movie review: 'avatar: the way of water'.

Bob Mondello

Filmmaker James Cameron's sequel to the biggest worldwide box office hit of all time, "Avatar: The Way of Water," has been in the works for more than a decade.

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Avatar: The Way of Water

Jake Sully lives with his newfound family formed on the extrasolar moon Pandora. Once a familiar threat returns to finish what was previously started, Jake must work with Neytiri and the arm... Read all Jake Sully lives with his newfound family formed on the extrasolar moon Pandora. Once a familiar threat returns to finish what was previously started, Jake must work with Neytiri and the army of the Na'vi race to protect their home. Jake Sully lives with his newfound family formed on the extrasolar moon Pandora. Once a familiar threat returns to finish what was previously started, Jake must work with Neytiri and the army of the Na'vi race to protect their home.

James Cameron
Amanda Silver
Sam Worthington
Zoe Saldana
Sigourney Weaver
3.3K User reviews
388 Critic reviews
67 Metascore
75 wins & 150 nominations total

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Trivia According to James Cameron , Kate Winslet performed all of her underwater stunts herself.
Goofs The main characters leave their home village so that the bad guys coming after them will no longer target the village. But the bad guys don't know any of this, and no effort is made to tell them. This defeats the stated purpose of leaving.

Tsireya : [to Lo'ak] The way of water has no beginning and no end. Our hearts beat in the womb of the world. The sea is your home, before your birth and after your death. The sea gives and the sea takes. Water connects all things: life to death, darkness to light.

Crazy credits The first half of the end credits highlight Pandoran sea creatures.
Alternate versions Like its predecessor, which is present 1.78 : 1 aspect ratio, this film presents 1.85:1 aspect ratio for home video releases, although there can be no widescreen versions of this film as James Cameron intended to watch the full format.
Connections Featured in AniMat's Crazy Cartoon Cast: Watching the Weird Way of Water (2022)
Soundtracks Nothing Is Lost (You Give Me Strength) Performed by The Weeknd Lyrics and Melody by The Weeknd (as Abel "The Weekend" Tesfaye) Music by Simon Franglen and Swedish House Mafia Produced by Simon Franglen and Swedish House Mafia The Weeknd Performs Courtesy of XO/Republic Records

User reviews 3.3K

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Dec 23, 2022

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How long is Avatar: The Way of Water? Powered by Alexa
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December 16, 2022 (United States)
United States
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Dec 18, 2022
$2,320,250,281

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Runtime 3 hours 12 minutes
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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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Avatar: The Way Of Water Review

16 Dec 2022

Avatar: The Way Of Water

In the near-decade-and-a-half since we last visited Pandora, the humans in the film have travelled the 4.4 light years back to Earth, regrouped, made the return trip and built a new city-sized base on the alien moon. James Cameron has been about as busy. Besides mapping out a Lord Of The Rings -sized mythology for his burgeoning franchise (frankly we’ve lost count of how many Avatars are percolating in his brain at this point; we think it’s 32?), he’s been pushing technological envelopes left, right and centre, stirring up a mad brew of aquatic performance-capture, 3D tech and amped-up frame rates. The result, Avatar: The Way Of Water , is so dazzling to behold that adjectives like “dazzling” seem too anaemic to apply. It’s a leap beyond even what he pulled off with the first film, a phantasmagorical, fully immersive waking dream of a movie in which something impossible is happening on-screen at almost every moment. It’s a lot to process. And a timely reminder of what cinema is capable of when it dares to dream big.

Size is a key factor here — this is a sequel, after all, and the law of movie physics dictates that follow-ups must get increasingly colossal. The Way Of Water ticks this box in several ways. For one, there’s the ensemble of characters. All your old favourites are back (plus Norm Spellman), but making their bow are a group of azure urchins, the children of Neytiri ( Zoe Saldaña ) and Jake ( Sam Worthington ). The prospect of a blockbuster driven by kids can be a concerning one; Cameron, though, manages to keep things on the right side of saccharine. Even if none of these younglings are quite as winning as Aliens ’ Newt — not even the adopted Spider (Jack Champion), a wild-child human space-sprog who brings her to mind — they’re all easy to root for, which is good news considering the second act of the movie leaves Jake and Neytiri behind to venture out on adventures with the new generation. The titchy Tuktirey (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss) doesn’t get much to do, but there are substantial storylines for Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), who finds a friend in an unlikely place, and Kiri ( Sigourney Weaver , a 70-something playing a 14-year-old through VFX magic), the most interesting of the fresh characters, who appears to be getting set up to become a major player in future instalments.

The action, when it arrives, is thunderingly entertaining.

Then there’s the new environment. As you’ve probably gleaned by now, Cameron has activated his key mantra — just add water — returning to the ocean for the first time since 1997’s Titanic . Except this isn’t any ocean you’ve seen before. The first time he plunges us beneath the surface of Pandora’s big blue, the brain almost can’t take it all in: the images are crystal-sharp, hyper-real — see it in 3D HFR if you can — but the marine ecosystem teeming in every frame is mesmerisingly unearthly (you might find yourself taking your eyes off the important stuff to stare at an alien eel). It’s like a National Geographic documentary beamed in from another solar system, Cameron’s twin obsessions with sea-life and sci-fi fusing together in truly trippy fashion. The lengthy second act of the movie, in which the Sully family, fleeing the human villains, relocate to the Bora Bora-esque shores of a Pandoran island, will likely test the patience of some. (There are multiple fish-riding tutorials, as the Sullys get familiar with the barracuda-meets-dragonfly Skimwing and the adorable, seal-like Iwi.) But for those willing to tune into the strange and highly earnest vibe, it’s heady, entrancing stuff, particularly the screentime given to the Tulkan, a species of space-whale that proves unexpectedly moving — even if the drama on the beach is a little less compelling than what’s going on off it.

