Rating:
Summary: Without the premium screen, 3D experience, "Avatar: The Way of Water" falls short in terms of storyline, pacing and character development.
Thirteen years in the making, "Avatar: The Way of Water" has delivered at the box office, perhaps even better than expected. It's an epic movie that gives people a fantastic reason to upgrade to the biggest, most premium 3D screen you can find, and it feels more than a movie - more like an event.
But that's "Avatar: The Way of Water" on the big screen. How does it fare when streaming on your phone or tablet during your lunch hour? That's what this "streaming review" examines.
The first problem you'll notice with "Avatar: The Way of Water" is the clearly shot-for-3D scenes that, when viewed on a 2D screen, feel out of place. To be fair, this was more of a problem with the first "Avatar" movie than this one - although I'm not sure if it's because the 3D elements have been toned down, or if we've just gotten used to viewing these types of scenes in 2D.
The second problem you'll definitely notice is how rushed certain parts of the film feels. This seems strange given the film's more than 3-hour runtime, but with so much time devoted to demoing underwater scenes - literally, they felt like demo scenes you might find on home theater test discs or your run-of-the-mill nature documentary - there leaves less space for character and story development. Considering the exponential increase in the number of characters in this film compared to the original, thanks to the Sully/Neytiri brood and all the new Metkayina clan characters, this meant most characters got little more than cameos, and that includes Jake Sully and Neytiri (although it's more understandable given they're not the main focus of this movie). This also means there's very little attachment to any of the Na'vi characters, although the script seems to do better with some of the animal ones.
The storyline is also frustrating. There was never going to be a story without humans, the Sky People, returning to Pandora. But when it does happen, it feels like all the progress made in the first film was negated in an instant - what was the point of so many of the Na'vi, humans and animals of Pandora dying in the first film if all they won was a temporary reprieve? It would have been better if the conclusion of the first film hadn't felt so definitive - a major and final victory for the Na'vi - but I guess nobody was thinking about four more movies in the franchise when making the first film about almost naked computer-generated blue people.
And that brings me to the effects. Re-watching the first film recently, while most of the effects held up, part of the movie now feels like a video game cutscene in terms of its realism (gaming graphics have improved a lot since 2009). Unfortunately, the feeling that none of it is real lingers in this movie, not just for the aliens, but for animals and plants too.
The Pandoran world-building is again first class, but human world-building is once again lacking. There's not enough background information other than a throwaway statement of "we want the planet" on humans and their motivation. You'll almost have to go to the intro of the first movie to find the last piece of real-world building for the "Sky People". Without a clear motivation, humans are reduced to nothing more than cartoon villains. A little bit more on the RDA (the group/corporation behind the pillage of Pandora - I have to explain this because there's almost zero information presented in-film on this group), the dire situation back on Earth which is prompting these "extreme" actions on Pandora, would have added depth to the antagonists. In the real world, villains never believe they are the villains - they always believe they are the heroes of the story, and that they're doing things for the "right reasons", even if these are horrible things. We need to know the "right reasons" for the Sky People.
Is Avatar: The Way of Water entertaining? Yes, I would still say so. It is a real spectacle with the 3D and the premium screen experience. But if we strip away the spectacle, we're left with a fairly average sci-fi movie with quite a few flaws. This affects the re-watchability of the film, which was something the first film suffered from too.
You can stream "Avatar: The Way of Water" right now on on Disney+.
