movie review avatar the way of the 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 Review

Judgment spray..

Avatar: The Way of Water hits theaters on Dec. 16, 2022. Below is a spoiler-free review.

I think it was right about when a Pandoran whale lamented, in Papyrus-subtitled dialogue, that its past was “too painful” to recount that I realized I had totally bought into Avatar: The Way of Water. The success of 2009’s Avatar heavily influenced the direction of digital filmmaking and distribution, and though the world has changed a lot in the 13 years leading up to this sequel, some things never do… like how when James Cameron decides to make a sequel, he expands and embellishes the preceding story in surprising, engaging ways. Avatar: The Way of Water isn’t afraid to be weird as hell, as it doubles down on the naked sentimentality of the first movie, refocuses the plot on more interesting characters, and yes, it has to be said, sets the high water mark for visual effects in film all over again.

The Way of Water bridges the long gap between movies with a dense prologue that explains what happened after the resource-hungry humans of the RDA retreated from Pandora. Defecting Avatar pilot and now full-time Na’vi Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) start a family as the new leaders of the Omaticaya tribe. That family grows to include three biological and two adopted children, and it’s the driving force behind Jake and Neytiri’s decision to exile themselves after the RDA return to resume their plundering, led by the practically non-existent General Ardmore (Edie Falco). These early scenes deliver a lot of exposition, and breeze over important details about the status quo and the nature of certain relationships. At a bladder-busting 190 minutes, The Way of Water almost always finds the time to circle back to reinforce the most crucial plot elements, but it does mean that there will be times where you’ll be searching for a character’s name or their place in the social hierarchy. Cameron’s betting that you’ll be too bowled over by what a decade of technological advancement has done for realizing Pandora on screen, and the results speak for themselves.

What's the best James Cameron movie?

Though we spend some brief time in the forests of the first film, the vast majority of The Way of Water takes place in the territory of the seafaring Metkayina tribe, and the vibrant underwater ecosystem is an even more dreamlike palette for Cameron to work with. Bioluminescent rainbows from the flora in the depths refract through the moving surface like the aurora, sunsets on the wide horizon bounce off the waves and cast the shores in a purple hue, the thoughtfully designed marine life all reinforce the sense that Pandora is a living, breathing world even more effectively than Avatar did. But when the time comes to blow up all that tranquility in favor of blockbuster action, it should come as little surprise that Cameron delivers the goods. Even the most chaotic action sequences are readable, thrillingly paced, and above all, impossible to take your eye away from. An early raid on an RDA cargo shipment features a train derailment that I smiled the whole way through, taken aback by how visceral the destruction felt.

Cameron’s environmentalist interests remain the backbone of the larger Avatar plot, and his heavy employment of familiar character archetypes and story devices feels like a clear message that the Na’vi good guys and military baddies are more important as a collective than individually. And if we’re talking archetypal characters, we have to talk about Cameron’s decision to (quite literally) revive Stephen Lang’s Miles Quaritch as The Way of Water’s primary villain. Quaritch’s hyper-macho drill sergeant persona felt dated in 2009, little more than a vessel for all the worst aspects of Avatar’s themes of colonialism, but Lang’s scene-chewing enthusiasm always kept the character interesting. Quaritch gets his second chance at revenge thanks to a Na’vi body of his own, and his newfound physical prowess gives him even more swagger than he already had. His personal vendetta doesn’t get fleshed out with long monologues about the nature of life or the expectations of a military man; it’s made manifest in the simple fact that, even given a new lease on life, he’s still gunning for the Sullys.

The Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy Movie of 2022

Lang manages to showboat without feeling like a showboat, with all the subtlety of Quaritch holding his own human skull aloft in grand Hamlet fashion, though there are some new wrinkles to the character that suggest a little more depth than The Way of Water has time for – yes, even at three-plus hours long. The Way of Water is in no rush to expand the franchise’s universe and, after a decade plus of seeing the pros and cons of interconnected storytelling, that serves the experience well.

Thanks in no small part to a shift in focus to the next generation, The Way of Water has far more room for levity than its self-serious forerunner. Jake and Neytiri’s kids bicker and tease, they get into scraps with their new tribemates, but above all, they stick together. Cameron invests a lot into middle kids Lo’ak and Kiri as the new representatives of the Na’vi’s warrior and spiritual leanings, with each struggling to understand their place. Spider, the Sullys’ adopted human child, doesn’t get quite as much time with his siblings because of how the story progresses, but his mix of feral energy and wisecracking attitude help him stand out. The eldest and youngest Sully children have little to do and get lost in the shuffle, apart from when someone needs to be endangered to keep the plot moving.

With the Sully kids taking center stage, Jake and Neytiri’s role in the story is proportionally diminished, and that’s okay. Jake is no more interesting a character than he was last time around, but he does have utility here as a tough father figure for his kids to struggle to live up to. Zoe Saldaña’s Neytiri feels like the legacy character with the least to do, mostly advocating for her kids to a distracted Jake. The leaders of the Metkayina tribe, played by Cliff Curtis and Kate Winslet, are cut from a very similar cloth to Jake and Neytiri and often end up feeling redundant as a result.

Though the vast majority of The Way of Water’s technical gambits pay off, missteps in that arena are more glaring. Specifically, Cameron overplays his hand in how he brings one of Jake and Neytiri’s children to life. Kiri, the eldest Sully daughter, is voiced and played in performance capture by Sigourney Weaver, and her connection to the late Dr. Grace Augustine (also Weaver) is an important story point, but the choice to have Weaver herself play this younger incarnation frequently distracts. It’s less to do with the idea of an adult playing a child via mo-cap and more the fact that… well, it’s Sigourney Weaver. Of course, Weaver’s game for the attempt, but pitching her voice up and shrinking her Na’vi body down isn’t quite enough to bridge the uncanny valley of hearing an icon – an icon in Cameron’s own filmography, no less – being transposed into an adolescent.