Which brings us to the plot. Interestingly, this is the one area in which Cameron has gone smaller. Relatively, of course: with moon-crossing odysseys and beasts the size of a submarine, he’s hardly gone Ken Loach . But the epic warring-species stakes of the original Avatar have been dialled down (for now), replaced by a simple revenge story. Stephen Lang ’s granite-tough Colonel Quaritch , a major standout in the first film and a character deepened here, is back in avatar form, eager to avenge his own death (it’s a long story) by slaying his blue foes. And so for now, bigger questions will have to wait. A new resource coveted by humans that’s even more unobtainable than unobtanium doesn’t get elaborated on, while Edie Falco is introduced as the new human Big Bad (yes, Carmela Soprano gets her own exo-suit) but phases out of the action. Instead, we’re left with a stripped-down game of cat-and-mouse, designed to test every one of the Sullys to their limits. It’s an effective choice by Cameron, keeping the stakes clear and resulting in a powerful, emotional final hour, as Quaritch corners his quarry and turns up the heat.

The Way Of Water takes its sweet time getting to the melee — at well over three hours, it should really be called ‘The Way Of Wishing You Hadn’t Drunk That Water’ — but by the time it does, it’s made sure you care about what’s going on. And the action, when it arrives, is thunderingly entertaining. On one side: the Na’vi navy, astride battle-fish, ululating and bristling with spears. On the other, Quaritch and his blued-up squad of Marines, plus a swaggering, dickish Australian seadog named Scoresby (Brendan Cowell, near-stealing the show with his salty jargon), a conflicted marine biologist ( Jemaine Clement , doing an American accent that might be the most alien thing in the film), and an armada of incredible military tech (scuttling crab-suits FTW). What ensues is a sea battle for the ages, a blisteringly exciting meld of live-action elements and visual-effects, which boggles the brain while never forgetting to focus on the heart. Where Cameron goes from here, who knows. But this is a reminder, after a long absence, that he’s still master and commander of making your jaw drop.

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Avatar: The Way of Water (United States, 2022)

It’s finally here. After years of missed release dates related to postproduction issues, James Cameron’s oft-delayed sequel to 2009’s Avatar has finally arrived. Was it worth the 13-year wait? Unquestionably. It’s difficult to overstate how impressive and potentially game-changing this motion picture is. Nothing before has prepared audiences for the immersion offered by Avatar: The Way of Water when seen in optimal circumstances. The film’s straightforward narrative (which isn’t going to garner any writing nominations) plays a distant second fiddle to the amazing technical leap forward that this movie offers. If theatrical movies are going to survive, this is the future – the kind of experience that will get me off my sofa and into a well-upholstered theater seat. The Way of Water gave me three-plus hours like no other three-plus hours I have spent in a multiplex. By alternating fast-paced action sequences with slower, more contemplative stretches, Cameron calms the blood pressure before repeatedly elevating it. Those in search of a rich emotional experience or complex storyline won’t find either here, but those things have never been the director’s bread-and-butter. He offers enough of both to allow his vision and his team’s technical bravura to smooth out any pacing inconsistencies and take the viewer down a dizzying rabbit hole. Awesome.

The sequel starts between 15 and 20 years after the first Avatar ended. During the peaceful interval between movies, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) have been raising a family: eldest son Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), adopted daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), younger son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), and youngest daughter Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss). Also hanging around is Spider (Jack Champion), a human left behind (babies couldn’t be put into cryo-sleep for the journey home) who has “gone native.” Their idyllic lifestyle with the Forest Na’vi is shattered when a new group of Earthlings arrive in the skies of Pandora. Their objective this time isn’t stip-mining; it’s colonization. But, before they can tame (and terraform) the planet, they have to pacify the natives…by force. Led by General Ardmore (Edie Falco), the marines are given a “by any means necessary” mandate, which suits Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) just fine. A Na’vi avatar implanted with the memories of the original Quaritch, this soldier has the same personality and intends to avenge himself upon the killer of his predecessor: Jake Sully.

No matter how many words I could use, I’d never be able to adequately describe the leap forward that The Way of Water takes. It’s as close to Virtual Reality as can be obtained in a movie theater. The visual effects are impressive on their own – CGI used in new ways to flesh out the first-rate world building begun in Avatar . The action sequences are cleanly choreographed and expertly shot – there’s no confusion about what’s going on. Cameron does what he has always done in ratcheting up the tension because it’s never a certainty who’s going to live and who’s going to die. The motion capture is top notch. There are very few humans in this film, making The Way of Water more of a hybrid animated/live-action movie. But when it comes to the 3D…

A quick comparison of The Way of Water with the most recent MCU release (which also has numerous underwater scenes), Wakanda Forever , illustrates how much bolder Cameron is when it comes to world-building, character arcs, and narrative trajectory. Compared to this film, even the best recent superhero entries feel stale and rote. The Way of Water excites both in terms of its visual presentation and the way in which it has been fashioned. There’s an energy here that has been sadly absent from too many recent Hollywood blockbusters. For 2022, The Way of Water may not be the most intricately made or intellectually rigorous motion picture, but it exemplifies what “cinematic” means today.

