The Way of Water movie was released in theaters on December 16; it is the first of four Avatar sequels and the second film in the series. The first Avatar took a detailed approach to introduce the fictional planet and how nature interconnects with the Pandora people, the Na’vi. The second movie introduces a new biome in a different area of Pandora along with new people, wardrobes, and visuals that took five years to create.
This is the first film the director James Cameron has directed since the original came out. James Cameron is also the director of Titanic and The Abyss which are both known for being some of the best water movies ever made which is why it kind of made sense that the new avatar focused on an oceanic area home to the Metkayina people. They are a Na’vi tribe that lives close to the sea and have evolved to survive for long periods underwater. The Omaticaya forest tribe in the first movie is nothing like the Metkayina, the oceanic tribe. From the design of the characters to the animals and land there are a lot of differences and similarities between the two. It’s almost like re-watching Avatar one but instead, you are learning all about an entirely different biome.
There are a lot of scenes where the main characters, the sully family, are just exploring the different parts of marine life. Although I enjoyed learning about the different people and places of Pandora, the planet where Avatar takes place, it did take a long time to get around to the actual plot. The movie was more about the new area than it was about the actual problem going on in the movie, which wasn’t even a very strong problem. Pandora was once again invaded by the “Sky people” in order to extract a resource from Pandora’s ecosystem. The person leading them was once again Colonel Miles Quaritch, who was killed at the end of Avatar one, but he sneakily uploaded his consciousness to a futuristic hard drive and had it re-implanted in a genetically engineered Na’vi body. To me, this felt like a stretch, but I would still say the movie is worth watching because it did rekindle the feeling and message the first movie had.
The Avatar movies are simple storytelling with grand-scale event pictures and fantastic world-building. The beauty of the cinematography created is enough to make you forget about the three-hour length and plot of Avatar: The Way of the water.