I really tried to give this movie a fair shake. I did not really love or hate the first Avatar movie, but it did mean I went in to this one sort of cynically. The first movie was forgettable, expensive and bland, so why did it deserve a sequel?

And, well, nothing here convinced me it did. At several points all throughout this movie I found myself wondering why I should care about any of this. "The Way of Water" never had answers for me.

I have absolutely no connection to any member of Jake Sully's people and their incredibly boilerplate family dynamic feels made more for a Thursday Night Sitcom than a three-hour movie. You have the two head-strong boys trying to impress their military father, the shy quirky girl, and the baby. Everything we've already seen before.

Which I suppose is the heart of some of this problem: despite being "aliens," everything in Avatar always feels too human and too normal. They spent a quarter of a billion dollars on some (admittedly, very nice) CGI for concepts that aren't that far off from what we already have on earth. We have fish, we have whales, we have birds, we have jungles, and we have indigenous people.

So it all comes off as feeling very self-important and highlights the idea that the message conveyed in this movie is extremely manufactured. An excuse to spend a lot of money that didn't need to be spent.

It's $250 mil just to say "Humans are destructive and we should care more about our environment" as if that isn't obvious already. Or, in other words, the longest, most expensive "crying native american" PSA ever created.

Maybe there will be a day when the temperature around this message is different, but as of this writing, it feels like the last thing we need is all this money spent on "saying something" and not actually doing anything.