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Avatar: The Way of Water

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Avatar: The Way of Water Review – Ever Get That Sinking Feeling?

James Cameron’s long-awaited sequel to 2009’s groundbreaking Avatar is beached by many of the same shortcomings.

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Does anyone care about Avatar anymore? That’s the question that has vexed film critics and pop culture commentators in the 13 long years since James Cameron released his paradigm-shifting science fiction epic. While the 2009 film became the highest-grossing box office hit of all time (with a brief moment in which it was dethroned), re-introduced 3D to a new generation of moviegoers, and pushed the limits of CG technology, it has seemed to fade almost altogether from the zeitgeist during the past decade, replaced by the MCU, Stranger Things , the streaming revolution, and all kinds of other entertainment game-changers.

Meanwhile Cameron toiled steadily away, planning not just one Avatar sequel but four , while patiently waiting for visual effects to catch up again to the vision he had for further tales set on the moon named Pandora. Thanks to the re-release of Avatar itself earlier this fall in a striking new 4K remaster, combined with the initial trailer for the first of Cameron’s four sequels , suddenly the franchise seems front and center in the cultural conversation again. And now that Avatar: The Way of Water is arriving in theaters at long last, the question can be answered: Was it worth the wait?

The answer is mixed. There is no question that Cameron has once again delivered a visually stunning, achingly beautiful film, with even more detail and immersive world-building going into his creation of the world of Pandora and its inhabitants than in 2009. There may even be some debate over whether Cameron has made what is essentially an animated film that incorporates a few live-action actors instead of the other way around. But one of his major filmmaking choices—his decision to shoot much of the picture in the hotly contested 48 frames-per-second frame rate—proves far more problematic.

What’s even more of an issue is that, just as with the first Avatar , Cameron has pretty much put visual effects and filmmaking bravado first and relegated story and character to a lower priority. But while the first film essentially lifted the “white savior rescues Indigenous tribe” template from Dances with Wolves , the Disney version of Pocahontas , and any number of similar tales, what plot there is in The Way of Water is thin and (pun intended) very watery, with repeats of major beats from the first movie and no discernible character development to speak of for any of the major players.

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There are apparently readers who feel that the description of any plot whatsoever constitutes a spoiler, so we respectfully suggest that those readers stop here if they want to go into The Way of Water completely cold. For the record, everything we’ll discuss from this point on in any detail happens more or less in the first 30 minutes of this 190-minute motion picture and appeared in the trailers.

The Way of Water kicks off more than a decade after the events of the first film, as we are reintroduced to Jake Sully (performed in motion capture by the returning, merely adequate Sam Worthington), who ended Avatar by having his mind and soul fully integrated into his Na’vi body. Jake is mated with Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and they have since had three children of their own, two sons and a daughter, while adopting two others: a human boy named Miles, nicknamed Spider (Jake Champion), who was born on the human base in the first film but now lives among the Na’vi, and Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), a teenage Na’vi with a strange connection to the first film’s late Dr. Grace Augustine (also played by Weaver).

This is where The Way of Water takes perhaps its strangest narrative turn: although the human colonists were driven off Pandora at the end of the first movie, this one opens with their destructive return, this time led by the pragmatic, ruthless Gen. Ardmore (Edie Falco). And they’re not just here to mine the moon for “unobtainium” anymore. With Earth on the brink of becoming uninhabitable, the plan now is to colonize Pandora completely.

The movie then skips ahead one full year, and we get the impression that a whole movie is kind of missing as it’s revealed that the Sullys and their Omatikaya clan have been forced out of the forest and into hiding in Pandora’s floating mountains, out of which they operate as a sort of insurgency against the humans. The latter, meanwhile, have erected an entire city on the coast, and are now deploying “recombinants”—elite soldiers whose human memories are integrated into the bodies of powerful Na’vi warriors—to infiltrate the real Na’vi.

One of those recombinants is Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who was killed by Jake and Neytiri in the first film but who has been resurrected in a Na’vi body. When it becomes clear to Jake that Quaritch is out for revenge against him and his entire family, the Sullys flee to Pandora’s vast network of islands where they hide themselves among the water-centric Metkayina clan and try to adopt to their new tribe’s customs even as Quaritch begins a murderous quest to find them.

All that is packed into the opening act of the film, and the pacing is off from the start. The Way of Water adopts a stop-and-start rhythm that never really picks up steam. Much of what happens in the first act seems rushed just to get the main players back on the board while the long second act of the movie details the Sullys’ immersion into the ways of the Metkayina clan, their relationship to certain underwater life forms, and the friction between the Sully kids and the children of Metkayina leaders Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and Ronal (Kate Winslet).

