Avatar: The Way of Water

The visual effects are amazing. But Cameron should be better than this.

I'm a big fan of Mr Cameron. Not only for his directing skills, but also for his screenwriting skills. But this time he seemed to have missed the goal. I know he rarely does sequels. But is this the best he could do? The story has not changed anything compared to the previous episode. Repeated crises, repeated enemies, repeated conflicts,and wait a minute,WHAT? Even repeated Titanic. Are you serious?

As a director, he also did not reach his previous level. For a long time, the pace of the film felt too slow. Yes, the underwater scenes are phenomenal. But this is not the Blue Planet, this is a sci-fi action movie. At least it's what most audiences expect from the film, isn't it?

Movie exceeds all the CGI anyone can possibly expect, but the storyline fails to overwhelm the audience. Id say 70% of the film is about family bonding and descriptions of culture on Pandora. Had it been on Discovery or Nat Geo, itd have been awesome. But thats not what people going in to watch the movie would want to see in a 3 hr movie.

The action starts out at the beginning and in the end with detailsed description of the life of the Naavi comprising the major chunk of the film in the middle.

Personally I was unable to sit through the movie in one go. Finished it in 3 sittings while skipping through many scenes I felt were totally unnecessary.

He did it again. And I don't even really understand how. He has some kind of mysterious, special power that he secretly wields over us and we don't even notice. That's how he keeps tricking us into spending all our hard-earned money to see his movies, so much so that we've made him the most commercially successful director of all time. Because these are James Cameron's most typical trademarks, for pretty much all of his movies, which he has once again dutifully employed in Avatar 2:

~ The story is paper-thin.

~ The dialogue was written by a 16-year-old intern.

~ The soundtrack is unbelievably cheesy.

~ The lead actor has no discernable acting skills.

~ The bad guys are all 100% completely evil, and the good guys are all but entirely saintly.

~ The message and moral of the story are about as subtle and nuanced as a jackhammer.

And yet.....

IT'S SO DAMN COOL.

The world he and his visual design team have created is truly a work of art... It's stunningly beautiful, creative and inventive and it makes you want to be there so badly, it hurts. The action sequences are reliably awesome as always, and there are some truly heartfelt emotional passages. In all honesty, the story is awfully predictable, and an almost step-by-step rehash of the first movie. But it's damn near impossible to be bothered by this, because the magic is there, and it's real. And the whales... Oh my god, the whales. Or whale-like creatures, anyway. Absolutely spellbinding. The familiar characters are precisely the same as they were before, and it makes the past 13-year wait seem like nothing at all. It's like meeting with friends you haven't seen for a while. I especially love Zoe Saldaña, she was always the shining star of Avatar, and she's just as mesmerising here, even if her screentime is a bit shorter. The new characters are all good, strong additions to the whole. Cliff Curtis is very powerful as the Sea People's chief, and Kate Winslet is absolutely unrecognisable as his mate, which is as big a compliment as I can think of.

But the biggest, and most pleasant surprise, are Jake and Neytiri's children. All but one, played by young, virtually inexperienced actors who all understand their assignments perfectly. They are, without exception, lovely and engaging and very real. They each have to deal with their own respective troubles that come with their coming of age, and all these young performers were cast perfectly. I loved them. The "but one", however, is one of the most surprising character/performer pairings I've ever seen. Sigourney Weaver plays a 14-year-old. Yes you read that right. And it's amazing. She's amazing, it's all amazing...

Damn James Cameron. If he was a superhero, his name would be Magic Movie Man.

James Cameron does it again. Creates a beautiful, vibrant world with a basic, paint by numbers plot. If someone had stepped in and cut this movie an hour shorter, we might have been okay but instead I was getting bored, checked my watch and saw I still had 45 minutes to go.

Is the world beautiful? Yes, absolutely. Does the adjusted frame rate work? No, action scenes feel like a cut scene from a video game. How's the story? Mediocre. The overarching story gets lost and forgotten because James Cameron wants to paint the whole world. As he does that, he fills it in with random cliché side plots to distract you until you remember, oh yeah, there's a big bad villain out there. The story feels like something my 6 year old niece would write. Bouncing from one thought to the next.

Rough synopsis: Oh the *Insert character/Group* is in trouble! Lets go save them. How could you do that? You know better. Here's a beautiful CGI thing to look at. Rinse/repeat.

Major themes carry over from the first one. Humanity is bad except for "our" white savior. He's the good guy. Here's a new group of Navi that don't trust us at first but they'll come around after a scary moment.

The story feels like Cameron kept adding on one story trope after another and no one walked into the room to knock the pen out of his hand. If you end up watching it, do yourself a favor and get up to pee halfway through. Grab some popcorn and a drink. Maybe taking a break from Pandora will make it not so insufferably long.

What's worse than watching a boring movie? Knowing there will be at least three more boring movies the franchise will release over the next few years just to appease Cameron's narcissism. It's a story filled with cliched tropes and regurgitated plot lines. You might as well watch it with the sound off. Does the movie really need to be 3-plus hours long? No, it doesn't. Perhaps Disney chose to combine films #2 and #3 and will do the same for films #4 and #5 -- and films #6 and #7 -- because they know nobody wants to watch seven Avatar sequels. (You'll just have to watch four VERY LONG AND BORING sequels. Good grief.