Tripwire Reviews Avatar: The Way Of Water

Out Of His Depth

Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows takes a look at James Cameron’s Avatar sequel, The Way Of Water, fourteen years in the making and out from tomorrow in cinemas. Warning: a few spoilers ahead…

Avatar: The Way Of Water
Director: James Cameron
Stars: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Kate Winslet, Cliff Curtis, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder

Thirteen years is a hell of a long time to wait for a sequel to a record-breaking film but director James Cameron has insisted that the second Avatar film will be just as revolutionary as its progenitor. So it’s December 2022, Avatar: The Way Of Water is out for people to see at last and is he right?

So many years later, Avatar’s protagonist, monolithically dull US marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is still with hot-headed Na’avi bride Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) but now they have been joined by a whole brood of annoyingly one-dimensional children: sons Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) and daughters Tuk (Trinity Jo-Lo Bliss) and Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) plus adopted human brother Spider (Jack Champion). Neteyam is the older more sensible brother while Lo’ak is the reckless younger sibling.

Sully and family are threatened when Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who was dispatched in the first film, returns this time in a Na’avi body to seek revenge on him accompanied by a group of sadistic human marines, who are also now transferred to giant blue bodies. Meanwhile the evil sky people are wreaking havoc on Pandora again, hunting the planet’s whale-like creatures the tulkun for a substance that stops the ageing process in humans. So the marine is forced to leave the forest and heads to the islands to seek refuge for him and his family from the evil offworlders yet again. So queue the family having to adapt to a new life in the water, literally like fish out of water (or in it). Lo’ak also bonds with lone wolf (or should that be lone whale) Payakan when the animal rescues him from death from another more lethal marine monster.

When the first film was released, Cameron had produced something that we had’t really seen before and, despite its flaws, Avatar was a genuinely immersive and sometimes exciting sci-fi action adventure film. Avatar: The Way of Water is visually a very impressive film with Cameron and co doing something new with the water effects here but in terms of its plot and its script, it really is just a lazy retread of the first film. We are bashed constantly over the head with its clumsy eco-agenda, a theme that lacks any nuance or subtlety here at all, while Sully’s offspring are whiny and annoying. The island Metkayina people led by Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) are a different hue to the forest-dwelling Naavi and their bodies are adorned with Maori-style tattoos and they do look visually stunning. However their characterisation is pretty thin and flimsy too. The only potentially intriguing sub plots here are whether human child Spider is sadistic colonel Quaritch’s offspring and who the mother of Sully’s adopted daughter Kiri is.

Avatar: The Way Of Water feels like a three-hour theme park ride of a movie showing off Cameron’s technical developments over the past fourteen years but it has forgotten that a good genre film needs a clever and inventive script as well to lift it above just another exercise in logistics. Older films helmed by him like Terminator, Terminator 2 and Aliens were enhanced by the director trying something new and a little subversive with the material. WOW, as I shall now call it, is overlong, predictable and extremely dull in places, like we are watching a three-hour lecture on the perils of man’s interference with nature. It also sometimes feels like a travelogue, wowing us with their technical expertise but offering us scenes that don’t really propel the story forward. Also, the audience understands the spiritual connection between the people and the planet from a significant amount of screen time devoted to that in the first film and there are better, less cack-handed ways of reminding us about this fact. Visually it is very immersive on the big screen but that really isn’t enough. Several sequels are on the cards but from the evidence here, they will be beautiful but incredibly shallow affairs.

It is likely that the film will still clean up at the box office mainly because there is no competition for people’s hard-earned cash this Christmas but apart from that, I really can’t see any creative reason as to why this film exists.

Avatar: The Way Of Water is out in cinemas from this Friday 16 December. Here’s the film’s trailer