The problem with this is that none of the kids, with the possible exception of Kiri (played with a sprightly energy by the great Weaver), is given more than a token attribute at best. Jake and Neytiri’s older son, Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) is supposed to be the responsible one, while younger son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) is the rebel always getting in trouble, and little daughter Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss) is there mainly to be cute and get into danger. Their interactions with the Metkayina kids might as well take place in an American schoolyard with blue-skinned aliens throwing around the words “bro” and “dude” in jarring fashion.

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For much of the middle section of the movie, Jake and Neytiri themselves are strangely passive, left mainly to yell at Lo’ak for his latest transgression and Neteyam for not watching out for his sibling. Tonowari and Ronal are given even less to do, a tremendous waste of Curtis and Winslet (who barely makes an impression here under the motion capture). But no one here, not even Jake and Neytiri, have much of a character arc at all: “Protect the family” is where Jake begins and ends, unlike the first time where at least he went from reluctant human soldier to tribal leader.

The worst offender in all this is Quaritch, who was one of Cameron’s most cartoonish, one-dimensional villains in the first movie and is now even more so here (along with the rest of the humans, to be honest). While there is some half-hearted attempt at giving this version of Quaritch some shading through an unexpected plot point, he is just walking vengeance and places the movie on a predictable path to a rematch between Jake and his colonel.

This all makes The Way of Water a bloated, often boring mess of a movie that’s nestled inside some of the most amazing visual effects work ever put on the screen. Make no mistake: the CG used to create Pandora here is a monumental step forward from the first film, with the Na’vi truly looking like three-dimensional beings. Even the texture of their skin, faces, and expressions have made incredible leaps ahead. One feels for almost the entire running time that one is watching real creatures.

The same goes for the settings themselves, with Pandora even more exquisitely detailed and rendered than before. The underwater sequences are full of life and visual vibrancy, even if the action within is never that interesting. The floating mountains, the atolls on which the Metkayina live—watching all of this in shot after shot is just wondrous, and even the 3D this time around is more fully integrated into the imagery for a more nuanced kind of depth perception.

Where Cameron goes wrong, just like Ang Lee and Peter Jackson before him, is in the use of high frame rate (HFR) filming, in which the images are captured at 48fps instead of the longtime industry standard of 24fps. The result reduces the “film” quality of the images and, in theory, gives it a “live” feel instead, but just as with Lee’s Gemini Man and notoriously with Jackson’s The Hobbit, it looks more like an old video game or TV video broadcast than anything else.

For The Way of Water , Cameron and his team have refined the format to some degree, but it’s still incredibly intrusive, artifact-laden, and reduces the painterly quality of film to something akin to a sports broadcast. It’s an awkward and creatively reductive format for movies, cheapening the impact of this film’s otherwise terrific effects work, and we regret that he made this choice (which we imagine he’ll carry over to the next three Avatar installments).

With everything going on visually, from the highs of exploring more of Pandora to the lows of the 48fps format, it’s still rather unsettling to arrive at the explosive, relentless—almost overbearing, frankly—third act with little to no investment in the characters or how the story pans out. Even the late introduction of a secondary villain feels forced into place, and the rest of the story plays out merely to leave things in motion for the next movie.

We don’t regret watching Avatar: The Way of Water at all, even if its three-plus hours feels long (a lot longer than some of the pumped-up superhero movies Cameron likes to slam). It demands to be seen on the big screen, with all the bells and whistles, if only because there are so many elements of James Cameron’s vision that will take one’s breath away over and over again. But we do regret that he seems to have put all that visual magic ahead of a truly compelling story to accompany his extraordinary world-building. In other words, we wish he made us care more.

Avatar: The Way of Water is out in theaters on Dec. 16.

2.5 out of 5

Don Kaye | @donkaye

Don Kaye is an entertainment journalist by trade and geek by natural design. Born in New York City, currently ensconced in Los Angeles, his earliest childhood memory is…

‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ Is James Cameron’s Most Stunning Cinematic Journey Yet

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

Avatar : The Way of Water is a long time coming. The newest chapter in James Cameron’s spears-versus-guns, aliens-versus-predators epic has been planned all along, and its own sequel, Avatar 3 , is already set for a 2024 release (the movies were filmed simultaneously). Avatar 4 , partially shot, has been slated for 2026. The fifth installment’s got a script. These are movies in which the colonizing empire is the bad guy, the destroyer and abuser of a new world and the people — called Na’vi — inhabiting it. Maybe there’s some irony in needing to prove this point with a five-movie empire of one’s own.

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Scenes of Na’vi flying above treetops and floating rock formations made the first Avatar memorable — if we can use that word. For a movie that’s still apparently one of the most profitable Hollywood products of all time, Avatar has an uncomfortable reputation: it’s gotten cool to pretend that we’ve forgotten about it . Is there such a thing as a billion-dollar cult object? What’s funny about the new movie is that large stretches of runtime, especially in the first half, will feel familiar for even the apparent amnesiacs among us. Much of this stretch calls back to the first movie so thoroughly that it nearly amounts to a neat recap. There are changes, of course. Once by land, now by sea. Jake Sully and his family, on the run from the RDA, must learn to live and work among the water dwellers. This is a race of Na’vi whose design seems to have taken its cues from Maori culture, among others. Tails and bodies and lungs are thicker among the reef people, visibly adapted to this distinct environment . Their bodies and the bodies of their spiritually linked animals bear tattoos that tell stories. It again puts Jake back in a position to defer to a race that is not his. He and his brood must get their sea legs, in this movie, just as Jake once had to walk the walk as Na’vi. We, the audience, get to feast on the benefits of this new territory. Cameron treats us to lavish tours of the ecosystem, as before, with just as much aw-shucks wonder attached.

