Avatar: The Way of Water: Five things we learnt from the trailer

Long-awaited sequel to James Cameron’s eco-epic is released later this year

Avatar fans can finally get their eyes on footage from the sequel, 12 years after James Cameron’s fantasy epic was first released.

The first trailer for Avatar 2, officially titled Avatar: The Way of Water, has been released online days after debuting in cinemas before screenings of Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

While the trailer refuses to give away much in terms of plot or character, there are a handful of key details we can take from it.

See below for five things we learnt in the Avatar: The Way of Water trailer...

It’s gonna be a wet one

As you might have guessed from the film’s title – or the interviews castmembers have given about some of the filming conditions – there’s going to be a lot of water in this film.

Pandora’s aquatic regions feature prominently in the trailer, so it’s lucky the water looks as good as it does. Even when it’s clearly CGI, there’s a beautiful realism to the watery environments here.

Zoe Saldana and Sam Worthington in ‘Avatar' (Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox)

A change of scenery

But that said, it’s not going to just be an episode of Blue Planet. The trailer also provided a glimpse of a number of other enviroments, suggesting a greater variety of locations that the original Avatar offered.

There are the verdant jungles which made such an impact in Avatar, as well as industrialised areas, beaches, and more. A mech suit, somewhat similar to the kind worn by Stephen Lang in Avatar, also makes an appearance, amid some kind of high-tech construction site.

A Titanic undertaking

One of the shots shows two Na’vi protagonists trapped in a corridor-like container of some kind, while water violently sloshes around them.

The scene will look familiar to fans of Cameron’s previous work, most notably the 1997 box office smash Titanic, which featured a similar scene in which Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet traverse the lower decks of a ship while water rises around them.

Whether this is a deliberate callback or simply a coincidental echoing remains to be seen, but Cameron will certainly be hoping to recapture some of the magic that made Titanic such a hit.

DiCaprio and Winslet in ‘Titanic' (Fox/Paramount)

Better CGI

The original Avatar was vaunted for its CGI graphics. While the ravages of time are not kind to digital effects in general, it has, by and large, held up.

That said, The Way of Water looks to have taken huge strides forward, with the environments, lighting and detail on the characters all hugely impressive here.

The 3D Revolution might not be dead yet

The original Avatar was the pinnacle of 3D cinema fare, but other than the odd outlier (2013’s Gravity springs to mind), there’s never really been another film to make the format seem worthwhile.

This could all change with The Way of Water, however. The trailer, which debuted in 3D, makes smart use of the eye-popping visual possibilities. If anything is able to reignite cinema’s 3D revolution, it’s the immersive spectacle of Pandora.

Avatar: The Way of Water is out in cinemas on 16 December.