Avatar: The Way of Water [dir. James Cameron]

This opinion of Avatar: The Way of Water, which shall for purposes of retaining sanity be henceforth referred to as Avatar 2, assumes that you saw the first film back in 2009 when it wowed audiences with its visual splendor and for a fair spell, brought back 3D as a gimmick for drawing people into movie halls.

So about the movie, Avatar 2 is pretty much what I expected it would be. Story-wise, it is stodgy and contrived. After the events of Avatar, human soldier turned Na'vi rebel  leader Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) stays back in Pandora. His love interest and warrior companion Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) is now wife and mother of his several all-blue children. There is also one adopted child from Sigourney Weaver's avatar (when did she get the time to make whoopie in Pandora?) and, get this, a son from the wicked Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang). The son is human, but brought up among the Na'vi.

Once again exploitative humankind launches an assault on Pandora. This time Quarritch, who was killed in the previous film's climax, and his goons have been resurrected as Na'vi avatars. So the majority of the cast in Avatar 2 consists of motion captured performances later rendered as computer generated imagery (CGI). Apart from Quaritch's human son and a few others, there are few actual actors on the screen. To Cameron's credit, the level of immersion is high enough that this is not a distraction.

While in Avatar, we only saw Pandora as a forest covered planet, the sequel explores another environment. To escape Earth's attack on his people, Sully and his family leave the forest region and go into hiding along the seashore. This region is home to an aquatic species of Na'vi led by Tonowari and Ronal (Cliff Curtis and Kate Winslet), distinguished by their aquamarine coloration and other anatomical differences.

While Jake's family adjusts to the new circumstances, giving the film opportunity to dole out lessons on racial tolerance and immigration, blue Quaritch and his squad are bent on hunting them down, even if it means casting their net of terror across the whole of Pandora, threatening the Na'vi and all other animal life upon the sentient planet.

So a fair deal of cliched sermons, and dialog choked with its own importance; Avatar 2 is not a film of subtleties. At upwards of 3 hours, it also cannot be described as brisk and breezy. But, you know what? It is such a seamless visual marvel I spent very little time hand-wringing over its cliches. Remember how we gasped at the beauty of the forests and cliffs in the first film? The submerged world in the sequel is equally amazing. Of course, it is derivative in the sense of being essentially an aquatic re-design of the fauna from Avatar. But even with the more than 10 years since the first film, Cameron once again shows why he is king of the large scale technological spectacle.

While staying true to the original design, the rendered visuals show impeccable fluidity and texture. Water is an infamously treacherous medium to convincingly render, and the process here required performance capture of the actors in submerged conditions. But the presentation betrays none of the edges or difficulties. Every object behaves as it should, with the appropriate weight and detail. Cameron's capture of the film's several action scenes is also masterful - there is total clarity in the action, no confused edits or shortcuts. In comparison the visuals from many of the Marvel superhero movies appear inconsequential. The visuals here ARE the story, and a gorgeous experience they make.

Others may have very different opinions, but I was engrossed enough in the world of Avatar 2 to not hugely mind its shortcomings in script and characters, and I wouldn't mind watching it again, this time on a bigger screen.