Avatar: The Way of Water is a thoughtful, sumptuous return to Pandora, one which fleshes out both the mythology established in the first film and the Sully family’s place therein. It may not be the best sequel James Cameron has ever made (which is a very high bar), but it’s easily the clearest improvement on the film that preceded it. The oceans of Pandora see lightning striking in the same place twice, expanding the visual language the franchise has to work with in beautiful fashion. The simple story may leave you crying “cliché,” but as a vehicle for transporting you to another world, it’s good enough to do the job. This is nothing short of a good old-fashioned Cameron blockbuster, full of filmmaking spectacle and heart, and an easy recommendation for anyone looking to escape to another world for a three-hour adventure.

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‘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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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. But the expanded, bio-diverse world-building pulls you in, the visual spectacle keeps you mesmerized, the passion for environmental awareness is stirring and the warfare is as visceral and exciting as any multiplex audience could desire.

Box office for Disney’s Dec. 16 release is going to be monstrous, while simultaneously whetting global appetites for the three more Avatar entries Cameron has announced.

What’s most astonishing about The Way of Water is the persuasive case it makes for CGI, at a time when most VFX-heavy productions settle for a rote efficiency that has drained the movies of much of their magic. Unlike other directors who have let technological experimentation at times smother their creative instincts — Robert Zemeckis and Ang Lee come to mind — Cameron thrives in the artifice of the digital toolbox.

Working in High Dynamic Range at 48 frames per second, he harnesses the immersive quality of enhanced 3-D to give DP Russell Carpenter’s images depth and tactile vibrancy. Skeptics who watched the trailer and dismissed the long-time-coming Avatar sequel as a videogame-aesthetic hybrid of photorealism and animation that ends up looking like neither may not be entirely wrong. But the trippy giant-screen experience, for those willing to give themselves over to it, is visually ravishing, particularly in the breathtaking underwater sequences.

The story picks up more than a decade after Marine veteran Jake Sully ( Sam Worthington ) began living on the extrasolar moon Pandora in the Indigenous Na’vi form of his genetically engineered avatar. He and his warrior wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) have raised a family in the meantime, including teenage sons Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) and Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), their tween sister Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss) and adopted daughter Kiri ( Sigourney Weaver ), the biological child of the late Dr. Grace Augustine’s avatar.

Spider (Jack Champion) — a human child orphaned by the “Sky People” conflict and too young to be put into cryosleep when the colonists and their military security force were packed off to Earth at the end of the first movie — spends more time among the Na’vi than he does in the lab facilities with the science nerds. While his connection to the Pandorans runs deep, he’s a walking preview of conflict to come in future installments as his loyalties are divided. The identity of his dad doesn’t remain a mystery for long.

Jake is the respected leader of the Omaticaya clan, whose peaceful existence among the lush forests is threatened when the invaders return to Pandora. Their mission this time is not just to mine the moon for the valuable mineral “unobtainium,” whatever that is, but also to establish Pandora as a human colony, given that Earth is becoming uninhabitable.

Heading the security squad is a face with a familiar snarl and an arsenal of hardass folksy snark, Colonel Miles Quaritch ( Stephen Lang ). But since he was killed by Neytiri’s arrows last time around, it’s now his larger, faster Na’vi avatar (don’t ask), accompanied by a similar bunch of re-engineered big-foot blue grunts. “A Marine can’t be killed,” says Quaritch. “You can kill us, but we’ll just regroup in Hell.”

It goes somewhat against the goal of establishing a new habitat for humanity that their interstellar vehicles incinerate vast expanses of greenery wherever they land, but that just shows that revenge is the only thing Quaritch cares about. The recombinant colonel has acquired none of the spirituality or the respect for nature of the Na’vi people in his new form, and with his disdain for “half-breeds,” he’s even more like a Wild West villain with fancy hardware than before.

When it becomes clear to Jake after some tense encounters that Quaritch is coming after his family, he relinquishes Omaticaya leadership and relocates with the brood to a distant cluster of islands inhabited by the Metkayina clan. The chief, Tonowari (Cliff Curtis), and his pregnant shamanic wife, Ronal ( Kate Winslet ), reluctantly offer the refugees sanctuary, aware of the obvious risk to their community.

Anyone too hung up on consistency might wonder why the Na’vi adults all speak in an unidentifiably exotic accent while their offspring tend to sound like they’ve stepped right out of a CW teen series. Tsireya, in her cute macrame bikini top, appears to have been keeping up with the Kardashians. But you either go with it or you don’t, and there’s a soulful sweetness to the scenes of domestic family life and adolescent interaction that’s warmly engaging.

With the resemblance of the Metkayinas’ intricate tattoos to Maori body art and even a war chant with protruding tongues not unlike the haka ceremony, Cameron seems to be paying tribute to the Indigenous people of the Avatar productions’ host country, New Zealand. The design work on the beautiful Metkayina people themselves is impressive, physiologically distinct from the Omatikayas in various ways that indicate how they have adapted to ocean life.

“Water has no beginning and no end,” says Tsireya, with a reverence that no doubt reflects Cameron’s own feelings. The director has been a deep-sea geek since he graduated from the Roger Corman special effects shop with his seldom-mentioned feature debut Piranha II . That fascination has continued not only through The Abyss and Titanic but also in his ocean documentaries, giving the new film a full-circle feel as we share his intoxication with an unspoiled environment full of power, splendor and mystery.

Just as the flying ikrans and leonopteryxes swooped through the glowing skies of Pandora in the first movie, the sequel finds wonder in the creatures gliding over the exquisitely detailed reefs and ocean depths in this new environment. The Metkayinas ride on dragon-like aquatic mammals called ilus and skimwings. In one enchanting touch, Tsireya shows the newcomers how to attach a kind of stingray as a cape that allows them to breathe underwater. The ocean peoples’ most sacred bond is with the gigantic tulkun, highly intelligent whale-like creatures that provide 300 feet of bait for Quaritch to lure Jake out of hiding in the maze of islands.

You might roll your eyes at soggy dialogue referring to a tulkun as a “spirit sister” and “composer of songs,” but sequences in which these sentient giants become prey are profoundly moving. That section introduces new characters in mercenary sea captain Scoresby (Brendan Cowell) and Resources Development Administration marine biologist Dr. Ian Garvin (Jemaine Clement), who looks on squeamishly as the magnificent creatures are hunted for one of the most valuable commodities in the universe.

