Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)
Thirteen years is a long time to wait for a sequel. When Avatar (2009) landed, it rewrote the rulebook on blockbuster spectacle, becoming the highest-grossing film in cinema history and turning stereoscopic 3D into something audiences actually sought out rather than tolerated. James Cameron had always promised more stories set on Pandora, and a franchise blueprint was duly announced, but the years kept rolling by. By the time Avatar: The Way of Water finally arrived in December 2022, it had been so long that a reasonable portion of its audience had grown up, had children of their own, and needed reminding what the fuss had been about in the first place. That context matters, because Cameron was not simply making a sequel. He was attempting to relaunch an entire cinematic universe on the strength of goodwill alone, with no intervening instalments to keep the flame alive.
Cameron's career has always been defined by an almost pathological commitment to pushing production technology to its outer limits, a quality evident from The Terminator (1984) through to Titanic (1997) and beyond. The Way of Water is no different in that ambition. Shot partly at high frame rates (up to 48 frames per second in select sequences) and with extensive underwater performance capture, the production required Cameron and his team at Lightstorm Entertainment to essentially invent new techniques as they went. The budget, while never officially confirmed, is widely reported to sit somewhere in the region of 350 to 460 million US dollars, making it one of the most expensive films ever committed to production. 20th Century Studios, now operating under Disney ownership, carried the considerable financial risk. The source material is entirely original, as with its predecessor: Cameron wrote the story and screenplay himself, expanding the world of the Sully family as they are driven from their forest home and seek refuge with the Metkayina, a reef-dwelling Na'vi clan. The film runs to three hours and twelve minutes, a runtime that announces itself as a statement of intent before a single frame has played.
Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldaña return as Jake and Neytiri Sully, now parents to a brood of children, both biological and adopted, who carry much of the film's emotional weight. Saldaña, who has developed a comfortable fluency in large-scale science fiction (her work across multiple franchises speaks to a particular kind of physical and vocal discipline), brings warmth to a role that could easily have been sidelined by the scale of everything around her. Sigourney Weaver, a Cameron collaborator since Aliens (1986), returns in a rather different capacity, playing a teenage Na'vi despite being well into her seventies, a casting choice that raises questions the film does not entirely resolve. Stephen Lang is back as the antagonist Quaritch, reconstituted in Na'vi form, and Kate Winslet joins the cast as Ronal, a Metkayina leader. Winslet, reuniting with Cameron after Titanic, reportedly held her breath for over seven minutes during underwater filming, which is the sort of commitment that tends to generate more column inches than it does screen time.
James Cameron’s 2022 behemoth Avatar: The Way of Water is a visual marvel that frustrates equally as much as it impresses. You can add all the shiny, high-budget sprinkles you want to a scoop of vanilla ice cream, but it’s still just prettier vanilla ice cream.
The imagery is absolutely stunning, regularly breathtaking in its depiction of Pandora’s oceans. But the moment the action kicks into gear, the high frame rate completely fails to cope. It’s a bizarre, jarring technological stumble where the image simply cannot keep up with the chaos on screen, leaving you admiring the pretty pixels while the kinetic energy flatlines. It might be a massive box office juggernaut, but huge financial returns do not automatically equal a good movie.
Honestly, the runtime is where the whole enterprise starts to feel like a crazy slog. We were two hours in and I suddenly realised we still had a full, standard 90-minute movie left to sit through. Unlike epics like The Lord of the Rings or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, where the length feels earned and expansive, this picture drags its feet mercilessly. The narrative structure feels like it suffers from at least three false starts: we begin with the young Na'vi kids, pivot awkwardly to the human antagonists, and then finally drag ourselves to the water section. The middle act, in particular, is a mercilessly drawn-out hour of swimming around with whales that tests your patience to the absolute limit, long before the final act finally remembers it’s supposed to be an action movie.
Beneath the glossy, blue-skinned surface, the story is basically just a rehash of all the same beats from the 2009 original, offering zero narrative surprises.
Then there’s the voice acting, which suffers from the same quality control issues as the rest of the movie. At times it’s emotive and engaging, but far too often the cast seems to just give up on the accent entirely, delivering lines that feel very wooden. Jemaine Clement, in particular, attempting an American accent is so wildly jarring that it completely pulled me out of the scene. You expect a director of Cameron’s calibre to wring every ounce of authenticity from his ensemble, but here, the performances frequently feel like a disjointed afterthought.
This is a picture that sits squarely in the middle for me, a frustrating tug-of-war between moments of genuine cinematic awe and deeply tedious execution.
Cameron has crafted a technically ambitious, visually spectacular sequel, but its bloated runtime, repetitive plot, and jarring technical hiccups hold it back from true greatness. It’s a bang average blockbuster.
A film of this scale was always going to divide opinion, and the gap between what The Way of Water achieves technically and what it delivers as a piece of storytelling seems to be where most of that division lives. Cameron remains one of the few directors working in mainstream cinema with the clout, and the stubbornness, to spend a decade building something entirely on his own terms, and there is something worth acknowledging in that, even when the results are uneven. Whether the planned further sequels will tighten the narrative ambitions to match the visual ones remains to be seen. For now, this is a film that will leave you with vivid memories of its images and rather hazier ones of its plot. Sometimes a pretty picture is just a pretty picture.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2022 | Watched: 2026-07-31
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
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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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