Avatar: The Way of Water is an impressively large and extraordinarily long film. Set many years after the original, the film follows the continuing lives of Jake Sully and Neytiri - now with a family consisting of several teenage Na'vi children (with the film focusing on the children for much of its runtime). When marines return to Pandora seeking revenge, the couple must flee from their jungle home to the shores of a coastal tribe. There, they must learn to adapt to their new home, overcoming conflicts within their new tribe, as well as Colonel Miles Quaritch (now cloned and in an Avatar body) who is hunting for them in a relentless quest for revenge.

Avatar 2's effects are excellent, most of the CGI is beautifully rendered and necessary for the film's sweeping camerawork and scope. It's so good, in fact, that it's easy to forget almost nothing you're seeing on screen at any given moment is real. Unfortunately, many of the underlying failures of this sort of CGI remain: the characters and objects often appear weightless, leading to moments where the physics of what's happening lands firmly in the uncanny valley - even if the aesthetics are often breathtaking.

In 2009, the ambition of rendering the majority of a live action film in a computer (one which looked magnitudes more convincing than even the most impressive CGI of the time) was daring enough to justify a tradeoff in verisimilitude. The first film became the highest grossing film of all time because audiences had never seen such expansive use of CGI. Now, though? It's all they know. While they might be cheaper, and not as gorgeously rendered or intricately detailed, Marvel movies - just as colorful, creative, expansive, and busy - are so popular and ubiquitous that the novelty of these massive CGI spectacles is long dead.

Given how the industry has changed over the past dozen+ years, and the massive gap between the two films, one might assume Cameron would dedicate considerable time, energy, and attention to his script - he has not. Motivations, character development, and structure are all laughably thin. Despite it's 195-minute runtime, the film is largely uneventful - the main characters haven't grown or changed in any meaningful way by the end of the story, and the motivations of the antagonists are entirely contrived, making precisely zero sense.

Filling the void between action spectacles is what some might try to call "character work" mostly centering around the children of protagonists, Jake and Neytiri. The children are viewed as outsiders to the new tribe and are challenged to fit in, a plotline which derivatively borrows from the first film, itself an already-tired Dances with Wolves retread.

The dialogue is a significant issue here - it's laughably blunt, a cringe-worthy mix of direct verbalizations of feelings, and irrelevant, throwaway banter, all obviously written by a 68 year old with a distant, bland memory of what being a child is like. Cameron seems to think all it takes to depict a teenager is to have them say "bro" and "cuz" in every sentence, while getting into lots of absolutely senseless fights with some of the most cliche bullies ever put to film and always, *ALWAYS* doing the opposite of whatever they're told.

The performances are... fine, I guess. There are very few scenes featuring real humans in the entire film, so the CGI and motion capture is forced to do all the heavy lifting. Actors become voice actors, and only Zoe Saldana musters any genuine emotion - though she is sadly in very few scenes, serving as little more than a background character for the majority of the film (as are almost all of the women, to be honest, appearing to exist on the world of Pandora only to bare children - sometimes even after death).

The plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense... Quaritch is cloned into an Avatar body (in the first of *many* absurd contrivances in this movie) and embarks on a mission of revenge against Jake Sully. This could be ok as a simple way to kick off the plot - but it never develops beyond this and it doesn't even make any sense because this isn't a *personal* mission of revenge - he's literally given orders to go after Jake, as if the entire Earth military presence is there on Pandora *ONLY* to go after Jake. Quaritch seemingly has no other purpose for being there.

This also introduces problems for the plot when viewed in the context of the first film. The entire reason Jake Sully was recruited by the military in the first place is because they made an Avatar body for his twin brother and when his twin brother was killed the Avatar would have been useless had it not been for Jake. But now we're told they have the capability to not only clone people and Avatar bodies, but also download and save those people's memories to be uploaded into the cloned bodies. Why they didn't just do this with Jake's brother is a question left unanswered.

Speaking of plot problems introduced by this movie... the goal of the humans in the first movie was to acquire "unobtainium" which goes entirely unmentioned in the sequel. This is yet another absurd contrivance because it means we can conveniently forget all about the jungle Na'vi and what they must be going through trying to defend themselves from the humans who would no doubt be resuming attacks on their home in order to obtain more "unobtainium." But because Cameron wants to show his cool new water special effects, he doesn't want us thinking about the tired old jungle he's leaving behind and he knows he can't do that if we're reminded of the giant "unobtainium" repository underneath the burnt remains of the Na'vi home tree.

About halfway into the film, we're introduced to another, similar MacGuffin, when the whalers (who don't even appear to be a part of the military at all) extract some kind of glowing golden goo out of one of the whale-like Tulkun. We're told this goo is capable of completely halting aging in humans. One might immediately wonder why this is so valuable though, given humans can apparently have all their memories downloaded into a clone - effectively making them immortal - but Cameron doesn't linger long enough for the audience to ask tough questions because this is never mentioned again and has no real bearing on the plot at all. It's *probably* setup for one of the sequels, but nobody has any reason to care at this point. The only reason this appears to be included in the movie at all is to give the humans an excuse to be at sea, attacking the water Na'vi tribes.

This is already getting ridiculously long so I'll just rapid-fire a few thoughts here...

The children are captured *THREE TIMES* in this movie. So much so that one of them even comments about it, exasperatedly saying she can't believe she's been captured again.

The final battle is ridiculously absurd on multiple levels but the most significant issue with it is that the water Na'vi just *disappear* halfway through the battle so it's just Jake and his family (along with the daughter of the leader of the water Na'vi - which was his entire reason for getting involved in the first place) left to fend for themselves.

The outcast Tulkun was a really interesting idea that suffers from terrible execution. The water Na'vi treat him like a murderer because he fought back against humans who murdered his family. It felt like very cult-like rigid adherence to dogma and didn't sit right with me.

There are also seemingly only three types of human in this movie: The Evil Military Grunt, The Evil Apathetic Capitalist Profiteer, and the Sympathetic Scientist who gives lip to their peers and maybe defects (but we won't know until we see them in a background shot of Avatar 3). No one resembling a real person. Only one-dimensional Saturday-morning cartoon characters. Oh, and Spider, I guess.

Suffice to say, outside of the spectacle of the admittedly very impressive CGI, this movie is absolutely terrible.

4/10.