“Family is our fortress,” Jake says, and while certain dynamics — like the golden-child eldest son and the undisciplined second-born who can never live up to his example — feel pedestrian, the characters all are sufficiently fleshed-out and individualized to keep us invested. That’s especially true once tragedy strikes and the ongoing attack allows no time to fall apart after a devastating loss.

The good guys-vs.-villains story (scripted by Cameron, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver) isn’t exactly complex, but the infinite specifics of the world in which it takes place and the tenderness with which the film observes its Indigenous inhabitants make Avatar: The Way of Water surprisingly emotional. While much of the nuance in the cast’s work is overshadowed by CG wizardry, Saldaña and Winslet have poignant moments, Weaver has solid foundations on which to build continuing involvement, and Dalton and Champion are standouts among the young newcomers.

I missed the heart-pounding suspense and tribal themes of James Horner’s score for the 2009 film, but composer Simon Franglen capably maintains the tension where it counts. Even more than its predecessor, this is a work that successfully marries technology with imagination and meticulous contributions from every craft department. But ultimately, it’s the sincerity of Cameron’s belief in this fantastical world he’s created that makes it memorable.

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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.

In The Terminator , Arnold Schwarzenegger's cyborg assassin is famously sent back from 2029 to rain death and cool Teutonic one-liners on the good people of 1984. For nearly four decades now, that film's creator, James Cameron , has also seemed like a man outside of time, an emissary from a near-future where movies look like something we've only imagined them to be: liquid metals, impossible planets, boats bigger than the Ritz. Avatar: The Way of Water (in theaters Friday) brings that same sense of dissociative wonder. What fantastical blue-people oceania is this? How did we get here? And why does it look so real ?

The answer to that first question, as several hundred million fans of the original 2009 Avatar already know, is a mythical place called Pandora. The next two land somewhere between vast technology, sweat equity, and God (and, at this New York press screening at least, a slightly smudgy pair of 3D glasses). The Way of Water is, indeed, spectacularly aquatic, though not quite in the way that the six-time Oscar winner's eerie deep-sea thriller The Abyss was, or even the vast, ruthless North Atlantic that swallowed Leonardo DiCaprio and 1,500 other doomed souls in his Titanic . This is circa-2022 James Cameron, which is to say he makes it seem a lot like 2032 — a world so immersive and indubitably awesome, in the most literal reading of that word (there will be awe, and more awe, and then some more) that it feels almost shockingly new.

It's also very much a Cameron movie in that the plot is, at root, blood simple: good, evil, the fate of the free world. Former Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington ) has permanently shed his human form to become full Na'vi, the extreme ectomorphs with Smurf-colored skin whose peaceful pantheistic ways have long clashed with their would-be conquerors from Earth, the rampaging, resource-greedy "sky people." There's still an American military base there, led by the brusque, efficient General Frances Ardmore (a bemused Edie Falco , incongruous in a uniform). But the Na'vi largely run free, hunting and cavorting and swooping through the air on their dragon-bird steeds, singing the songs of the rainforest and raising little blue babies with swishy tails.

Jake and his Na'Vi princess, Neytiri ( Zoe Saldaña ), now have three offspring of their own, along with an adopted teenage daughter named Kiri ( Sigourney Weaver ), the child of the late Dr. Grace Augustine (whom Weaver plays once again in flashbacks), and an orphaned human boy called Spider (Jack Champion), a loinclothed Mowgli they treat more like a stray cat than a son. Jake is the stern patriarch, still a soldier to the bone, and Neytiri is the gentle nurturer; the children, beneath their extraterrestrial skin, are just happy, jostling kids. But when the DNA imprint of Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) is recovered by science after his fiery defeat in the first film and poured into the healthy body of an Avatar, the resurrected officer vows revenge: While Ardmore & Co. continue to efficiently strip-mine Pandora, he will settle for nothing less than his former protegé's dishonorable death.

And so Sully and his family are forced to flee, hiding out among the reef-people clan of Metkayina. The taciturn chieftan ( Fear the Walking Dead 's Cliff Curtis ) and his wary wife (congratulations if you can tell that's Kate Winslet ) are reluctant to let strangers into their world, especially when they come trailing danger and forest dirt behind them. Socially, most Metkayina are only as welcoming as they strictly need to be, and the Sully family soon finds that living in harmony with the sea also means a steep learning curve for land-bound Na'vi — new customs, new modes of transportation, new ways of breathing.

But that, of course, is where Cameron and his untold scores of studio minions get to shine: 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. The director, who penned the script with married screenwriting duo Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver ( Jurassic World , Mulan ), tends to operate in the grand, muscular mode of Greek myth (or if you're feeling less generous, the black-and-white clarity of comic books). The storytelling here is deliberately broad and the dialogue often tilts toward pure blockbuster camp. (Not every word out of the colonel's mouth is "Oorah," but it might as well be; Jake speaks fluent Hero Cliché, and the Na'vi boys say "bro" like they just escaped from Point Break .)

And yet 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. The actors, performing in motion capture, do their best to project human-scale feelings on this sprawling, sensational canvas, to varying degrees of success. Saldaña's mother-warrior makes herself ferociously vulnerable, and Weaver somehow gets us to believe she's an outcast teen; Worthington often sounds like he's just doing his best to sound 10 percent less Australian. Even the non-verbal creatures — bioluminescent jellyfish as delicate as fairy wings; whales the size of aircraft carriers, with four eyes and flesh like an unshelled turtle's — have an uncanny anthropomorphic charm, stealing several moments from their speaking counterparts.

By the third hour, Cameron has shifted into battle mode, and the movie becomes a sort of rock opera, or a sea-salted Apocalypse Now ; the "Ride of the Valkyries" thunder rarely feels far behind. The scale of mortal combat in those moments is, one could say, titanic, though it turns out to be a more personal reckoning for Sully and his family too. The final scenes are calculated for maximum impact and not a little bit of emotional manipulation; at 192 minutes, the runtime is almost certainly too long. It's strange, maybe, or at least wildly uncritical, to say that none of that really matters in the end. The Way of Water has already created its own whole-cloth reality, a meticulous world-building as astonishing and enveloping as anything we've ever seen on screen — until that crown is passed, inevitably, in December 2024, the projected release date for Avatar 3 . Grade: A–

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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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Avatar: The Way of Water is a gorgeous rehash of all the first film’s triumphs and failures

James cameron’s second avatar movie is a visually stunning but narratively uninspired return to pandora that drowns some of its best ideas in military morass..

