Avatar: The Way of Water review – You probably still won’t care, but at least it’s very pretty

Thirteen years after its predecessor became (for a time) the highest-grossing movie ever, this sequel feels less like an act of love than an act of material achievement

Who cares about Avatar? No one quite seems to know. James Cameron’s 2009 behemoth, the highest-grossing film in the world until Avengers: Endgame a decade later, has been at the centre of a small cultural fracas in the lead-up to its Covid-delayed sequel. One half of the internet has fervently defended the film against claims by the other that it’s, as actor and podcast host Griffin Newman once coined, only “memorable for being unmemorable”. Where is its mark on the world? Where are the legions of fans strutting around in blue body paint and wiggly cat ears? Where are the imitators? Shouldn’t there have been a million more derivative films about aliens defending themselves from colonisation?

I can answer these questions no better than anyone else. But, sitting down 13 years later to watch Avatar: The Way of Water, after years of Cameron promising his follow-up would make us “s*** [ourselves] with [our] mouth wide open”, I did start to wonder whether we’ve been looking at things from entirely the wrong angle. These films, which are largely identical in tone, don’t feel like acts of love, but of material achievement. They exist more to be respected than to be adored – signposts on the road of cinema history, marking the end of one era and the beginning of another. Avatar redefined the notion of CGI spectacle. Hollywood has spent the years since pumping out extended cinematic universes just to try and match its sense of grandiose importance.

Avatar: The Way of Water is, once again, a gauntlet thrown down at the feet of the industry. I can’t say that I cared all that much about its story, its themes, or its characters, but its unimpeachable effects work made it feel like I’d locked eyes with the future. It’s an achievement of such technological clarity that I’d instantly buy any flatscreen TV that was showing it in Currys. The plot, if anything, is an inconvenient distraction from the real pleasure of looking and guffawing. The first film saw human marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) switch sides, betraying his fellow colonisers on the moon of Pandora in order to join up with the alien Na’vi. In Avatar’s final scene, he transferred his consciousness into a Na’vi body for good. A decade later, we’re reunited with him and his mate-for-life Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), now with their own family unit in tow. They have three children and have adopted the teenage Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), who was born, Jesus-like, from the “avatar” of Dr Grace Augustine (also Weaver) from the first film. Then there’s “Spider” (Jack Champion), a white human boy in dreadlocks who hangs around like a stray and offers us a solid preview of what Disney’s inevitable live-action Tarzan will look like.

Their paradisal bliss is short-lived as – mamma mia, here we go again – the very bad humans return in order to colonise Pandora once more. And they do so for over three hours. The screenplay offers us three separate reasons for this: Earth is on its deathbed and humanity needs a new home; there’s a new, extremely rare and expensive substance on Pandora on top of the energy-conducting mineral “unobtanium”; and they’re somehow still mad at Jake for betraying them. This time, the formerly dead Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) has had his consciousness cloned into a Na’vi avatar. Jake and his family are forced to flee, seeking sanctuary among the water-dwelling Metkayina – Na’vi in a different shade of blue – and their leaders Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and Ronal (Kate Winslet).

Hence, “the way of water”, which is really Cameron’s excuse to boggle the audience’s minds with underwater sequences that are so indistinguishable from reality that the events of The Matrix seem all the more like a terrifying plausibility. If Avatar created the documented phenomenon of “Pandora Depression” – a moroseness stemming from the crushing realisation that Cameron’s world is but an illusion – who knows what The Way of Water could trigger in viewers. The film’s controversial use of a higher frame rate, speeding up the standard 24-frames-per-second to 48-frames-per-second, is certainly disconcerting in parts, but it also does away with the typically blurry sludginess of CGI-heavy blockbusters of late. There’s always been a barrier preventing total immersion into CGI worlds, but Pandora seems so tangible that it’s the humans here who look fake.

The beauty of The Way of Water, though, stops there. It’s hard to find much artfulness in its compositions, which seem mostly to borrow from the baseline language of video games, complete with excessive POV shots. And there’s little heart to its story, which compounds the narrative problems of the first film by once more laying the glory of anti-colonial resistance at the foot of a white man who’s “gone native”. The Na’vi are no more than a vague, exoticised blend of real indigenous cultures, with the Metkayina given a few, shallow nods towards Polynesian traditions. The latter is especially odd when handed to Kate Winslet.

Saldaña’s Neytiri, tellingly, is completely sidelined. She mostly cries, and then is told to stop crying and get it together by her stout, action-hero love. The dialogue is either filled with faux-spiritualism or Cameron-typical quips such as “it’s called a punch, bitch”. The two extremes never blend in a way that feels convincing. But these are exactly the same criticisms lobbed at the first Avatar and, often, the rest of the director’s filmography. Cameron, at this point, seems interested less in being an artist than a cinematic frontiersman. That’s the point of The Way of Water – it’s not about what the film has to offer us now, but what it tells us about the future.

Dir: James Cameron. Starring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Kate Winslet, Cliff Curtis, Giovanni Ribisi, Edie Falco. Cert 12A, 192 minutes

‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ is in cinemas from 16 December