Why do we continue to doubt James Cameron?
I don't envy the last 13 years of the director's life. Sure he got an unprecedented payday when Avatar became the highest-grossing film of all time in 2009, but since then it's been non-stop talk about the sequel or how Avatar wasn't even that good.
On top of that, directing multiple sequels to Avatar is a Herculean task in and of itself.
I saw Avatar back in 2009 about a week after its release. I had to sit in the second row from the front because screenings were still very much selling out. I remember getting really into the film at the time, but then never revisited it until its re-release this year.
Watching Avatar again I got the same feeling whenever I watch Titanic, the previous highest grossing film of all time, also directed by Cameron. They're both three-hour epics you kind of want to be overrated then you watch it and damn, of course it's good.
Avatar: The Way of Water elicits the same feeling. How fun would it be for us as a filmgoing society to dunk on Cameron and his long-delayed sequels! Oh how we would laugh! But unfortunately we can't. Once again it's been proven to never bet against him.
The Way of Water is every bit the spectacle that the first film was. I wondered if in the interim decade the advances in technology would mean that Avatar films would no longer be an outlier but Cameron is just such a master of his craft, even the most impressive feats like Thanos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe can't quite stack up.
Once again the story is pretty simple. When a threat returns to Pandora, Jake and his family take refuge with a tribe of water-based Na'vi. Obviously more happens but that's kind of the whole plot.
With this as the starting point there's a lot of time given to exploring the new tribe whose culture is heavily influenced by real-life Pacific indigenous cultures. Kiwi actor Cliff Curtis plays the leader of the tribe and, according to Cameron, was instrumental in bringing a lot of his own culture to the character.
A lot of this character and culture exploration could, admittedly, be cut from the film and you would still be left with most of the plot intact, but some of the most "unimportant" scenes to the plot reveal the most about character, about the world and even after the three-hour runtime I was still left wanting more of scenes like this.
The action in the film is the best we've seen in years. Probably since Mad Max: Fury Road which, in my opinion, might be the greatest action ever put to screen. Cameron controls the camera and your attention so meticulously that it ruins other action scenes for you.
While I'm upset that this is an end for all the jokes about how the Avatar sequels will never come out, the movie we ended up with was more fun than making fun of its lack of existence.
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