By Charles Pulliam-Moore , a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

Share this story

James Cameron’s first Avatar was a phenomenon that fundamentally altered the landscape of the entertainment industry with its record-breaking box office success and briefly convinced a generation of theatergoers that 3D movies were great, actually. The original Avatar ’s story was little more than a white savior narrative cosplaying as a sci-fi epic. But the movie’s breathtaking visuals and astonishing level of rich detail made the prospect of returning to the alien world of Pandora for multiple sequels an interesting — if a bit dubious — one.

In a number of mostly technical ways, Avatar: The Way of Water is a superior film to its predecessor and a filmmaking marvel that’s a testament to Cameron’s ability to craft immersive, breathtaking set pieces. But for all of its VFX wizardry and moments where it feels like Cameron might have learned something from his previous missteps, The Way of Water ultimately plays like a by-the-numbers sequel that’s too focused on trying to feel relatable when what it needs is to be even more alien.

Set some years after the events of 2009’s Avatar , The Way of Water continues the story of human marine-turned-Na’vi savior Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his mate Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) as they raise their gaggle of children in Pandora’s lush forests. Though stoic Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), hot head Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), and baby of the family Tuktirey (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss) all love and revere their father, none of Jake’s biological children can fully understand the significance of him being from Earth or how their human heritage makes them unique among other Na’vi. The same is less true of Jake and Neytiri’s adopted daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), a sensitive teen who has a unique connection to Pandora’s wildlife, and her good friend Spider (Jack Champion), a human boy abandoned on the planet after Earthlings were forced to leave at the end of the first film.

Just in the details of how each of the Sully children is dealing with different aspects of growing up in the shadow of their father — the leader of their forest-dwelling tribe — there’s plenty of material for an interesting tale. But The Way of Water tries to broaden its focus and showcase more of Pandora’s natural wonders by making the Sullys the centerpiece of yet another war that forces them to flee their home as humans return to Pandora once again in search of natural resources and revenge.

In moments when The Way of Water is showcasing new aspects of Pandora’s natural wonders, the movie sings and shines with an undeniable brilliance that will undoubtedly please fans of the original and appeal to those intrigued by the idea of diving deep into a dangerous, alien world. But while the movie is often a visual delight, that delight is consistently undercut by Cameron’s inexplicable decision to shoot the bulk of The Way of Water at 48 frames per second, a choice that leads to the entire thing looking like a very expensive video meant to be played on an array of televisions in a Best Buy.

If you’ve at all followed the genesis of the Avatar franchise, then you’ve undoubtedly heard Cameron and The Way of Water ’s cast harping on about how this approach to filmmaking was crucial to properly realizing Pandora and its people for a present-day audience. That may be true to a certain extent. But as you watch The Way of Water — particularly if you’ve recently seen the first Avatar at a lower frame rate — it’s hard not to get the overwhelming sense of technique and tools being consistently prioritized over artistry in ways that detract from the movie’s striking beauty.

While the jarring quality of The Way of Water ’s frame rate never really goes away, it’s something that’s easy enough to get used to, especially in the movie’s slower scenes that are really about giving you a moment to drink in the strangeness of Pandora’s flora and fauna. What’s far less easy to grow comfortable with, however, is the way the movie doubles down on most of the first Avatar ’s more problematic plot beats and framing the Na’vi as animalistic “savages” whose culture is clearly a hodgepodge of those belonging to real-world indigenous peoples.

It’s both funny and cringe-inducing to watch Jake Sully unironically pontificate about the dangers of the invading “sky people” with a straight face while his alien dreadlocks are blowing ever so slightly in the wind. It’s the sort of visual that perfectly encapsulates everything that was wild (read: exhausting) about the original Avatar and feels reflective of how uninterested Cameron is in elevating the franchise beyond a rather base and fetishistic power fantasy.

Avatar: The Way of Water also stars Stephen Lang, Kate Winslet, Edie Falco, Cliff Curtis, Giovanni Ribisi, and Jemaine Clement. The film hits theaters on December 16th.

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• What Is Cinema?

Avatar: The Way of Water Is a Spectacle Worth the Wait

Our world was very different when we last left it to travel to Pandora, the jungle moon of James Cameron ’s dreams where the humans and Na’vi of Avatar laid their scene. Back then, in 2009, the Marvel machine was just creaking into motion. Filmgoers flocked to theaters for franchise sequels, sure, but also for romantic comedies and Oscar-y dramas (within reason). Movies reigned supreme—the industry was sturdy enough to support a massive original film like Avatar , and the Cameron investment handsomely paid off.

Can Avatar: The Way of Water , Cameron’s long-awaited sequel, pull off the same feat in a much different moviegoing clime? That certainly doesn’t seem to concern the filmmaker himself, who has barreled back to Pandora with as much force and blare and earnest silliness as ever. The Way of Water insists that times haven’t changed; it is heedless of contemporary industry undulations. (It should probably be noted that the movie was wrapped before Top Gun: Maverick ’s lucrative assertion that the good times never die.) That swaggering energy is, in large part, what makes the film such a pleasure to watch. 

When last we left paraplegic military grunt turned messianic alien Jake Sully ( Sam Worthington ), he had committed to his Na’vi body, met a lady fair (Neytiri, played by Zoe Saldaña ), and become the hero of his adopted community. The destructive humans were exiled to Earth, and peace and harmony were once again restored to this erotically lush ecosystem. 

In the ensuing years, Jake and Neytiri got busy making a family, amassing a brood of children both biological and adopted. Sigourney Weaver ’s dead character, Grace, somehow had her own Na’vi baby, Kiri, who is also voiced by Weaver. She’s been brought into the Sully fold alongside teenage brothers Neteyam ( Jamie Flatters ) and Lo’ak ( Brittain Dalton ), baby sister Tuk ( Trinity Jo-Li Bliss ), and human teen Spider ( Jack Champion ). The bad guys have, unfortunately, come back, and the Sully family, along with the rest of their FernGully cohort, spend much of their time staging raids to destabilize attempts to reestablish a militarized human colony. An insurgency, if you will.

