Avatar: The Way Of Water Spoiler Review: A Gorgeous Cinematic Experience That Tries To Transcend Storytelling

Though the final hour of 'Avatar: The Way of the Water' is where the real action begins - at 190 minutes this movie would feel too long, but it's surprisingly fast even if it's not action-packed for a while - the middle section is where the film shines. Jake and his family leave their Omaticaya clan of the forest and land on the reefs of Pandora to join the Metkayina people of the sea, which means it's not just Jake who must learn a new way of life, but his whole family. Initially, they are greeted with suspicion by Metkayina leaders, played here by Cliff Curtis and Kate Winslet (the latter unfortunately has little to do with the whole affair, even given the strange echoes of " Titanic" in the third act). But over time, Jake and his family, especially his second son Lo'ak (Britain Dalton), have completely settled into... well, into the waterway.

If there's a lesson for viewers of 'Way of the Water', it's that special effects really can be this amazing in movies, and far too few movies really have special effects. . In the marketing campaign for this movie, James Cameron spoke candidly about his opinion on the onslaught of comic book movies that have become the dominant form of cinematic entertainment over the past decade, and at the very least, when you look at "The Way of Water", you can see why the visuals of these movies just don't measure up. We're just over a month away from "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever," in which a hero similarly becomes involved with a strange group of people who live in water, culminating in a grand battle over a huge ship. The parallels may not seem entirely solid, but the problem is less that the comparisons aren't perfect as much as they are unfair. The special effects in "Wakanda Forever" are often full of seams, as you can almost imagine where blue screen backgrounds exist shot after shot.

The special effects of "The Way of Water" - especially in the mid-hour sea sequences - are breathtaking. Anyone with a passing knowledge of how movies work will inherently know that much of what's on screen must be fake. Even though the actors filmed in a water tank, or some kind of film set with a large amount of water, the characters themselves are as much a product of motion capture technology as computer effects and animation. (That's not even taking into account the many sea creatures that Jake and his family encounter.) Any given shot in this film appears to be partially, if not entirely, done via digital effects, and yet the seams are almost always invisible. (The words "Almost always" should be used here because, although Cameron's preferred viewing method is via 3D and 48 frames per second, whenever rapid movement is visible on screen during these shots at high frame rates, the viewing experience briefly becomes distracting. High frame rates may be the future, but the future isn't here yet.) It's at Credit to this movie that if Cameron had wanted to spend the whole time in the second-hour mood, it would still be one of the most triumphant special effects experiments in movie history.