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But it is rousing. I can hardly think of another time that I was so excited to see a guy’s arm get ripped off. That’s how Avatar snares us; that’s how it gets away with even its most awkward conceits, its cringe forays into manic-pixie territory, its implicit representational weirdness. Is it meaningful that the Na’vi with the most preternatural gifts in this world tend to share blood with humans — that to be Na’vi, alone, is apparently not enough, not even on their own planet? Is it weird that Kate Winslet plays a reef-dwelling shaman, CGI or no? Questions like these eat away at the edges of the movie’s intentions. They don’t ruin the movie — there’s too much else to gawk at, too much excitement to sop up. But these questions matter, just as the movie’s behemoth size matters. The Way of Water is never better than during its climax, when it makes good on the cathartic satisfaction that’s been promised all along, the action-packed release that’s teeming with dramatic grace notes, every strand of the story coming together, every rebel without a cause suddenly given just cause. The movie continues for some time after this, though. As if making some sick joke, Cameron even treats us to a sinking ship. The excesses are forgivable in the way that watching someone execute a narrow turn with a semi truck, blocking all traffic, is begrudgingly forgivable. Some vehicles aren’t designed for elegance. That it manages more than its share of lumpen grace, regardless, is the The Way of Water ’s primary achievement. It isn’t perfect. It wouldn’t be nearly as fun to reckon with if it was.

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Official Discussion - Avatar: The Way of Water [SPOILERS]

If you've seen the film, please rate it at this poll

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James Cameron

James Cameron, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver

Sam Worthington as Jake

Zoe Saldana as Neytiri

Sigourney Weaver as Kiri

Stephen Lang as Quaritch

Kate Winslet as Ronal

Cliff Curtis as Tonowari

Joel David Moore as Norm

-- Rotten Tomatoes: 81%

Metacritic: 69

VOD: Theaters

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Screen Rant

Avatar franchise alum was criticized for way of water's box office comment: "i heard straight from the source".

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James Cameron Has A Ridiculous 29-Year, $2 Billion Box Office Streak - But Will Avatar 3 Kill It?

Rebel ridge ending explained by director, hayden christensen recreates an iconic revenge of the sith moment.

Avatar: The Way of Water star Edie Falco reveals that she was criticized for mistakenly believing the sequel had underperformed in theaters. Directed by James Cameron, the follow-up to 2009's Avatar was released in 2022, continuing the story of the Sully family as they face off against returning human invaders on Pandora. Falco, who joined the Avatar: The Way of Water cast as antagonist General Ardmore, made headlines in December 2022, before the film had even come out, for comments she made on The View in which she assumed the movie came out and flopped at the box office.

During a recent interview on The Jess Cagle Show (via Entertainment Weekly ) Falco reveals that her comments about Avatar: The Way of Water on The View had some blowback. The actor reveals that she heard Cameron himself wasn't too impressed:

"I heard straight from the source who was with him when he heard that I had said that, that it did not go well. I took a lot of flack for that. "

Falco would further elaborate on her The View comments, saying, " All I was saying is I'm a jerk. I never know what's going on with my life ." She pokes fun at her own lack of awareness regarding the projects she's in, especially something as gargantuan as Avatar , and meant her comments to be more self-critical than anything else. But, she says, " it was not taken like that ," and she " got a lot of phone calls from a lot of very important people ."

With Avatar: The Way of Water , in particular, she had filmed her scenes four years prior to the movie actually coming out, and she had long since moved on:

"I make these things, I do the job, I say goodbye to everybody, and then I'm done. Then I'm onto the next thing. I have no idea what happens to things after I'm done."

What Avatar: The Way Of Water's Success Means For The Franchise

James cameron's sequel plans are confirmed.

Avatar: The Way of Water was something of a question mark in the years leading up to its release. The first Avatar still stands as the highest-grossing movie of all time, but it was unclear what the interest level would be in returning to that story and that world 13 years later. What's more , Avatar: The Way of Water was an expensive and ambitious film, and one that was intended to serve as the first of four sequels, putting a lot of pressure on it to succeed.

Avatar: The Way of Water carries an estimated budget of more than $400 million, though some of this covers material that was filmed for the sequels. The film grossed $2.32 billion worldwide.

James Cameron's movies have been box office juggernauts for a long time, but Avatar 3 risks killing the director's $2 billion hot-streak.

Fears regarding Avatar: The Way of Water were proven wrong, however, and the sequel now stands as the third highest-grossing movie of all time . This result solidified Cameron's sequel plans. The upcoming third installment, officially titled Avatar: Fire & Ash , is set to release in 2025, and there will presumably be more confidence leading up to the film's release that it will succeed. Falco, for her part, seems likely to pay more attention to Avatar: Fire & Ash 's release and performance since she will be returning as Ardmore.

Our Take On Edie Falco's Avatar: The Way Of Water Comments

Why they're not surprising.

