Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)
You can pile all the shiny, high-budget sprinkles you want on top of a scoop of vanilla ice cream, but at the end of the day it's still just prettier vanilla ice cream. That's essentially where I land on Avatar: The Way of Water, James Cameron's long-gestating, enormously expensive sequel to his 2009 blockbuster. Visually, there are moments here that are genuinely, breathtakingly spectacular. As a piece of storytelling, it's a frustrating, bloated slog that tests your patience in ways no film pushing three and a half hours ever should.
Let me be fair first. The depiction of Pandora's oceans is, at times, extraordinary. There are sequences where the sheer beauty of what's on screen stops you cold, where you feel the craft and ambition behind every frame. Cameron has always been a director who pushes the technology of filmmaking forward, and I mean it sincerely when I say some of this looks unlike anything you've ever seen. When it's working, it really is working. I've loved Cameron's technical ambition across his career, from Titanic (1997) to Aliens (1986), and that same restless drive to do something visually new is absolutely present here.
But then the action kicks in, and something deeply strange happens. The high frame rate, which is presumably meant to make everything feel more vivid and immediate, completely fails to cope with the chaos on screen. Rather than immersing you in the spectacle, it makes everything look weirdly flat and cheap, like you're watching a particularly expensive BBC drama rather than a blockbuster. It's a jarring, baffling technological stumble, and it happens precisely when you most need the film to grab you by the collar.
And then there's the runtime. We were two hours in and I suddenly clocked that we still had a full, standard ninety-minute film left to sit through. Now, I'm not someone who automatically objects to long films. The length of something like The Lord of the Rings or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly feels earned because the story keeps moving and expanding. Here, it just drags. The narrative structure has at least three false starts: we open with the young Na'vi kids, then awkwardly pivot to the human antagonists, then finally haul ourselves to the water setting the whole film has been promising. The middle act is a mercilessly drawn-out stretch of swimming around with whale-like creatures that goes on for the best part of an hour. By the time the final act wakes up and remembers it's supposed to be an action movie, you've been sat there so long you've practically forgotten why you cared.
Beneath all those gorgeous blues and greens, the story is essentially a retread of the same beats from Avatar (2009). Outsiders arrive, conflict erupts, family bonds are tested, nature fights back. There isn't a narrative surprise in sight. And the voice performances are all over the place. At times the cast is genuinely emotive, and then suddenly someone gives up on their accent entirely and delivers something so wooden it pulls you completely out of the scene. Jemaine Clement attempting an American accent is so wildly unconvincing it had me doing a double take. For a director with Cameron's reputation for getting the best from his ensemble, it's a baffling lapse.
Huge box office returns don't automatically make a good film, and The Way of Water is proof of that. This is a picture that sits squarely in the middle for me, a genuine tug-of-war between moments of awe and stretches of deeply tedious execution. Cameron has made something technically ambitious and visually spectacular in places, and I won't pretend otherwise. But the bloated runtime, the recycled plot, and those jarring technical hiccups stop it well short of greatness.
Bang average blockbuster. Two and a half stars.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2022 | Watched: 2026-07-31
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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