Avatar: The Way of Water Review: An Exhaustingly Splendid Return to Pandora

Back we go to the exotic moon of Pandora in Avatar: The Way of Water, James Cameron’s long-delayed follow-up to his 2009 sci-fi epic Avatar. Times have changed as much for moviegoers as they have for Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), the formerly paraplegic U.S. marine who now fully inhabits the towering, blue-skinned body of an indigenous Na’vi tribesman. But unlike our politically polarized, pandemic-ravaged, streaming-centric corner of space, Pandora has become something of a paradise since the expulsion of the “sky people” (read: us greedy Earthlings) who wreaked all sorts of havoc in the first film.

Freed here of the need to establish the ins and outs of the alien society that he and a small country’s worth of technicians created from motion capture and CGI scratch, Cameron gets his goofball on in the first hour of Way of Water’s 192-minute runtime. He lovingly observes as Sully, his warrior wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), and their four half-human, half-Na’vi children live through a decade of peace and prosperity. They bound through lush foliage, forage for food and other necessities, and revel in nightly eclipses that turn the sky above Pandora into a luminous astonishment that would look great as a MacBook dynamic desktop background.

You’ll either go with the moment when the Sully clan takes a family photo (do the Na’vi have personal cameras?) or roll your eyes harder than you would at a George Lucas-helmed Star Wars prequel. Yet Cameron, one of the sincerest of super-spectacle megalomaniacs, has both the bucks and the bent to put over such unashamedly earnest looniness throughout Way of Water. Indeed, there’s something more than agreeable about just hanging out at length with the Pandorans before the “sky people” make their inevitably destructive return.

Proving that you can’t keep a good villain down, and thanks to a clever retcon, the first Avatar’s deceased antagonist, Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), is reborn in his own Na’vi body. He’s thirsting for revenge and his quest has the support of a military industrial complex—overseen by Edie Falco’s General Frances Ardmore, hilariously introduced stomping around in an Aliens-esque exosuit while drinking her morning cup of coffee—that wants to colonize Pandora. Realizing that their presence puts their forest tribe in danger, Sully and his family hightail it to the seashore where they hide out among the initially hostile reef people of Metkayina.

The adult reefers, two of the more prominent played by Cliff Curtis and Kate Winslet, cast innumerable suspicious glances, while the adolescents lightly bully the Sully children, particularly rebellious second son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) and adopted teenage daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), the latter a genetic product of Weaver’s deceased character, Dr. Grace Augustine, from the first film. Way of Water’s second hour is its baggiest, though it features some of Cameron’s wackiest conceits, notably a whale-like species that speaks with the reef people telepathically and whose thoughts are subtitled in Papyrus typeface.

There are several extended sequences of Lo’ak befriending one of these creatures who’s been outcast from his tribe and who, along with Lo’ak, will prove his heroic mettle in battle. One gets the sense that Cameron is so enamored of the heavy lifting required to realize scenes like these (most of the aquatic set pieces were shot in actual water, with the human performers decked out in specially designed mo-cap suits) that he’s willing to bring narrative momentum to a halt in the process. The sights and sounds are captivating, yet the cavernous disconnect between the innovative technology on display and the rudimentary storytelling occasionally makes it feel like we’re watching video game cut scenes seemingly designed to make Kojima Hideo blush.

In such instances, your mind may wander to Way of Water’s unique visual look, though that will of course depend on how your movie house projects it. (The film will reportedly be available in the most formats ever offered for a wide theatrical release.) Cameron and cinematographer Russell Carpenter photographed Way of Water in high frame rate 3D, though unlike Peter Jackson’s divisive Hobbit trilogy or Ang Lee’s fascinatingly flawed Gemini Man, the high frame rate, which at its nadir replicates the atrocious motion-smoothed look of an improperly calibrated TV set, is applied selectively throughout, sometimes within the same shot.

A foreground character may have a familiar grain-flecked cinematic sheen while their surroundings will be eye-searingly crisp, and the effect is so uncannily burnished that it upends the senses. It’s all evidently intentional, and apropos, anyway, of a world that should feel alien in multiple respects. Cameron’s aesthetic flexes are rarely uninteresting, though Way of Water’s second act still tends toward the exhausting more often than not.

Fortunately, the third hour goes fully for broke, as Quaritch tracks down the Sully family with the help of some interplanetary whale hunters and Cameron ingeniously restages the finale of his own Titanic with blue aliens in place of corseted aristocrats. It’s a masterclass in terms of spectacle, pace, and emotional involvement, one that shames pretty much all of the big-budget Hollywood offerings nowadays, though whether such deep-pocketed one-upmanship is a worthy endeavor will depend on your feelings toward Cameron’s personal obsessions. He can yammer all day about the Avatar movies’ overarching environmental message, but neither of the films thus far overcome the perversity of preaching for a small footprint with a production this inordinately large. For all the genuine thrills provided by its pioneering pageantry, Way of Water ultimately leaves you with a soul-nagging query: What price entertainment?