It's important to remember that, for many actors, the movies they star in are just jobs . Just because someone stars in an Avatar movie or a Star Wars movie or an MCU film doesn't mean they're heavily invested in that property beyond what they were contracted to do as actors. This is evidently the case for Falco, who wasn't paying close attention Avatar: The Way of Water 's reception or release.

While Falco clearly didn't mean anything by her original comments from 2022, it's not surprising that higher-ups involved in the project were unhappy with one of its stars assuming that it had bombed. Since Falco will be appearing in Avatar: Fire & Ash and potentially the fourth and fifth films as well, it's likely that she will be doing more press in the coming years, but viewers evidently shouldn't expect any additional slip-ups.

Sequels Release Dates
	Dec. 19, 2025
	Dec. 21, 2029
	Dec. 19, 2031

Source: The Jess Cagle Show (via Entertainment Weekly )

Avatar: The Way of Water

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Ten years after the events of Avatar (2009), Avatar: The Way of Water follows Jake Sully (Sam Worthington, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), and their new family as they brave the world of Pandora and the struggles they endure to protect themselves and their people. Director James Cameron used The Way of Water to explore the oceans of Pandora and set the stage for the subsequent three sequels. In addition to Worthington and Saldana, Avatar: The Way of the Water sees the return of Sigourney Weaver, this time playing a character named Kiri, and Stephen Lang’s villainous Quaritch.

Every Movie To Earn Over $2 Billion, Ranked by Box Office

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Earning more than an initial budget for a film is a success in itself when stopping to think just how much time and money goes into making a movie. But all that hard work and financial backing doesn't always equal instant success. When a film earns less than its original budget, it is often considered a box office failure or a box office flop , which is a title no one wants unless aiming for. Sometimes, a movie will take its audience by surprise and perform exceedingly better than expected, but it can also go the other way to become an underwhelming final project.

Whether backed by seemingly limitless funding or a low-budget picture, movies can go either way in terms of box office performance. But for those with a higher budget and widespread notoriety, there's an immeasurable advantage at the box office. For a film to surpass $1 billion is an incredible achievement, but to go just that little bit further and breach the $2 billion mark is almost unheard of. Unadjusted for inflation, only six movies have ever breached the milestone , making it an extraordinary accomplishment for those who have succeeded in doing so.

6 'Avengers: Infinity War' (2018)

Worldwide box office: $2,048,359,754.

The Avengers running towards Thanos' Army in Wakanda in Avengers: Infinity War

The first of only two Marvel movies to breach the almost unheard of $2 billion mark came in 2018 with the release of the highly anticipated Avengers: Infinity War . It may be the last spot, but on a list of $2 billion movies, "last" isn't a bad place to be in the slightest. Infinity War was always going to be successful ; whether from financial triumph or critical acclaim, the anticipation surrounding its release was just too widespread for it not to be, but it's safe to say that no one saw what they did coming.

The third Avengers movie threw many a curveball in the direction of fans. No one expected half of Earth's Mightiest Heroes to be snapped out of existence or the emotional weight that would follow in the year to come. Infinity War drew fans in from the get-go, and until its successor overtook them all, its box office records were almost second to none. It became the highest-grossing superhero movie since 2012's The Avengers and the fastest to breach $1 billion and $1.5 billion . It may be the lowest-grossing of the $2 billion movies, but it remains the sixth-highest-grossing movie ever made .

Avengers: Infinity War

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5 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' (2015)

Worldwide box office: $2,058,880,845.

Kylo Ren, played by Actor Adam Driver, and Rey, played by Actor Daisy Ridley, grit their teeth during an intense lightsaber battle in 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens'

Behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars is the second highest-grossing film franchise ever . It is one of the most expansive and diversely explored universes in media, effortlessly entertaining its continuously expanding audiences for almost fifty years. In total, this franchise has garnered $10,324,604,852 , with a little over $2 billion coming from one film alone .

Star Wars: The Force Awakens was released in 2015, ten years after the franchise's previous installment in 2005. With a decade-long gap between releases, it's not at all surprising that fans, old and new, were biting at the bit for its arrival, ready to contribute to what would quickly become the franchise's most financially successful release in its then four-decade run. The Force Awakens surpassed Jurassic World to become the fourth-fastest movie to reach $1 billion , doing so in just twelve days. At the time of its release, it broke multiple worldwide box office records and solidified itself as one of the best and the most financially successful Star Wars films ever made , a title which it continues to hold nearly ten years later.

Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens

4 'titanic' (1997), worldwide box office: $2,223,048,786.

Jack and Fabrizio at the Titanic's bow raising their arms in celebration and laughing

Titanic is a story everyone has heard of. The movie shone a light on the tragedy and brought it to the attention of a wider audience throughout the years. However, given the historical aspects of the source material, it has always been a topic of conversation that has piqued the interests of many for decades. Despite some memes and modern-day influences, James Cameron 's retelling of the 1912 maritime disaster remains the most financially successful of its kind .

