REVIEW: ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’
It’s boring until it isn’t, and then, whoa, Katie bar the door!
John Podhoretz • December 16, 2022 1:00 pm
For much of its running time, Avatar: The Way of Water resembles nothing so much as one of those screensavers from the early 2000s that turned your computer monitor into a simulated aquarium. Remember? Fish floated by, there were some bubbles, it was very colorful and completely unrealistic. Soothing, though.
For a solid hour of The Way of Water—it’s the movie’s second in a complete running time of 3 hours and 10 minutes—we are treated to tall blue and green cartoon characters swimming and diving and riding on the backs of alien seahorses and having sign-language conversations with whale-like creatures. It’s like a nature documentary, only there’s no actual nature, just the world’s most unimaginably expensive computer-generated imagery blended with live-action performances the computer then draws over. (Kate Winslet is in this movie. You’d never know. It could have been me.)
I’m not sure I can convey to you how boring this all is except to say that it’s, you know, like staring at a fish tank on your computer monitor. “The way of water has no end and no beginning,” someone says—and writer-director James Cameron thinks the line is so important he has another character repeat it later in the film. The problem with dialogue like this is when you’re at minute 100 and you’re watching a CGI person smiling as she gazes at a coral reef for what feels like forever, you fear there really will be no end.
The first hour is better, but not much better. In this sequel to his mammoth box-office hit of 2009, the most financially successful movie ever made, Cameron proves uncharacteristically choppy and uninspired in his plotting as he brings us up to date on what’s been happening to his hero Jake Sully, the human turned alien.
I was not a fan of the first Avatar, but I recognized Cameron’s expository brilliance, which is a hallmark of his work. People these days tend to scoff at Titanic, but what Cameron does there is extraordinary: He begins the movie with a present-day sequence in which we are told how the ship went down in 1912. As a result, when we travel into the past and the Titanic hits the iceberg 90 minutes later, we know everything
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