Avatar: The Most Flawed Movie I’ve Ever Loved

“Avatar: The Way of the Water” Review

Avatar: The Way of the Water is quickly making a name for itself as one of the top box office hits of the decade. Following the success of its predecessor though, we should hardly be surprised.

But is it a good movie?

Well, no. But is it worth the watch? Absolutely.

In fact, I can hardly think of a movie in the past five years more worth watching on the big screen. Claims that the movie is the visual spectacle of a generation hardly seem overstated. But for a movie that took so incredibly long to produce, the special effects were the very least we were expecting.

What I didn’t expect, however, was just how poor some of the writing would be. For a director who’s made his fair share of headlines for disparaging the Marvel Cinematic Universe, James Cameron’s latest film seems to share more in common with the superhero blockbusters than he may like to admit.

As the Marvel franchise has continued to evolve, the movies have often begun to feel like delivery mechanisms for action scenes rather than compelling plots. And they come out with so many new Marvel movies each year that they can hardly even be blamed for it. The plot is secondary and, for most viewers, that’s okay.

But if Thor: Love and Thunder were Marvel’s only project and it took nearly fifteen years to produce, these shortcomings would be a lot harder to forgive. And that’s precisely the position the Avatar series has found itself in with the release of this new movie.

For a film to have so much time to devise a solid narrative and still deliver something so barebones was a little jarring. And for a film to have such a long run time and still leave so much improperly explained to the viewer was downright frustrating for many viewers. Even on a second viewing, I found myself struggling to follow.

Where the first Avatar film was tasked with a similarly ambitious challenge, it did a far better job than its successor at exploring and introducing the world that it had built. It had an entirely new world to expose the viewer to, but the exposure was so well-paced that it left little up in the air for viewers.

The original Avatar was a cinematic masterpiece of a film. But its visuals were never at the expense of the plot or the viewer’s understanding of it. In Avatar: The Way of the Water, the plot felt as though it went to painstaking lengths to justify any and every excuse for CGI. And the net result was a visually stunning extravaganza that often feels as though it would be more at home in a tech conference than alongside most of the great movies of the last decade.

When compared with the groundbreaking writing that went into movies like Inception, Inglorious Bastards and Everything Everywhere All at Once, Avatar: The Way of the Water hardly fairs better than the standard superhero or action blockbuster as far as writing is concerned.

Between the characters and the plot points, there’s hardly an instance of originality. The pacing leaves viewers disoriented and the lack of character development underscores the sense of stakes that they hope to convey in those final scenes.

Even the film’s soundtrack leaves something to be desired. For the stunning environments that the film explores, the score did a remarkably underwhelming job at imparting their grandeur. The environments created, both aquatic and terrestrial, are almost inarguably some of the greatest ever to be put on screen.

With the lengths that a soundtrack can go to heighten the impact of movies like “Interstellar” and “Star Wars,” though, it can’t help but leave even some of Avatar’s most spectacular scenes feeling as though they’d missed an opportunity. The score rides the movie’s narrative rather than heightening it.

But perhaps the most remarkable achievement of Avatar: The Way of the Water is its ability to captivate its audience so thoroughly that they’ve been largely willing to forgive just about any of the film’s deficits. To see the film in 3D was visually stunning, even if a little dull at the theater I ended up at. But to see it in 4DX IMAX was the most jaw-dropping, immersive cinematic experience that I’ve ever had.

The craftsmanship that went into creating each and every environment elevates the movie to a place where it’s best appreciated as artwork. The piecemeal plot all but assures that the narrative isn’t what people will be here to appreciate.

It’s in this way, that I think James Cameron’s efforts might be best placed elsewhere: like designing planetarium displays, or presentations for museums — or hyper-realistic ship sinking simulations. James Cameron loves his marine disasters.

But to pretend that this movie has the greatness of any of the storytelling, world-building super powers of the last few decades is overselling it. At its worst, Avatar: The Way of the Water is a circuitous, contrived and confusing tech demo of a movie that arrived a decade too late. At its best, it’s a wildly enthralling enough adventure to excuse all of that three times over.

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