Avatar: The Way of Water - A Review - Blue is the Dullest Color

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An underwhelming, unneeded sequel that is just as forgettable as the original. It’s time to close Pandora’s box.

One need to look no further than the box office and Oscar ballot to understand why we are doomed as a nation, a civilization, and a species.

In the last year, two movies dominated that speak volumes about the monumental moronity of the masses. First there was Top Gun: Maverick, a hellaciously stupid, completely unnecessary, thirty-five years too late, second-rate sequel to the gay-themed, feature film Pentagon commercial that was the original Top Gun (1986). Maverick has made over a billion dollars since it premiered in May of 2022 and just got nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.  

And there’s also Avatar: The Way of Water, a ten-years too late sequel to a movie everyone saw but nobody remembers – Avatar (2011). The Way of Water is a three-hour and fifteen-minute middling monstrosity that has made over two billion dollars at the box office and also been nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.

After going to the movie theatre to see Maverick like a sucker, I promised myself I wouldn’t do the same for The Way of Water. I figured if writer/director James Cameron wanted to vomit out retreads of his immensely uninteresting Avatar world onto to audiences for the rest of his career, he could do it without my twenty bucks.

But since I am a tremendous big shot in Hollywood, I recently got a screener of The Way of Water and in service to you dear reader, I decided to watch it and review it.

To give context to my thoughts on The Way of Water, let me just briefly recap my feelings on the original Avatar. Basically, I thought it was an instantly forgettable, painfully dull venture that was dreadfully written and looked like a high-end videogame. I never watched it again after seeing it in the theatre, and never thought about it and never had any interest in a sequel.

Which brings us to…the sequel.

Avatar: The Way of Water is even more dreadfully written, even more forgettable and an even more dull movie than the original. It is a putrid and puerile piece of pissant moviemaking that serves no purpose whatsoever.

Unlike say the money printing machines that are the Star Wars or Marvel movies, Avatar has no compelling underlying mythology that can enrich and elevate its pedestrian story. Instead the film franchise attempts to satiate the viewer’s need for psychologically rich archetypes and mythology with vapid, vacuous, trite and insipid American cultural politics.

Speaking of the story, the plot of The Way of Water is as flaccid as the one in the original Avatar. On the planet Pandora (not to be confused with the music streaming service), Jake Sully, a former disabled human Marine and current Na’vi leader, husband and father, must protect his Na’vi family from the evil of human militarism and colonialism.

Sully’s old Marine unit was wiped out in the original Avatar – don’t worry I didn’t remember that either, but all are back now with their consciousness implanted into newly lab-grown Na’vi. So all those old, completely forgettable characters you didn’t remember from the original are back!!

In order to protect his family, which consists of his wife, two teenage boys, one teenage girl, and a younger kid whose gender I cannot for the life of me remember, Sully takes them away from the Omatikaya - forest Na’vi, and to the Metkayina - water Na’vi.

The movie is mostly a teen angst drama revolving around the struggles of the Sully kids to fit in with the water Na’vi, surrounded by predictable battle scenes between good guys and bad guys.

Here’s the thing, The Way of Water is like every bad teenage angst movie ever made, but cliched characters speaking bad dialogue don’t magically become interesting just because their skin is blue. And make no mistake, teenagers are no less annoying when they’re blue either.

The movie at one point feels like Blue Rebel Without a Cause, with Sully’s middle son Lo’ak as bargain basement James Dean and a four eyed whale as Sal Mineo’s Plato.

The movie has lots of scenes of laughing at people trying to learn new skills, like when the Metkayina teens mock the Sully kids for struggling to learn how-to-live in water, and when Spider – a human child raised by the Na’vi, laughs at the reincarnated Marine Colonel now trying to live in his new Na’vi body. Everybody laughs except for those watching.

Speaking of Spider, he’s like every dreadlock wearing white kid who thinks he’s black, as well as every skateboarding douchebag who thinks he’s interesting and tough. To say that Spider is the most annoying and embarrassing character to hit the big screen in ages would be a massive understatement.

As for the women in The Way of Water…they are all Na’vi and they are all repellant, hyper-emotionalist shrews of the highest order. If I wanted to spend hours on end with grating hags, I would’ve stayed married to my first, second or fourth wife (FYI…my third wife, Barbarella, was an angel…who unfortunately died from injuries sustained in a freak pole dancing accident - RIP).

The cast of The Way of Water, which include Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Winslet and Stephen Lang are tough to judge because they’re basically animated blue beings. No one sounds very believable or anything, but acting in CGI isn’t exactly easy.

Edie Falco, plays General Ardmore, one of the few actual human characters, and as much as I love Edie Falco and respect her as an actress, she is actively awful in this movie.

Jack Champion, who plays Spider, is just atrocious as well.

As for the most important part of The Way of Water…how it looks…I have to say that it looks…fine. Granted, I didn’t see it on the big screen and watched a digital screener on my rather big tv, so my opinion on the visuals is to be taken with a gigantic grain of salt. I will say this though, a movie having nothing going for it except that it looks like a fantastically high-end video game, is not a very strong argument that it’s a good movie.

The bottom line is that Avatar: The Way of Water is a very long, very boring and banal, very derivative and dull cinematic venture. James Cameron has made some great, and I mean great, movies. Both Terminator films are absolutely fantastic, and Aliens (1986), True Lies and even The Abyss, are flawed but exceedingly well-made, entertaining films. That said, Cameron will no doubt make a bazillion dollars with his Avatar franchise, but he won’t make anything artistically or cinematically worthwhile, which is a shame and feels like a waste of his talents.

Which brings me to my final point. Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water, are two movies that aren’t original and aren’t good, and yet they’ve dominated the culture for the last year. The fact that there are people out there who think these movies are awesome is a strong indicator that America is a country and empire is steep and steady decline.

Culture is the canary in the coalmine, and with Maverick and The Way of Water, that poor son of a bitch of a bird is down in the darkness, flat on his back in the muck and the mire, wheezing his last bitter breath.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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