Things go screwy with the return of Colonel Quaritch ( Stephen Lang )—or, at least, his consciousness, which has now been placed in a Na’vi body. Quaritch is on a mission of revenge, which means the Sully clan must flee their treetop refuge and take to the coasts, where a whole other race of Na’vi, the Metkayina, spend their time cavorting under the water and, on occasion, communicating with highly intelligent whale-like creatures. 

Cameron allows himself lots of time to explore this blue paradise, his camera splashing in and out of the fauna-filled sea as the Sullys get to know their new tribe (who are not all entirely welcoming) and experience such common things as a puppy-love crush, a spate of sibling rivalry, and the dawning suspicion that one of them might be some kind of Christlike deity made flesh. You know, basic family stuff. 

As The Way of Water dives further and further into its mythology, it tries the generosity (and, maybe, patience) of even the most supportive viewer. There is a lot of goofy lore introduced here, terms and ideas tossed around by eager kids and snarling adults until the movie is utterly deluged in world-building. If Way of Water loses its grip on some viewers and lets them drift away, others will steadfastly hold on, increasingly invested in the old-fashioned, bombastic sincerity that has become Cameron’s signature style. 

What’s most thrilling about the film’s sweeping immersion—if you let it immerse you, anyway—is that it all arrives as discovery. The Avatar franchise is not based on anything already known. There is no comic book to consult, no video game narrative to refer to. And so, as hokey as it might occasionally be—like, say, watching the Na’vi have in-depth conversations with placid, moaning space whales— Way of Water maintains a giddy spirit of creative birth. It is a total and discrete object, guided only by internal rules.

Cameron is certainly influenced by real-world things—Maori culture can be glimpsed in some of the Metkayina’s customs, for example—but for the most part, he is just making this stuff up. How rare that is to see these days, at least in movies as large as this one. The film’s geeky confidence earns our affection, graciously encouraging that cynicism be laid aside in favor of wide-eyed wonder.

Or maybe it aggressively wrestles that cynicism out of our hands. The Way of Water is a loud and busy sit, a grand 192-minute opera that pauses only very rarely for a moment of stillness and quiet. The film’s dreamy, eco-religious passages give way to bursts of action, all culminating in a lengthy, multifaceted, astounding set piece that is part Moby Dick , part Titanic , and part something altogether its own. The family drama crescendos into tragedy; heroes are made and humbled; a complicated villainy emerges. Much is left open for another sequel, which has already been filmed. That non-ending stokes our appetite for more just enough to drown out the mild frustration of having watched something for so long only for the narrator—wild wizard Cameron, waving his baton in the heavens—to close the book and tell us that the rest of the story is for another evening. 

Credit must be paid to the actors so un-self-consciously committed to this project. It’s a cringey thing to think about, all these performers running and swimming around in their motion-capture suits, spouting off dense expository dialogue in curious accents. And yet you never detect a flinch of embarrassment. Not from Saldaña, nor Weaver, nor even Kate Winslet , who plays a Metkayina leader somewhat hostile to intruding House Sully. Cameron has thoroughly sold them on his vision, just as he does the audience. The Way of Water instills trust through its unrelenting insistence, a steely aptitude mixed, intoxicatingly, with childlike “and then, and then” enthusiasm. 

There is, really, no one else who does it like Cameron anymore, someone who so (perhaps recklessly) advances filmmaking technology to make manifest the spectacle in his head while staying ever-attentive of antiquated ideals like sentiment and idiosyncrasy. Watching The Way of Water , one rolls their eyes only to realize they’re welling with tears. One stretches and shifts in their seat before accepting, with a resigned and happy plop, that they could watch yet another hour of Cameron’s preservationist epic. Lucky for us—lucky even for the culture, maybe—that at least a few more of those are on their way. 

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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 Reviews

It is admirable as a viewing experience, but it has none of the emotional conviction that makes a true movie classic.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 18, 2024

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

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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 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

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

Top cast 70

• (as Zoe Saldaña)

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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 13, 2022

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• December 16, 2022 (United States)
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• Stone Street Studios, Wellington, New Zealand
• 20th Century Studios
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• $350,000,000 (estimated)
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• $134,100,226
• Dec 18, 2022
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It’s been over a decade since director James Cameron released Avatar , and the fear of a sequel diminishing, or being inferior to the original film is certainly not the case with Avatar: The Way of Water . Cameron, who co-wrote the script with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, returns to Pandora, offering viewers even more stunning visuals, a personal, more emotional story, and incredible underwater sequences that put every other film’s technical achievements to shame. The Way of Water is overlong and stretched thin on story, but the Avatar sequel is beautiful, with lush world-building and characters that add depth.

Set nearly two decades after the events of the first film, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) are thriving. Jake has fully settled into Na’vi life and over the years the pair has welcomed four children — their eldest son Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), their second-oldest son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), adopted daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), and their youngest daughter Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss) — along with Miles (Jack Champion), better known as Spider, a human boy who was left behind on Pandora and who grew up alongside Jake and Neytiri’s family. However, Jake and Neytiri’s happiness abruptly ends when they are faced with another threat, this time in the form of Colonel Miles Quaritch’s (Stephen Lang) avatar, who is embedded with his clone’s memories. Quaritch wants his revenge on Jake, and is relentless in hunting down his family, forcing him and Neytiri to seek shelter with the Metkayina, a water tribe.

Related: Young Stars Of Avatar: The Way Of Water Share Pandora Secrets

One can’t say enough good things about the film’s visuals — each frame is more breathtaking and magical than the last. The underwater scenes are especially immersive and magnificent to behold. 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 within it, The Way of Water brings audiences in with them, and the 3D pops in ways that make the adventure all the more visceral.

Rather than staying put in the forest, Cameron takes the opportunity to explore a new part of Pandora and its diverse people. This benefits the Avatar sequel and keeps it from becoming stagnant. The film’s primary focus is the younger Na’vi generation, which allows the film to further explore Pandora and the Na’vi without needing to spend so much time on Jake’s perspective or introduction to the customs. Rather, the Metkayina's inclusion brings a fresh angle to the story and gives Neytiri and Jake’s family a lot to work with, including a few obstacles they must overcome. This also gives the story a genuine push-pull dynamic between the adults and the teens, who are head-strong and stubborn in their own ways. The threat by way of Colonel Miles Quaritch gives the sequel a sense of familiarity without retreading the same ground.

