‘Avatar: The Way of Water’: Visually Stunning, But VERY Flat Storytelling

I’ve just come out of James Cameron’s “Avatar: The Way of Water.” The reviews are also out. A 69 on Metacritic and 83% on Rotten Tomatoes. These reviews are not as good as we expected them to be, but here’s why …

It’s a very unique moviegoing experience in that the 3D and, really, the overall visual schema is stunning beyond belief. Even moreso than the original. Cameron has waited this long for technology to catch up to his vision and you’ve never seen anything quite like the immersive imagery on display here.

The reason why I call this a unique experience lies in the fact that if the imagery pops your eyeballs out, the story itself is rather mundane and unengaging. ‘The Way of Water’ plays it very safe in terms of storytelling. Nothing new is brought to the table. It’s a story of bloodlines, revenge and finding yourself. Cameron has always had the eye of a poet but a tin ear for dialogue, and never more so than in “The Way of Water.”

Set more than a decade after the first film, ‘The Way of Water’ again tells the story of the Sully family and the trouble that seems to always follow them — the US military are again the bad guys and as you watch this sequel unfold you quickly start to realize why a country like China would warm up and not censor it for release. Regardless, that should be the topic for a whole other writeup.

And so, what we get is a plot about the lengths one family would go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive, and the tragedies they endure amidst American military industrial intervention. Dull, right?

What isn’t dull are the underwater sequences, the clear highlights of Cameron’s groundbreaking usage of CGI, high frame rates and 3D. You can literally feel yourself swimming with the characters — it’s a technical feat of marvel. In fact, certain scenes play back at 48 frames per second, giving them an incredibly smooth and realistic feel compared to the standard 24fps.

This is and has always been about spectacle for Cameron. That’s the problem. He might be reimagining the way we look at a movie, but there’s nothing inventive in the way he tries, so painstakingly hard, to suck us into his story. You stumble upon cliche after cliche here, the redundancy is mind-numbing and, in the end, it turns out to be the film’s ultimate downfall. A mind-numbing 192 minute affair.

There’s a mosaic of unnecessary new characters in this movie. There’s also a penchant for simplicity in the way that it embodies the conventional tropes that have made today’s blockbusters so dull and uninvolving. The most depressing part of it all is that absolutely no one will dare tell Cameron that, for all the CGI breakthroughs he’s managed to produce, the coldness that seeps through in the process is incredibly problematic.

If this is the future of cinema then I want no part in it.