Avatar 2 is a film that really had no need to be made. The story of the first one was already cliche enough but had a reasonable endpoint. Here, A2 basically repeats the plot of the first one, and retcons some of the more important things of that film.

At some level, if this were the historiagraphy of a true series of events, I could see the plot here being a reasonable next step. However, from a creative perspective, it is sorely lacking. It feels as if certain actors were contracted for a trilogy, but then circumstances had to be cleverly written to keep including them despite critical endpoints. It feels a bit cheap. Likewise, since the story is itself a rehash of the first movie, it doesn't feel particularly thoughtful. The major action sequence focuses around a moralistic tale from our own history, but is mainly set to tug at your heartstrings in a variety of ways that never really succeed.

Probably the biggest misstep here is that the Reef People are not really explored from a cultural perspective. They are shown as having physical adaptations to undersea life, but at the same time speak the same language and have largely the same culture as the Forest People. This makes no sense, and also removes an obvious opportunity to explore inter-group relations among Indigenous peoples. There is never a suggestion that these peoples have any prior history up to this point, which is odd. It all fits into a 'Indigenous Good, Colonizer Bad' mentality- that isn't necessarily wrong, but it is patronizing at the same time.

I did enjoy watching the spectacle. The CGI here is miles better than most of its contemporaries, which feels strange to say when we are 30 years after Jurassic Park. The world and the animations here at least look real, which is more than I can say for many current films that over-rely on CGI.