Avatar: The Way of Water: a technical landmark

Avatar: The Way of Water is a 2022 sequel that arrives thirteen years after the first film, runs three hours and twelve minutes, and cost more to make than almost any film in history. It is also, underneath all of that, a plain story about parents trying to keep their children alive. The whole character of the film comes from the gap between those two things.

The idea behind it

The first Avatar was a parable about a soldier who changes sides. The second one is about what happens after the revolution. Jake Sully is no longer the outsider who has to be convinced. He is a father, a clan chief and a wanted man, and the war he helped win has followed him home.

James Cameron has said the film is about the consequences of Jake and Neytiri becoming parents. That is the right frame for it. Jake can no longer act like a man with nothing to lose, and the film keeps testing that, measuring every decision he makes as a leader against what it costs his family. The villain is built for the same theme. Colonel Quaritch returns as a recombinant, an avatar body carrying the memories of a dead soldier, and he spends the film discovering that he has a son.

It is worth saying plainly what the film is not. It is not a plot machine. There is no puzzle to solve and no twist that rearranges the story. What it offers instead is a long, patient immersion in a place, and a family under pressure inside it. If that sounds like a thin offer for three hours, the film is betting that the place is worth it. For a great many people it will be.

The story, spoiler-light

Sixteen years after the Na’vi drove the RDA off Pandora, Jake and Neytiri have three children of their own, Neteyam, Lo’ak and Tuk, and an adopted daughter, Kiri, born in unexplained circumstances from the avatar body of Dr Grace Augustine. Spider, the human son of the dead Colonel Quaritch, has grown up alongside them.

The RDA comes back, this time to stay, and it brings recombinants: Na’vi bodies implanted with the memories of soldiers who died in the first war. One of them is Quaritch. When he starts hunting Jake’s family directly, Jake does the one thing a chief is not supposed to do. He takes his family and leaves. They travel to the eastern sea and ask for shelter from the Metkayina, a reef clan led by Tonowari and Ronal, and the middle of the film becomes a story about arriving somewhere you are not wanted and learning to belong.

The sea is where the film’s best ideas live. Lo’ak, the second son, befriends a Tulkun, one of the giant intelligent creatures the reef people treat as kin. The Tulkun are hunted by the RDA for a fluid in their brains, and that hunt, more than any battle, is what the second half is really about. I will leave the last hour there. There is a loss in it that the film earns honestly, and it changes what the ending means.

What makes it science fiction

Pandora itself is the science fiction here, more than any single technology. The moon is one connected biosphere, and the film treats the Na’vi bond with it as a fact of biology rather than a metaphor. The idea that a whole world can hold memory and be consulted is one of the oldest dreams in the genre, and Cameron stages it with total seriousness.

The recombinant soldiers are the other real idea. Quaritch is not a clone and not a ghost. He is a copy of a man, given a new body and the old man’s memories. The film is interested in what survives that process and what does not, and it uses the answer to complicate him rather than to excuse him. That is more than most blockbusters attempt.

Where it sits in the genre is somewhere between planetary romance and the environmental science fiction of the 1970s. It has more in common with Frank Herbert’s Dune than with the space operas it is often grouped with. Both are stories about a world that people keep trying to extract from, and both are more interested in the ecology than the hardware.

Who should watch it, and who should skip it

• Watch it if you want to see the current ceiling of visual effects work, at the scale it was built for.
• Watch it if you liked the first film’s world and wanted more of it, especially the water.
• Watch it if a slow, sincere family story appeals. That is most of what the film is.
• Watch it on the biggest screen you can find. The film was made for one.
• Skip it if three hours and twelve minutes is a hard no. Nothing about the film rewards impatience.
• Skip it if you want a plot with momentum. The middle act is a long stay in one place, deliberately.
• Skip it if the first film left you cold. This does not fix whatever you disliked.

Where to watch it

Avatar: The Way of Water is streaming on Amazon Prime Video, and it is also available to buy or rent from the usual digital stores. Availability differs by country, so check your local Prime Video catalogue with the link below. If you have a large screen and a decent sound system, use them. This is one of the few recent films where that genuinely changes the experience.

Watch Avatar: The Way of Water on Prime Video.

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The verdict

Avatar: The Way of Water is a technical landmark and a modest story, and it is honest about which one it wants to be. The world building is the most complete in mainstream cinema, the water and the creatures are genuinely new, and the family at the centre is played without irony. Against that, the plot is a series of familiar beats, the middle act takes its time, and the film asks for a level of patience that not every evening has room for.

Watch it for the spectacle and for the Tulkun, and go in expecting a long stay rather than a tight story. On those terms it delivers something no other film at this scale has managed. On the terms of story, it is the same film Cameron has been making for thirty years, and it knows it.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to have seen the first Avatar?

No. The film explains everything you need as it goes, and it picks up sixteen years later. That said, several of the emotional payoffs land harder if you have seen the 2009 film, so it is a better evening if you have.

How long is it, and is the runtime a problem?

Three hours and twelve minutes. The middle act, on the reef, is deliberately slow. If the world holds you, the length is not a problem. If it does not, the film will feel every minute of it, and no one should pretend otherwise.

Why is Kiri’s parentage a mystery?

Kiri was born from the inert avatar body of Dr Grace Augustine, and the film deliberately leaves the how and the why unexplained. It is one of the threads the later sequels are expected to pick up.

Where can I watch it?

It is streaming on Amazon Prime Video and available to buy or rent on the usual digital stores. Availability varies by country, so check your local catalogue.