The film combines fictionalized and historical events to create a movie tailored for audience members other than history or maritime disaster buffs. It is a three-hour-plus feature with romance, disaster, epic, and history at the forefront of its multiple incorporated genres and remains one of the most well-known films in media as a whole. At the box office, Titanic performed incredibly well from very early on in its theatrical run, bringing in an initial worldwide total of over $1.8 billion. Multiple rereleases and anniversary showings boosted its total by over $400 million, making Titanic the fourth highest-grossing film thus far. Not bad for a twenty-seven-year-old movie.

3 'Avatar: The Way of Water' (2023)

Worldwide box office: $2,317,514,386.

More often than not, a sequel to a movie with such a widespread following as Avatar will perform well at the box office from sheer curiosity alone. But those numbers can increase dramatically when it's a continuation of one of the most popular movies ever made. Two years ago, in 2022, the first of four further installments in the Avatar franchise was released to high anticipation from audiences. Avatar: The Way of Water followed in its predecessor's footsteps to become one of the highest-grossing films of all time, coming roughly $600 million shy. It essentially matched its financial success, with the reception from fans mimicking that of the 2009 feature.

Thanks to its groundbreaking visuals, technological requirements, and director James Cameron's choice of filming style, the Avatar movies are significantly reliant on a higher budget to make them so special. Avatar worked on a budget of $237 million, while its successor was created with an estimated $350-$460 million budget . The hefty budget that helped make these movies so impressive more than paid off when The Way of Water pulled in over a $2.3 billion gross, shattering multiple records to become the highest-grossing movie of 2022 and the third most financially successful film of all time, making James Cameron the only director ever to have three $2 billion features to his name.

Avatar: The Way of Water

2 'avengers: endgame' (2019), worldwide box office: $2,748,242,781.

The Final Battle of 'Avengers: Endgame,' with portals opening in the sky

When a movie as highly anticipated as Avengers: Endgame finally comes around to its release day, audiences flock to their local cinemas to see the outcome. Following the shocking events of Avengers: Infinity War the year prior, fans had been nervously anticipating the beginning of the end as the culmination of the Infinity Saga neared closer and closer. Endgame served as the penultimate movie in the Saga, and the consequences of Infinity War had fans anxiously awaiting its arrival from the moment the credits rolled on Infinity War .

According to the Tomatometer, Avengers: Endgame is the highest-rated of the four-movie franchise with a whopping 94% approval rating , but its critical success is just one part of its overall triumph. At the box office, it garnered over $2.7 billion on an estimated budget of $356-$400 million. It broke multiple records and eventually became the highest-grossing movie of all time , a record it held for 1.5 years. In 2021, it was overtaken by the very film it surpassed, as rereleases saw Avatar reclaim the top spot. It may have been relatively short-lived, but holding that title at all is an incredible achievement. Avengers: Endgame grossed over $2.5 billion in just twenty days , becoming the first movie to do so. It is also the fastest feature film to reach $500 million (8 days) and $1 billion (5 days), among other records that helped it surpass its predecessor. Today, Avengers: Endgame remains the second most financially successful movie ever and the crowning achievement of the MCU.

Avengers: Endgame

1 'avatar' (2009), worldwide box office: $2,923,706,026.

Avatar is a movie that few have yet to see. It is one of those films with endless discussion capabilities, able to grip an audience from start to finish, no matter how many times they have seen it. Avtar tells the epic story of a tribe of individuals known as the Na'vi who reside in a spectacular place called Pandora , as humans in the 22nd Century attempt to mine a priceless mineral. Full of heart, soul, and a gripping plot, this now fifteen-year-old feature remains as loved among its audience as it was back then.

Breathtaking visuals and a style that left its viewers in awe make it a truly memorable viewing experience from start to finish. An overwhelming success story, Avatar broke numerous records as its stunning visuals and groundbreaking cinematography paved the way for it to become one of the most beloved media stories ever made. Atop its unwavering triumph among fans and critics, Avatar remains the highest-grossing movie of all time . Avengers: Endgame may have briefly surpassed it, but following rereleases, it climbed back to the number one spot, where it has remained undefeated ever since.

