So, I finally got around to watching Avatar: The Way of Water. As expected, the film was visually stunning, but it did have a few issues.

The written review is below (originally posted on Medium), but if you prefer to watch, here’s my video review of Avatar: The Way of Water:

This movie is absolutely worth the price of admission and should be seen in a theater, but if you’re like me and waited too long to see it on the big screen, it also looks great on your smaller screens. I just think it likely loses some of the dazzle and pizazz that is clearly built into the imagery for theater projection.

The technology behind Avatar: The Way of Water is next level stuff. I can imagine that it could be fed into a system that does generative video AI and we will be able to put on a headset, allowing us to step into the film and look around us to see everything that is happening around us from the front, the back, to the sides, above… and even below. This film feels like one of the first steps down that future pathway.

There is something magical about the setting and the scenery. It is simply astonishing to look at from the lush vegetation to the creatures of the forest, the air, and the sea. It is breathtaking.

The characters are very well designed, but it’s their eyes that seal the deal. The eyes of the Na’vi and the creatures of Pandora are so lifelike and expressive. The tech that makes this work is a showstopper.

So, the CGI, the setting, the creatures, and the sound are all spectacular. That leaves us with the story, which is also pretty solid. The gist of it is that many years have passed, and Jake Sully and Neytiri now have a family. The Sky People (aka humans) have returned, and they have brought some Avatars with them. One is Sully’s old commander, whose consciousness was digitally captured and stored before his death and has been implanted into one of the new Avatar bodies. This sets up the “payback” conflict that drives a lot of the action as well as the Sky People’s need to clear the land of Na’vi so that they can begin building their new home there and … to do whatever needs doing for human survival.

Cue the fantastic battle scenes, the flight of the Sully family, and the new water Na’vi allies that they find.

There are some logic gaps here that if you look too hard, you can’t help but to think that wherever Sully goes, the Avatars are going to find him … and they’ll destroy everyone and everything in their wake. So, whether it’s the Forest People or the Water People, he’s pretty much putting everyone he knows and encounters at risk … even those he’s never met.

This leaves you thinking that he should have just gone to an abandoned place somewhere, but even that would leave angry Avatars burning and killing everything anyway.

And, even if they get Sully and killed him, the Sky People aren’t going anywhere. They’re making Pandora their new home. So, really, taking the battle to the humans at scale with all the people of Pandora is the only real option, and it’s the one that isn’t really explored in The Way of Water. I guess that’ll be in the next film.

So, onto the one thing that really bugged me about the film. Sully’s children picked up a lot of “bro” talk and soldier speak. About 15 years have passed between the two films. That’s a long time. The script has the boys talking to each other and other males as “bro.” That is definitely not a Na’vi term nor is it a term that a father or older adult humans (because some stayed behind) would use in a normal discussion with young children.

Plus, the Sully children spend most of their time with the Na’vi kids. So, the use of terms like bro just feels so jarring every time I heard it. It feels like a term they put into the script to give it a modern military feel for today’s audience. In other words, it doesn’t fit into the story world that James Cameron created for this film. They should have found a similar Na’vi term and normalized it’s use… even if we are hearing the “English” translation if the Na’vi language. The use of that term would have given the same effect without being so jarring.

So, that’s my big nitpick of the film, which is actually quite small in comparison to everything else. Even the length of the film, and it was too long, can be overlooked because it was so shiny and pretty to look at from top to tail. Still, you do get the impression that James Cameron was quite pleased with himself and was having fun making this film, and so his enjoyment lifts the film so that it doesn’t feel so long.

Overall, I think Avatar, The Way of Water is a great film. I wish I had seen it in the theater, but still, it was a good time, and I recommend it.

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