The Way of Water introduces an abundance of new characters, including Jake and Neytiri’s children and the water tribe that gives their family refuge. While the new characters are welcome and their personalities and relationships well-established, there are enough of them that it’s easy for others to be sidelined — like Neytiri, who gets very little to do here compared to the first film and, unlike Jake, rarely shares moments with her children — and the screenwriters struggle to balance all of their storylines despite the lengthy runtime.

To that end, the sequel’s story is spread a bit thin, though there is certainly more depth than the first film, and some of the scenes are obviously working to set up Avatar 3 than acting in service of The Way of Water’s story. This doesn’t distract too much from the film’s narrative, but given that the film’s ending leaves a few things unresolved, it would have made the film stronger had Cameron wrapped up certain storylines before forging ahead.

Despite this, Avatar: The Way of Water explores enough new story beats, and raises the stakes for its characters through tension to justify the continuation of the first film’s narrative. Engaging, enjoyable, and one of the most beautiful films of the year, 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.

More: Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio Review: Stunningly Realized Stop-Motion Animation

Avatar: The Way of Water releases in theaters Friday, December 16. The film is 192 minutes long and is rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence and intense action, partial nudity and some strong language.

Avatar is a sci-fi action/adventure film created by James Cameron and released in 2009. Set in the fictional world of Pandora in the distant future, humans seek a rare mineral found on the planet but find a race of highly-intelligent beings directly in their mining path. To attempt to communicate and work with them, scientists create body replicas called "avatars," and one man will change the destiny of both races using an avatar of his own.

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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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Parents' guide to, avatar: the way of water.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 40 Reviews
• Kids Say 112 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Long but dazzling return to Pandora has sci-fi violence.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Avatar: The Way of Water is the long-awaited sequel to James Cameron's epic 2009 mega-hit Avatar . The sequel returns to Pandora 15 years after Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) rallied the indigenous Na'vi clans against the corrupt "Sky People" (colonizing humans trying to mine…

Why Age 13+?

Sci-fi action violence. Supporting characters die due to explosions, bullet woun

Scattered strong language includes one "f--k," "holy s--t," "bulls--t," "dips--t

Brief scene of nonsexual nudity (blink-and-miss glimpse of a Na'vi woman's breas

No product placement in movie, but dozens of off-screen tie-in merchandising dea

Any Positive Content?

Messages about acceptance, unity, and teamwork. Strong environmental, pro-peace,

The women leaders of the clan are strong, brave, assertive characters, and the N

The Na'vi species is divided into clans with a variety of cultures, traditions,

Violence & Scariness

Sci-fi action violence. Supporting characters die due to explosions, bullet wounds, arrows, and dismemberment, as well as a whale-like creature's destructive movements. Several intense scenes involving combat, a ship sinking, and animal hunting that shows the killing of ancient beings. Children are held captive and at gunpoint. Bullying and pranking that leaves a teen in harm's way. Children are used as hostages. A couple of emotional deaths.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Scattered strong language includes one "f--k," "holy s--t," "bulls--t," "dips--t," "bitch," "goddamn," "damn," "piss," "hell," "oh my God," "ass," "ass-whooping," and insults like "four-fingered freak," "half-breed," "stupid," "ignorant," etc. "Jesus" used as an exclamation.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Brief scene of nonsexual nudity (blink-and-miss glimpse of a Na'vi woman's breasts). Adolescent Na'vi flirt and hold hands. There's a strong bond between Kiri and Spider. Jake and Neytiri embrace and kiss.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

No product placement in movie, but dozens of off-screen tie-in merchandising deals, including toys and books aimed at young kids.

Positive Messages

Messages about acceptance, unity, and teamwork. Strong environmental, pro-peace, and anti-imperialist themes. Idea that love and understanding can trump division and violence. Shows consequences, dangers, and immorality of a corrupt government colonizing and oppressing another land and people. Stresses importance of honest communication between children and their parents.

Positive Role Models

The women leaders of the clan are strong, brave, assertive characters, and the Na'vi are all deeply connected to the land. Jake and Neytiri are courageous and loving parents and clan leaders. Ronal is the spiritual leader of her community. Spider loves the Na'vi even though he's human and is forced into difficult moral situations. Lo'ak finds a way to commune with a sacred creature.

Diverse Representations

The Na'vi species is divided into clans with a variety of cultures, traditions, and belief systems, with overt parallels to Indigenous peoples (tribal tattoos and symbiotic, spiritual relationships with nature) and Indigenous history (colonialist expansion, genocide). But the filmmakers are White, and main characters are almost all voiced by non-Indigenous actors, raising issues about cultural appropriation. The women leaders of the clan are strong, brave, assertive.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Parents need to know that Avatar: The Way of Water is the long-awaited sequel to James Cameron's epic 2009 mega-hit Avatar . The sequel returns to Pandora 15 years after Jake Sully ( Sam Worthington ) rallied the indigenous Na'vi clans against the corrupt "Sky People" (colonizing humans trying to mine and extract Pandora's resources). Jake and his mate, Neytiri ( Zoe Saldaña ), now have four children and decide to save their forest clan by seeking refuge for their family among the island dwelling Metkayina clan. Filmed mostly underwater, the three-hour-plus film is visually striking. And, like the first movie, it has sci-fi action violence, with weapons, hand-to-hand combat, and the hunting of a sacred whale-like creature. The story also features adolescent flirting, hand-holding, and crushes, as well as marital affection. Occasional strong language includes many uses of "s--t," "bitch," and "ass," as well as one "f--k." Like the first movie, this one has a strong anti-imperialist message, plus environmental and multicultural themes that stress the importance of tolerance, acceptance, and honest communication. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (40)
• Kids say (112)

Based on 40 parent reviews

3 hours of extreme unnecessary violence !

More kid friendly than the 1st, what's the story.

AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER is set approximately 15 years after the events of the original Avatar . In the forests of Pandora, Jake ( Sam Worthington ) and his mate, Neytiri ( Zoe Saldaña ), are now parents to two teen sons, Neteyam ( Jamie Flatters ) and Lo'ak (Britain Dalton), as well as a young girl named Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), and Kiri ( Sigourney Weaver ), the teen daughter they adopted after she was born under mysterious circumstances. Jake has helped the Na'vi fight against the Sky People (humans trying to mine and extract Pandora's resources), but the onslaught of the humans' military operations ramps up when they launch a new mission: sending a select group of avatars with the uploaded consciousness and memories of the long-dead Col. Quaritch ( Stephen Lang ) and his loyal soldiers. Quaritch and his Na'vi-fied squad terrorize Jake and Neytiri's Omaticaya clan until Jake convinces Neytiri that their immediate family should leave and seek refuge with the far-off island dwelling Metkayina clan, who are a different shade of blue and boast fin-like tails and flipper-like hands. Their leader, Tonowari ( Cliff Curtis ), and his spiritual leader mate, Ronal ( Kate Winslet ), tentatively grant Jake and Neytiri's family sanctuary, but eventually Quaritch tracks them down and brings the war of the Sky People to the water clans.

Is It Any Good?

James Cameron 's crowd-pleasing sequel is a spectacular technical achievement that, while overlong, manages to dazzle the senses enough to prove that the director is still a visionary. Avatar: The Way of Water isn't a movie you see for its layered, complicated plot. The storyline is simple, and the dialogue is mostly expository or cliché, particularly when Quaritch talks. But it doesn't quite matter, because Cameron puts the movie's $350 million budget to remarkable use in all of the underwater sequences, the incredible creature effects, and the overall immersive return to Pandora. It's worth seeing on the biggest screen possible, in 3D if you can. Yes, the three-hour-plus runtime is long, but it's easy to get lost in the movie's memorable world-building. The motion-capture performances are fascinating to behold, and Winslet and Curtis are welcome additions to the cast. Of the young actors, Dalton stands out as Neytiri and Jake's troublemaking younger son, Lo'ak, who befriends an outcast tulkun (the sacred alien whales). Also worth noting is Jack Champion as Spider, the human boy raised among the Na'vi but whose mask marks him as different. His bond with Kiri, who's also a little bit different, seems headed toward romance, but it's too early to tell (not to mention complicated).

Lang's Quaritch is only slightly less unhinged in this installment than he was in the first film. But he's far from the only antagonist. The Na'vi face seemingly insurmountable odds as the humans' tech gets better and deadlier. The action sequences come mostly in the third act, but there are moments of pulse-pounding peril throughout that will make audiences clutch their seats (or their partners). There's even an extended ship-sinking sequence that's reminiscent of Titanic , right down to how people grip the railing and hold their breath as areas flood. While there's no Pandoran quartet playing classical music, composer Simon Franglen uses the late James Horner's original themes to create an evocative score as the Na'vi fight for their lives. With Avatar: The Way of Water , Cameron and cinematographer Russell Carpenter have created something monumental in scope, so much so that the movie's flaws don't prevent it from being stunning.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the visual and special effects in Avatar: The Way of Water . How do they compare to those in the first movie? How has technology changed since that one was released?

What themes does James Cameron consistently work into his films? Compare aspects of Avatar to the Terminator movies and Titanic . What similarities can you find?

Discuss the difference between how humans dealt with the Na'vi in the first movie and in this sequel.

How do the different tribes from Pandora interact, work together, and use teamwork to achieve their goals? Why is that an important character strength ?

The language and culture of the Maori people indigenous to New Zealand provided director James Cameron with inspiration for the sea-based Metkayina people. What are respectful ways to acknowledge other cultures?

Movie Details

• In theaters : December 16, 2022
• On DVD or streaming : March 28, 2023
• Cast : Zoe Saldana , Sam Worthington , Kate Winslet , Sigourney Weaver
• Director : James Cameron
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors, Latino actors
• Studio : Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
• Genre : Science Fiction
• Topics : Adventures , Ocean Creatures , Space and Aliens
• Character Strengths : Courage , Perseverance , Teamwork
• Run time : 192 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : sequences of strong violence and intense action, partial nudity and some strong language
• Awards : Academy Award , Common Sense Selection
• Last updated : August 9, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

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'Avatar: The Way of Water' Review: James Cameron Crafts a Stunning Sequel for His Epic Franchise

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Avatar has always had an uphill battle in trying to prove itself. Coming twelve years after James Cameron ’s Titanic , which became the highest-grossing film of all time, won 11 Oscars, and became a cultural milestone, Avatar had absurd expectations to meet right out the gate. Despite overtaking Titanic ’s box office total ( Avatar currently has made $721 million more than Titanic , or to put it another way, a difference that equals the entire domestic box office for Top Gun: Maverick ), the conversation around its sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water , has been one of uncertainty. The last thirteen years have been less focused on what Cameron might do with this long-in-development sequel, and instead, full of questions like “who even wants these sequels anymore?” or “has Avatar even had a lasting legacy? or “can The Way of Water even make a profit?”

Yet the argument countering these questions has often been “never bet against James Cameron,” a director that has proven time and time again that he will defy expectations, surprise audiences, and end up, for lack of a better phrase, king of the world. I personally have leaned towards the more cynical side of the Avatar arguments in the last thirteen years. Avatar was beautiful to look at, yet vapid and obvious in its storytelling—a combination that didn’t necessarily boost interest in four sequels. And yet, The Way of Water is one of the most breathtaking moviegoing experiences of 2022, a master learning from the mistakes of the previous film, and making a spectacle unlike we ever see at the movies anymore. Simply put, we should’ve never bet against Cameron.

Since we last visited the planet of Pandora, Jake Sully ( Sam Worthington ) has grown more accustomed to the ways of the Na’vi, now that he’s become one of them. Jake and Neytiri ( Zoe Saldaña ) have had two sons, Neteyam ( Jamie Flatters ), Lo’ak ( Britain Dalton ), a daughter Tuk ( Trinity Jo-Li ), and have adopted Kiri ( Sigourney Weaver ), who was born under unusual circumstances. The Na’vi have lived in peace since the majority of humans left Pandora, leaving a few people behind at their base, including Spider ( Jake Champion ), a kid born at the base who prefers the land of the Na’vi.

