‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ Review: James Cameron Crafts a Stunning Sequel for His Epic Franchise

Avatar has always had an uphill battle in trying to prove itself. Coming twelve years after James Cameron’s Titanic, which became the highest-grossing film of all time, won 11 Oscars, and became a cultural milestone, Avatar had absurd expectations to meet right out the gate. Despite overtaking Titanic’s box office total (Avatar currently has made $721 million more than Titanic, or to put it another way, a difference that equals the entire domestic box office for Top Gun: Maverick), the conversation around its sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, has been one of uncertainty. The last thirteen years have been less focused on what Cameron might do with this long-in-development sequel, and instead, full of questions like “who even wants these sequels anymore?” or “has Avatar even had a lasting legacy? or “can The Way of Water even make a profit?”

Yet the argument countering these questions has often been “never bet against James Cameron,” a director that has proven time and time again that he will defy expectations, surprise audiences, and end up, for lack of a better phrase, king of the world. I personally have leaned towards the more cynical side of the Avatar arguments in the last thirteen years. Avatar was beautiful to look at, yet vapid and obvious in its storytelling—a combination that didn’t necessarily boost interest in four sequels. And yet, The Way of Water is one of the most breathtaking moviegoing experiences of 2022, a master learning from the mistakes of the previous film, and making a spectacle unlike we ever see at the movies anymore.

The first Avatar was a pioneering 3D sci-fi spectacular which Cameron delivered in 2009. Now, after 13 years of unimaginably expensive pixel-crunching, the aquatic followup has arrived, with a third and a fourth on the way. This one is available in 3D and 2D, and so at any rate keeping loyal to that three-dimensional vision that Cameron almost single-handedly revived but which the rest of the industry has quietly forgotten about. Yet the whole idea of the “avatar” from the first movie – the artificially created body that can be remotely piloted into an unknown world and which crucially formed a dramatic part of the audience’s 3D experience – has been left behind.

The submarine world of this film is, in its way, its chief character and its whole point. The move from land- to sea-based existence is the way a new film was created. But the sea world is imagined with a lot of cliche. Frankly, there isn’t a single interesting visual image and the whole thing has the non-briny smell of a MacBook Pro. Finding Nemo was more vivid.

It’s nice and scenic, of course, and all of Cameron’s technological obsessions are on show. There is cutting-edge CGI and performance capture, digital 3D, hyper-real clarity and so on, but these gimmicks tend to take you out of the film rather than drawing you in: as impressive as the visuals are, the action never feels real because it’s always halfway between a cartoon and a live-action film. Nor does The Way of Water look significantly better than Avatar, which was genuinely startling back in 2009. And in terms of the design, it’s nowhere near as magical as those Roger Dean-inspired landscapes were when we first landed on Pandora. One issue is the shift from the rainforest to the sea. In reality, the Earth’s oceans are already so full of such jaw-droppingly weird creatures that the ones dreamt up by Cameron and his team aren’t much weirder. It’s fun, in a Little Mermaid sort of way, to see a school of tattooed, four-eyed whales stage an underwater ballet; but it’s not as awesome as actual footage of an actual whale.

The Way of Water also reminds us throughout that no director is quite like James Cameron, and that when he’s at his best, his films are tremendous experiences unlike any other. At times, this almost feels like Cameron giving the audience his greatest hits, with scenes of destruction that look like Terminator 2: Judgment Day, human machinery that is reminiscent of Aliens, and a climactic scene that probably wouldn’t be possible without Cameron’s work in Titanic. But speaking to this climax of The Way of Water, Cameron knows exactly how to structure a great action scene, not only in making the sequence exciting, emotionally powerful, and engrossing, but in just the basic mechanics of how the scene functions. Even though this part of the film features one massive action set piece with multiple characters, Cameron makes us aware of not only where each character is in relation to this scene and the stakes for all, but also how the shifting details of said scene will alter the situation for all characters involved. It’s an astounding accomplishment of structuring and planning that Cameron makes look effortless. It’s in moments like this where you realize that Cameron truly is one of the best action directors ever, and how frequently other action films falter in keeping these details in mind.