Avatar: The Way of Water

James Cameron's sequel to his 2009 epic is proof that cinematic wonder still exists. By David Sims. Na'vi swimming. 20th Century ...

The final battles in The Way of Water are rousing, but they’re also feats of geography, astonishing in how they manage to keep the audience focused on a huge ensemble of characters who are jumping between various locations. But The Way of Water wouldn’t work if it didn’t nail the ending, and use that accumulated scale in service of something genuinely jaw-dropping. Cameron actually succeeds at replaying the hits without feeling repetitive, which is impressive given that The Way of Water has the same basic structure as its predecessor. And are there new delights to be discovered in the alien world of Pandora, all these years after the The Way of Water only enlarges Avatar’s refreshing skepticism about the human race; almost every character in the film is Na’vi now, and there’s no need for a Dances With Wolves–style story arc of our hero falling in love with a new culture. But after a slow start, The Way of Water manages to repeat that formula without being a tired retread.

Our long-awaited return to Pandora is big, sincere, and totally immersive, once the viewer buys in.

That non-ending stokes our appetite for more just enough to drown out the mild frustration of having watched something for so long only for the narrator—wild wizard Cameron, waving his baton in the heavens—to close the book and tell us that the rest of the story is for another evening. The film’s dreamy, eco-religious passages give way to bursts of action, all culminating in a lengthy, multifaceted, astounding set piece that is part Moby Dick, part Titanic, and part something altogether its own. As The Way of Water dives further and further into its mythology, it tries the generosity (and, maybe, patience) of even the most supportive viewer. And so, as hokey as it might occasionally be—like, say, watching the Na’vi have in-depth conversations with placid, moaning space whales—Way of Water maintains a giddy spirit of creative birth. The bad guys have, unfortunately, come back, and the Sully family, along with the rest of their FernGully cohort, spend much of their time staging raids to destabilize attempts to reestablish a militarized human colony. The Way of Water insists that times haven’t changed; it is heedless of contemporary industry undulations.