RELATED: 'Avatar: The Way of Water': Zoe Saldaña & Sam Worthington Explain Why James Cameron Is "Like a Fine Wine"

But when the humans return to Pandora, they come back ready to colonize and once again threaten the lives of the Na’vi. Even worse for Jake Sully and his family is the return of Colonel Miles Quaritch ( Stephen Lang ), who has had his memories implanted in a Na’vi avatar and is ready to hunt down the Sully family. Jake leads his family away from their people and to a new land as they try to escape the wrath of Quaritch and the constant threats of the “sky people.”

As with the first Avatar , the look of The Way of Water is immediately stunning. The higher frame rate and the 3D technology make this a film unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Considering how frequently Cameron has pushed the limits of these technological advancements in the past, it’s no surprise how remarkable The Way of Water looks, and over the course of its three-hour runtime, the wonder of the visuals never ceases to amaze. Much of The Way of Water , naturally, takes place in the waters of Pandora, and it's unbelievably gorgeous, teeming with aquatic life and creatures, and it's almost hard to believe that this isn't some real world that Cameron has found and is presenting to the world.

But this is a Cameron film, and we know no matter what, his films are going to be visually impressive. The first Avatar also looked magnificent, yet faltered with a clumsy story with stiff dialogue and hackneyed story beats. Yet in the thirteen years since Avatar , Cameron—who also co-wrote the screenplay with the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy’s writers, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver —has learned from the mistakes of the past, altering elements in the past that didn’t work, and reconfigured other questionable choices into something that really works.

For example, the first Avatar had a lack of emotional stakes, often content to just skate by on its gorgeous visuals. This was also partially due to awkward, one-note performances that made it easy for characters to take a backseat in lieu of the wonder of the world around them. But Cameron almost presents The Way of Water as a redo, a reintroduction of these characters that does its damnedest to make its audience invested in this family. From the very beginning, it’s clear that The Way of Water ’s primary focus is on family and character dynamics, with an introduction that beautifully sets up what has happened on this planet since the last film, and the individual members of this family who have their own stories to tell. By the time Cameron gets to his incredible third act, it's hard not to care about the journey of this family.

Also aiding in this character development are some incredible motion-capture performances—particularly Saldaña, who isn’t given as much screen time as in the first film, yet is an absolute force when the spotlight is put on her. Again, in the outstanding third act, Saldaña’s performance easily joins the ranks of the best mo-cap performances ever committed to screen, as every emotion this mother is feeling can be felt, despite the computer that is between performer and audience. Worthington has also grown more comfortable in this role, and he takes on the part of both action star and dedicated father with equal importance, and as a leader who has to reckon with how his past is altering this world he fell in love with.

The Sully family is a strong addition to this sequel, not only building these relationships and our empathy for this story, but also setting up the future of where this universe can go. Weaver is particularly excellent, playing a much younger character this time, but with a spirit that is reminiscent of her work in the first film. Yet this performance never manages to feel like an adult playing a teenager, and that’s a testament to Weaver’s work here. Also a standout is Dalton’s Lo’ak, who as the second son doesn’t quite know how to fit in with the expectations that his family has of him. Dalton has previously worked in mo-cap for Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End , and there’s a naturalistic quality to his performance that comes from an actor who knows the limitations and benefits of this type of filming. Unfortunately, one of the weaknesses of The Way of Water is that the two other kids in the family don’t get quite as much attention as these two, but of course, there’s plenty of time to tell their stories over the next few sequels.

But there are also just more layers and depth to these characters, especially in comparison to the relatively thin characters of the first film. This is no longer a story of just good vs. evil, there is nuance and more than what we see on the surface. This is maybe best exemplified by Colonel Quaritch, who is still the same gung-ho marine out for blood that we knew in the first film, yet by taking on the appearance of a Na’vi, he now lives within this world and starts to see the beauty of it all—even if he uses it for his own gain and power. The Way of Water at least gives him some humanity, especially when paired with Spider, who the captain has kidnapped to help find the Sully family. Before, he was simply a monolith of evil, but now, we start to see that there’s more beneath that harsh surface.

This dedication to fixing what didn’t work the first time goes even further than just character. Considering how flat the human characters were in the first film, The Way of Water almost completely does away with them, rightfully focusing on the inhabitants of Pandora and their way of life. The Way of Water might even be better altogether if it avoided humans and villains and just allowed us to live in this world and explore the beauty inherent in its many lands. But anything that seemed silly in the first film has been removed or altered to improve this story going forward. For example, the desire for unobtanium has been replaced with a new mystery substance that, thankfully, avoids having a ridiculous name. And while the “I see you” moments of the first film were often laughable, here, they provide some of the most emotionally powerful scenes in the film. It really feels like Cameron and his writers took to heart the parts of the first film that people had an issue with and attempted to right the things that were holding people back.

Yet The Way of Water also reminds us throughout that no director is quite like James Cameron, and that when he’s at his best, his films are tremendous experiences unlike any other. At times, this almost feels like Cameron giving the audience his greatest hits, with scenes of destruction that look like Terminator 2: Judgment Day , human machinery that is reminiscent of Aliens , and a climactic scene that probably wouldn’t be possible without Cameron’s work in Titanic. But speaking to this climax of The Way of Water , Cameron knows exactly how to structure a great action scene, not only in making the sequence exciting, emotionally powerful, and engrossing, but in just the basic mechanics of how the scene functions. Even though this part of the film features one massive action set piece with multiple characters, Cameron makes us aware of not only where each character is in relation to this scene and the stakes for all, but also how the shifting details of said scene will alter the situation for all characters involved. It’s an astounding accomplishment of structuring and planning that Cameron makes look effortless. It’s in moments like this where you realize that Cameron truly is one of the best action directors ever, and how frequently other action films falter in keeping these details in mind.

In three hours, Cameron turned this Avatar nonbeliever into a viewer who can’t wait for a new sequel every two years. Avatar: The Way of Water truly feels like a fresh start for this series, as Cameron and his team address the weaknesses of the first film, improving the script and characters, while also creating one of the most extraordinary experiences one can have at the theaters.

Avatar: The Way of Water comes to theaters on December 16.

Where to Watch Avatar: The Way of Water — Showtimes

To find when and where you can watch Avatar: The War of Water near you, check the local showtime listing at the links below:

• AMC Theaters
• Cinemark Theaters
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• Movie Reviews

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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