Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) review

Big Jim is back! As a newfound Avatar appreciator, I was looking forward to whatever he had cooked up for us in the 13 years since Avatar was released, and….. I’m kinda disappointed? And kinda vindicated? What works about The Way of Water really works and what doesn’t reallyyyyy doesn’t work for me.

Let’s start with the vindicating; Cameron’s filmmaking is, as always, stunning. He’s one of those veteran directors that filmmaking comes to so naturally that he makes it look effortless. Unlike a director like Steven Spielberg who seems to just be coasting on easy-mode for the rest of his career, Cameron continues to push the boundaries of his craft with each film he makes, putting years and years of care and attention into each project, and it shows.

He’s always been great at directing the eye of the audience where it needs to be with each tiny camera movement and shot framing. In The Way of Water, he uses a combination of sweeping overhead shots and close, hand-held styles to create an immersive, adventurous experience. His level of directing prowess puts nearly every other CGI-heavy blockbuster since 2009 to shame. Where a lot of those blockbusters use CGI as a crutch in order to pump as many movies out as they can, the CGI in Avatar: The Way of Water is how CGI should be used. It's as purposeful as it is beautiful to look at. Cameron's use of digital effects never once feels like a crutch, but a tool that he carefully crafts his world in, unlike the plethora of Marvel and DC movies that just feels like a blur of ugly CGI.

Needless to say, the attention to detail in Pandora is incredible, from the Na'vi tribes, to the CGI environments, to the intricacies of the Na’vi language and even their own form of sign language. Since Cameron and his team developed an actual Na’vi language, each actor needed their own level of fluency in the language, giving an extra layer to the human and Na’vi performances. A detail I noticed and loved in The Way of Water, Avatar and even Cameron's True Lies with the subtitled “(perfect Arabic)” joke is James Cameron’s attention to detail in distinguishing levels of language fluency, just goes to show how every detail of this world has been thoroughly combed over and well thought-out.

While every filmmaking and technical achievement and world-building is flawless, the contents of the story are anything but. The plot of Avatar being thin was a blessing and a curse for that movie; it worked more as a framework to explore this new planet and the lore, which is perfectly fine for one movie, but it wasn’t unique enough to merit a giant franchise out of it. So with The Way of Water, I hoped it would go off in some big new direction, but it kind of just recycles the same conflict all over again.

The plot is just as thin as it was in the first movie, but the first movie was focused and structured well enough to make itself work on an emotional level despite being a story we’ve seen a dozen times before. The same cannot be said for The Way of Water, which is far more overstuffed and bloated than its predecessor. It's trying to do so much at once, and with an over 3 hour runtime, there is no excuse for every single one of those plot lines to be very thoroughly explored and developed.

There’s roughly a dozen plot threads going on at once, and they don’t get enough development to feel like they have a satisfying conclusion. The colonel from the last movie has been reanimated in an Avatar body and is forced to reckon with his lack of humanity when confronted with his human son left on Pandora? Not developed past the first act and then it gets tacked back on at the end. Sigourney Weaver’s daughter has some special connection with the planet and is maybe Na’vi Jesus? Brought up once or twice and then tacked on at the end. Conflict between the jungle tribe and the water tribe? Not explored past Jake's kids getting bullied by the water tribe kids. None of these are developed into anything satisfying, which is a shame because they all have potential to become something impactful. The only plot line that is developed properly and has a satisfying conclusion is the one about the outcast of the whale species, which makes me wish that sequence was the finale of the entire movie because it’s genuinely exciting and thrilling. While the ship sinking at the end was visually stunning, it just made me wish I was watching Titanic or The Abyss instead.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m terribly interested in seeing more Pandora if this is the angle the franchise is gonna have with every single entry. All of the new lore about the planet is great, specifically about the connection between the water tribe and the water creatures, but the plot that acts as a framework to get that lore across is often not as interesting as the lore itself. If this was a no-plot-just-vibes movie from the point of view of the water tribe, I’d probably be a lot more into this, because that was the stuff that was interesting to learn about. Jake Sully, Neytiri, their half dozen kids and Colonel Quaritch just aren’t interesting enough to be the eyes that we see this world from. I don’t need this to be Dune where it goes in weird fucking directions with each installment, but something it needs something different. Who knows, maybe I’ll rewatch this in 12 years when Avatar 3 comes out and have a better outlook on it.