"Avatar: The Way of Water" is produced by Disney Pictures, co-produced by 20th Century Pictures and Lightstorm Entertainment, directed by James Cameron, Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, West Gurney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Cliff Curtis, Joe David Moore, Cie Pond, Eddie Falco, Jaime Clement, Giovanni Ribbie A sci-fi movie starring West and Kate Winslet.
The film tells the story of Jack and Neytiri starting a family, and their children have gradually grown up, bringing a lot of joy to the family. However, the crisis never dissipated, and the Sally family tried their best to protect each other and survive, and finally came to the island and reef people near the sea on the planet Pandora to seek asylum.
Who cares about Avatar? No one seems to know. James Cameron's 2009 blockbuster, which was the world's top-grossing film until "Avengers: Endgame" a decade later, was stymied by the coronavirus pandemic. The delayed sequel has been at the center of a minor cultural dispute ahead of it. One half of the internet fervently defended the film against the other half's claim that it was, as actor and podcast host Griffin Newman once coined, simply "unforgettable." Where is its imprint on the world? Where are the legions of fans in blue body paint and dangling cat ears? Where are the copycats? Shouldn't there be a million more spin-off movies about aliens protecting themselves from colonization?
I can answer these questions better than anyone. But, sitting down to Avatar: Way of Water 13 years later, and after years of Cameron promising his follow-up would make us "open [our] mouths*** [ourselves]", I do start to doubt us Whether looking at things from a completely wrong angle. The films have largely the same tone, feeling less like an act of love and more of a material achievement. They exist more to be respected than to be admired—signposts along the path of film history, marking the end of one era and the beginning of another. Avatar redefined the notion of a CGI spectacle. Since pumping out the Expanded Cinematic Universe, Hollywood has struggled for years trying to match its sense of grandiose importance.
Avatar: The Way of Water has once again become a challenge for the industry. I can't say I cared deeply about its story, its themes, or its characters, but its flawless effect made me feel like I had locked into the future. It's such a clear achievement of technology that I'd immediately buy any flat-screen TV that plays it at Currys. The plot, if anything, is an inconvenient distraction from the real pleasure of watching and laughing wildly. In the first film, human marine Jack Sully (Sam Worthington) switched sides and betrayed his fellow colonists on the Pandora moon in order to join the alien Na'vi. In Avatar, he transfers his consciousness forever into the body of the Na'vi in the final scene. Ten years later, we reunite with him and his lifelong partner, Neytiri (Zoe Saldanha), who now have their own family unit. They have three children and adopt teenage Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), who was born like Jesus in the "incarnation" of Dr. Grace Augustine (also Weaver) in the first film. Then there's "Spider" (Jack Champion), a white boy with dreadlocks who wanders around like a hobo, giving us a realistic preview of Disney's inevitable live-action Tarzan.
Their heavenly bliss is short-lived - Mamma Mia, here we go again - very bad humans are back to colonize Pandora again. They did this for over three hours. The script gives us three different reasons for this: Earth is dying and humanity needs a new home; an extremely rare and expensive new substance has appeared on Pandora on top of the energy-transmitting mineral "unobtanium"; They are still mad at Jack for betraying them. This time, the consciousness of the dead Colonel Miles Quarridge (Stephen Lang) was cloned into the Navi avatar. Jack and his family are forced to flee, in the water-dwelling Metkayina (Navi in different shades of blue) and their leaders Tonovari (Cliff Curtis) and Ronal (Kate Winslet) seek asylum.
So "Ways of Water" is actually Cameron's excuse to confuse viewers' minds with underwater sequences that are indistinguishable from reality, so that the events of The Matrix seem more like a terrifying plausibility. If Avatar creates the documented phenomenon of "Pandora's Depression" -- a melancholy born of the overwhelming realization that Cameron's world is nothing more than an illusion -- who knows what Way of the Water might trigger for audiences. 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 disturbing in some ways, but it also removes the heavy blur typical of CGI of late. Blockbuster. There are always barriers that prevent full immersion in a CGI world, but Pandora seems so tangible that the humans here look fake.
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