Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

They said 50,000,000 Elvis fans can’t be wrong (on Elvis Presley’s second collection of gold records in 1959) so maybe the same principle applies to the second movie in the Avatar franchise? About the 2.9 billion who saw the first? They can’t be wrong? I don’t know. I saw a 3D IMAX version of that first one some double-digit years ago, with all the many folks (and me) ridiculously wearing the 3D glasses and gasping in wonder. Every generation seems to get its turn at the buying end of 3D as the future of cinema. I was duly impressed and inclined to defend it in a general way, the problematic auteur James Cameron notwithstanding. What’s wrong with a hit? I even looked at it again a few years later across the living room on my not-so-big TV and still liked it then, perhaps some kind of lingering hangover effect from the wonderful theater experience. But certainly things about the blockbuster rankled as insipid—looking at you, “unobtanium”—and they’re not particularly better in this sequel. I never thought the putdown of “Dances With Wolves in space” was that insightful, maybe because I like Dances With Wolves, even with all its problems, including a running time close to four hours. And speaking of long, I spent half my life the other day looking at a non-3D non-IMAX streaming version of the 2022 Avatar sequel. The Way of Water (which is over three hours) spends nearly an hour reprising the situation established in the first one, then shifts gears from the forest culture of the planet Pandora to the sea culture. Native forest Pandorans are tinted blue whereas the sea tribes helpfully have teal skin, for easy identification during the pitched battles. There’s probably nothing I can say to convincingly encourage or discourage anyone about seeing this movie, particularly at this late stage of the affair. It’s all world-building and big battles, with the now-usual blockbuster dose of family feels sprinkled in. Those inclined may find it wise to keep a hanky handy. In the first one, if it was there, I missed that Pandora is a moon of a larger gas giant type of planet. They make good use of it here as periods of light and darkness are dramatically affected, with a regular (daily?) event called “Eclipse,” functioning something like our tides. There’s also a lovable whale-like creature with specific interesting features who must suffer from human stupidity. Among other things, The Way of Water is a condemnation of game hunting. I can allow that in many ways its heart is in the right place and now and then it even rises to the level of entertainment. I thought The Way of Water was mostly boring but, you know, how can 2.9 billion people be wrong?