Avatar: The Way of Water divides the critics

The sequel to James Cameron’s 2009 sci-fi epic Avatar is making waves among critics after finally debuting at cinemas worldwide.

“Astonishing! Enthralling! Exciting! Immersive!” said Mark Kermode in The Observer. “None of these words could sensibly be applied to the three-and-a-quarter-hour Wet Smurfahontas stodgeathon that is Avatar: The Way of Water.”

Not everyone agreed, however. The second instalment in director James Cameron’s expected five-film franchise leaves viewers “wrapped in images so splendid you can barely look away”, said Alissa Wilkinson in Vox.

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‘Bland aesthetics and banal emotions’

Fifteen years separate the second and third films in The Godfather trilogy, said Richard Brody in The New Yorker, and Francis Ford Coppola enriched the latter movie with “both the life experience (much of it painful) and the experience of his work on other, often daring and distinctive films with which he filled the intervening span of time”. By contrast, Cameron has directed no other features films since Avatar was released 13 years ago, and the “sole experience” that his sequel suggests “is a vacation on an island resort so remote that few outside visitors have found it”.

This follow-up’s “bland aesthetics and banal emotions turn it into the Club Med of effects-driven extravaganzas”, Brody wrote.

This “lumbering, humourless, tech-driven damp squib of a movie” only “builds upon the mighty flaws of its predecessor”, said Kermode in The Observer. Originally scheduled for release in 2014, the long-awaited sequel is a “patience-testing fantasy dirge that is longer, uglier and (amazingly) even more clumsily scripted than its predecessor”.

Cameron’s new film is an “unchallenging cartoon for grown-ups and kids alike”, wrote Rich Juzwiak for Jezebel. The plot is “as slim as the long-torsoed body of a Na’vi and as clear as the water the central ‘reef people’ characters swim in”. The movie is “less an achievement in storytelling and more a marvel of world-building, a visual feast with mostly empty calories”, which is “kind of maddening” given the film’s reported budget of up to $450m, he added.

Filling ‘an awe-shaped void’

The set-up for Water is “in many ways a rehash of the first film”, said Miles Surrey on The Ringer. Our protagonist Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington) is once again “thrust” into a new environment to which he must adapt, “only this time he’s got a family along for the ride”.

But while the film’s “biggest skeptics” have “plenty of reasons” to doubt it, Surrey continued, they’re forgetting “the cardinal rule of blockbusters” – “when Cameron makes one, he never misses”. And it seems “the solution for adding a new dimension to the sequel is right there in the title”. Having explored “the lush forests of Pandora” in the first film, the sequel “moves the action to Cameron’s natural habitat: the ocean”.

This latest release has “myriad deficiencies”, said Wilkinson on Vox, yet it “filled an awe-shaped void in my heart”. From the moment that the film’s “first elegant sequence arrived on screen, I sat up straighter, leaned forward, and found myself in a world quite other than my own”.

And “if a movie can make us transcend ourselves”, she concluded, “even just for an hour, I hope we don’t squander that gift”.