NEXT: The Highest-Grossing Movie of Each Decade

COMMENTS

Avatar: The Way of Water movie review (2022)
Cameron invites viewers into this fully realized world with so many striking images and phenomenally rendered action scenes that everything else fades away. Maybe not right away. "Avatar: The Way of Water" struggles to find its footing at first, throwing viewers back into the world of Pandora in a narratively clunky way.
Avatar: The Way of Water
Avatar: The Way of Water
'Avatar: The Way of Water' Review: Big Blue Marvel
Way back in 2009, "Avatar" arrived on screens as a plausible and exciting vision of the movie future. Thirteen years later, "Avatar: The Way of Water" — the first of several long-awaited ...
"Avatar: The Way of Water," Reviewed: An Island ...
Richard Brody reviews James Cameron's "Avatar: The Way of Water," a heavy-on-the-C.G.I. sequel starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, and Kate Winslet.
'Avatar: The Way of Water' review: James Cameron stuns with this ...
Take the plunge: Avatar's underwater scenes are immersive and extraordinary. Filmmaker James Cameron returns to the world of the Na'vi people in Avatar: The Way of Water. I wouldn't call Avatar ...
Avatar: The Way of Water Review
Avatar: The Way of Water is a clear improvement on its predecessor and, though its story isn't breaking new ground, its jaw-dropping visuals make this an irresistible return to Pandora.
Avatar: The Way of Water First Reviews: A Magical, Visually Sublime
Avatar: The Way of Water First Reviews: A Magical ...
'Avatar: The Way of Water' Review: James Cameron's Immersive Sequel
Screenwriters: James Cameron, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver. Rated PG-13, 3 hours 12 minutes. In terms of narrative sophistication and even more so dialogue, this $350 million sequel is almost as ...
Avatar: The Way of Water review: A big, bold sequel
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.
Review: James Cameron's Spectacular Avatar: The Way of Water
Movie Review: In James Cameron's 'Avatar: The Way of Water,' Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) flee with their families to a distant ocean land to get away from the ...
Avatar: The Way of Water
James Cameron's long-awaited blockbuster sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, is a big, boisterous, beautiful return to Pandora. Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 13, 2024
Movie Review: 'Avatar: The Way of Water'
Movie Review: 'Avatar: The Way of Water' Filmmaker James Cameron's sequel to the biggest worldwide box office hit of all time, "Avatar: The Way of Water," has been in the works for more than a decade.
Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)
Avatar: The Way of Water: Directed by James Cameron. With Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang. Jake Sully lives with his newfound family formed on the extrasolar moon Pandora. Once a familiar threat returns to finish what was previously started, Jake must work with Neytiri and the army of the Na'vi race to protect their home.
'Avatar: The Way of Water' Review: Eye-Popping, but Lacking ...
Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña. '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. Reviewed at ...
'Avatar: The Way of Water' review: James Cameron revisits Pandora
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 ...
Avatar: The Way Of Water Review
Release Date: 15 Dec 2022. Original Title: Avatar: The Way Of Water. In the near-decade-and-a-half since we last visited Pandora, the humans in the film have travelled the 4.4 light years back to ...
Avatar: The Way Of Water Review
Visually, Avatar: The Way of Water didn't cut corners, and there was clearly a lot of work put into creating such spectacular, colorful, and unique vistas; the effort shows and the film's technical achievements are one of the core strengths of the sequel. As Jake and Neytiri's kids explore the ocean, and the gorgeously rendered creatures ...
Avatar: The Way of Water
Cameron does what he has always done in ratcheting up the tension because it's never a certainty who's going to live and who's going to die. The motion capture is top notch. There are very few humans in this film, making The Way of Water more of a hybrid animated/live-action movie. But when it comes to the 3D….
Avatar: The Way of Water
Avatar: The Way of Water review: A whole blue world, bigger and bolder than the first James Cameron made Avatar 2 writers read 800 pages of notes before they could start on its script Of course ...
Avatar: The Way of Water Review
Avatar: The Way of Water is out in theaters on Dec. 16. Ad. Rating: 2.5 out of 5. Avatar Avatar 2 James Cameron Sam Worthington Sci-fi Zoe Saldana. Written by. Don Kaye @donkaye. Don Kaye is an ...
Avatar: The Way of Water
2022. PG-13. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Argentina. 3 h 12 m. Summary Set more than a decade after the events of the first film, Avatar: The Way of Water begins to tell the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri, and their kids), the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay ...
'Avatar: The Way of Water': James Cameron's Most Stunning Movie Yet
Avatar: The Way of Water is a long time coming. The newest chapter in James Cameron's spears-versus-guns, aliens-versus-predators epic has been planned all along, and its own sequel, Avatar 3 ...
Avatar: The Way of Water
Chris Stuckmann reviews Avatar: The Way of Water, starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Winslet, Stephen Lang. Directed by James Came...
Official Discussion
Official Discussion - Avatar: The Way of Water [SPOILERS]
Avatar: The Way of Water
Avatar: The Way of Water - FULL Action Movie In English 2024 - Hollywood Action Movie HD #1080pnew action movies, new action movies 2021, new action movies 2...
Avatar Franchise Alum Was Criticized For Way Of Water's Box Office
Fears regarding Avatar: The Way of Water were proven wrong, however, and the sequel now stands as the third highest-grossing movie of all time.This result solidified Cameron's sequel plans. The upcoming third installment, officially titled Avatar: Fire & Ash, is set to release in 2025, and there will presumably be more confidence leading up to the film's release that it will succeed.
James Cameron Movies, Ranked by Action
Avatar: The Way of Water is the follow-up to Cameron's Avatar.The story takes place 16 years after the events of Avatar and follows James (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and their ...
All 6 Movies To Earn Over $2 Billion, Ranked by Box Office
Avatar: The Way of Water followed in its predecessor's footsteps to become one of the highest-grossing films of all time, coming roughly $600 million shy. It essentially matched its financial ...
Avatar: The Way of Water
52 Likes, TikTok video from shalmannisya🐊 (@shalmannisya): "Explore the thrilling world of Avatar: The Way of Water movie. Find out everything about the film, its characters, and the mesmerizing storyline. #avatardate #movie #avatarthewayofwater #avatar #sukabumi #moviflexsukabumi #moviflex #couplegoals #couple".
'Avatar: The Way Of Water' Cast: Where You've Seen The Stars Before
For the longest time, it seemed as if those "Avatar" sequels were going to be the sorts of movies that languished in development hell forever. However, over the last few years the wheels continued ...

Avatar: The Way of Water

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