Avatar: The Way of Water review: James Cameron's sequel is why the theatrical experience was made

To paraphrase a woman once known as Rose DeWitt Bukater: "Outwardly, I've spent the last 13 years insisting that only a total moron would ever bet against 'Avatar' mastermind James Cameron . Inside I was screaming."

Screaming that modern Hollywood's most all-or-nothing visionary was going to spoil the twilight of his career - and perhaps the last gasp of the movies themselves - on a series of sequels to his work on less convincing. Screaming at the idea that the only person with the resources and cachet to create massive new cinematic worlds from scratch had decided to semi-permanently root themselves in the one I'd seen before and didn't didn't particularly want to revisit. Howling at the wacky prospect that he would be able to extract new pockets from either of a planet he had previously (and eagerly) terraformed into the most basic of space fantasies of adoption by the settlers.

'Aliens', 'Terminator 2' and even the disavowed 'Piranha' sequel prove that Cameron has always had a knack for building radical new sites on pre-existing bedrock, but I was skeptical of another epic worthy of his ego. could be built on the bones of those flimsy colonization tropes, or that the Na'vi gave him the opportunities he needed to revolutionize cinema again (for better or worse).

On that last point, of course, Cameron knew that was the case. Pandora was conceived as a giant playground for the technology it wanted to bring to theaters - and as the weapon that would force them to go digital or die - and Cameron's plan for it still stretched beyond the nimble blue cat people selling the masses on thrift the rainforest. Her heart belongs to the ocean, after all, and Pandora's are nearly unbeatable.

Cameron always treated history as a direct extension of the spectacle needed to bring it to life, but the anthropocenic relationship between narrative and technology was a bit uneven in the first "Avatar," which obscured the former behind the veil of the new where his previous films would have better allowed them to intertwine. An out-of-body theatrical experience that makes its predecessor feel like a glorified proof-of-concept, "Avatar: The Way of Water" is such a staggering improvement on the original because its show doesn't does not have to make up for its history; in vintage Cameron fashion, the spectacle of the film is what helps tell its story so well.



The Adventures of Jake Sully (of the Jarhead Clan) will likely never escape its sub-"Lawrence of Arabia" foundations or achieve the kind of poignant popcorn flavor that inspired this reviewer to rank 'Titanic' as one of the 10 greatest movies ever made, but I'll say this: When 'Avatar' ended, I couldn't imagine caring enough about its characters to see a sequel, let alone four of them. When "The Way of Water" finally ebbed out to sea after a spellbinding 192 minutes - receding into darkness with the sweetest of cliffhangers at the end of a third act defined by some of the clearest and most more sensational character-driven this side of 'True Lies' - I found myself genuinely moved by the fate of Jake's big blue family, and can't wait to see what happened to them next. never doubted Big Jim for a minute!

Here's a silly movie that works so well because it uses dazzling new tools to satisfy our nostalgia for classic entertainment. Watching "Avatar: The Way of Water" in VFR 3D at High Dynamic Range doesn't feel like watching another movie you've seen before. This thing is a categorically and phenomenologically different experience from anything that's ever played at your local multiplex, including the original "Avatar" - it's light years ahead of the year's other blockbusters ("No", "RRR" and "Top Gun: Maverick") because Pandora's extrasolar moon is from Earth.

To some extent, that's because "The Way of Water" iterates on and improves on a technology that's already been tested. As you'd expect from an "Avatar" sequel, the main cast largely consists of a...