Welcome back into the media cycle, James Cameron. Sometimes divisive with critics but always pushing forward, Cameron has often dragged the cinema kicking and screaming into the age of digital wizardry. His contributions to the medium have been rewarded by audiences repeatedly, adored by a burgeoning demographic in the eighties and frequently breaking box office records since releasing Titanic in 1997. But lo! Avatar: The Way of Water may buck the trend - rather than gross the GDP of Suriname, the film may only gross the GDP of Belize - a pittance.

The film follows the continuing lives of Jake Sully and Neytiri. When marines return to seek revenge and use Pandora as a second Earth, the couple must flee from their forest home and into the water of a coastal tribe. There, they must learn to adapt to their new home as Colonel Miles Quaritch, cloned and in an avatar body, searches for their whereabouts.

Avatar 2 is an impressively large and extraordinarily long film, but there is one constant which is unwaveringly distracting - the high frame rate. Talented filmmakers like Cameron, Ang Lee, and Peter Jackson, occasionally allow hubris to misguide them in their quest for innovation and cutting-edge superficialities.

To this end, all three are desperately trying to incorporate a higher frame rate into their films, which is said to make look film more "realistic," a supposition I've never understood. How does an artificially inflated frame rate, the most standardized metric in art, look more natural to viewers who are accustomed, throughout their entire lives, to the previous standard? I humbly speak for the film-going public when I answer, "it does not." Avatar 2 further innovates by switching between (perceived) twenty-four and forty-eight frames per second. Although audiences are gifted less high frame rate, the technique only further distracts, as the film schizophrenically cuts between expected motion and horribly smooth action. It's also bound to greatly confuse those who notice the difference but aren't in the loop as to why or how. If the practice, inconceivably, becomes the standard, I may never see another blockbuster. Death to high frame rates!

Any given viewer's reaction to Avatar 2 will largely depend on their opinion pertaining to the state of filmmaking currently, relating to its trajectory since the release of the previous installment. Those pining for the days of practical effects and tangible sets having nothing to look forward to, but those accustomed to CGI spectacles will be comfortably pleased.

Avatar 2's effects are not dated, bland, or indulgent; most of the CGI is beautifully textured and necessary for the film's sweeping camerawork and general scope. The problem is that the underlying failures of computer-generated imagery are stalwart: the characters and objects are weightless, and the physics remain uncanny, 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 (no, not adjusted for inflation) because general audiences had never seen such expansive use of CGI outside of a Star Wars prequel.

Now...it's all they know. Viewers will see CGI landscapes and effects in at least two trailers immediately preceding the film (Quantumania and Guardians of the Galaxy 3) which are just as colorful, creative, expansive, and busy. They might be cheaper, not as luxuriously rendered or detailed, but the novelty is long dead.

Pre-armed with knowledge of the industry over a decade, and the alarming gap between the two films, it's reasonable to assume Cameron would ration considerable time, energy, and attention to his script - he has not. Motivations, character development, and structure are still laughably childish and thin; despite the 195-minute runtime, the film is largely uneventful. Obviously, Cameron's M. O. this time around is showing off the technological progress and giving audiences a 2001-esque peak into his imagined world, but it's not creative or unique enough to warrant the length or simplicity.

Filling the void when spectacle fizzles is grating "character work" mostly centering around the offspring of our previous protagonists, Jake and Neytiri. The children are seen as outsiders to the new tribe and are challenged to fit in for the sake of peace and harmony, a plotline which derivatively borrows from the first film, itself an already-tired Dances with Wolves retread.

This desolate, barren story soil could be given fresh nutrients with intriguing characters or complex dynamics; instead, Cameron bashes his audiences over the head with one of the most well-trodden and insipid themes of the modern age. It's amusing: a character from a preceding Shazam trailer mockingly references the Fast and Furious films and their shallow fixation on "family," which is followed by Avatar 2's three-hour opus to the word. There's probably some dystopian subtext to the recent fetishization of familial love, but the surface-level triteness alone signals a need for a new dead horse to brutalize.

Additionally, the dialogue is laughably blunt, a painful mix of direct verbalizations of feelings and irrelevant, throwaway banter, all articulated by way of grade-school-curriculum diction. The first fifteen minutes are also dedicated to narrated exposition, so rushed and pandering that Rise of Skywalker is blushing in the corner. If, as some have said, the first Avatar gained no cultural traction because it simply lacked a story and characters worth remembering, Avatar 2 will suffer the same relative obscurity. I hope the international grosses are worth all the monosyllables.

The performances are dutiful but unremarkable. Unlike the original, there's seldom a scene with real humans in the film, so the motion capture is forced to do the heavy lifting. Actors become voice actors, and only Zoe Saldana musters genuine feeling without being seen.

To be fair to Sam Worthington, Stephen Lang, Kate Winslet, and Cliff Curtis, the characterizations are too stiff and flat for any detailed emotion. Similarly, Jamie Flatters, Britain Dalton, Trinity Jo-Li Bliss, Jack Champion, Bailey Bass, Filip Geljo, and Duane Evans Jr. Work admirably as the scuffling youngsters.

Avatar 2 is exactly what audiences hope it won't be: a retelling of the original film in a different location, excruciatingly predictable and free of any character, thematic, or intellectual intrigue. Every story element and conservational ideal has been done before, and better.

However, this was also true of the original; it will be interesting to see if the technological promise and spectacle of the sequel are enough to lure audiences into theaters like they were a decade and change ago. Personally, the film evoked no particular emotion, but it did put me in the mood for Planet Earth. At least David Attenborough provides narration for subjects who can't already talk.