‘Avatar’ Returns to the Movies, and Hopes You Do, Too

“Avatar: The Way of Water” has been a long time coming. A child born when the original was released would have become an adult before this sequel swooped into theaters. More installments are planned, meaning the same child will likely grow old with the tall blue characters and their perennially threatened paradise. That is good news, for that child and for us, as this franchise is both big budget and big souled. “The Way of Water” is best seen through three-dimensional glasses, on the big screen. Both of these are now unfashionable for a generation accustomed to at-home streaming and art sized to their laptop screens. Some moviegoers can’t remember what it is like to buy popcorn or feel the magic of dimmed lights. To get to Pandora — the planet where Avatar is set — you’re going to have to get dressed and leave your couch.It’ll be worth it. The director whose work you’ll see is James Cameron, a devout vegan and box office maven with a Midas touch who has directed “Aliens,” the best “Terminator” movies, “True Lies,” “Titanic,” and the first “Avatar.” The last of that list is the highest-grossing movie of all time, and the tale of the doomed ocean liner sits in the third spot on that list. Expectations are high for “The Way of Water,” whose budget was a quarter-billion dollars.All that cash didn’t purchase Shakespeare to write the script. It largely reprises the original, with nefarious “Sky People,” also known as humans, bent on pillaging Pandora and slaughtering its indigenous people, the Na’vi. It is a fable of colonization and exploitation, aggression and self defense, environmentalism and extraction. Guns are bad, spears are good. Technology corrupts, nature heals. God is a mother, and she lives in the soil, not the stars.Remember, though, that you do not have your reading glasses perched on your nose, but spectacles that will immerse you in Mr. Cameron’s phantasmagoria. This is a feast for the eyes, not brain food. Pandora’s jungle is a riot of greens and purples, with vines and flowers that appear as if they’ll brush your skin and tickle your nose. Arrows whiz past, and photoluminescence becomes its own palette. The Na’vi themselves are long and supple poems in motion.“The Way of Water” tracks the odyssey of Jake Sully’s family from their forest home to a different, ocean-soaked region of Pandora. Sully is a Sky Person turned Na’vi who has crafted a blended family that straddles species. They are also targets, as the nucleus of an insurgency against a renewed push by the off-world forces to remake Pandora as a human colony. Fearing that their presence will spell doom, the Na’vi learn to swim off foreign shores. Mr. Cameron’s team will make you feel like you have never seen water before. It is alive and textured, a place of danger and respite. The N’avi move through it like air, soaring and accelerating on the backs of sea creatures Darwin could never have dreamed up. For an interlude, Mr. Cameron appears to forget about the plot entirely, and the effect is breathtaking. Whales dance ballet and reefs thrum in chorus. It is “Planet Earth” made in a daydream. When the violence comes, as it must, Mr. Cameron displays his chops as a choreographer of carnage. The final battle scene feels like its own film, elemental and interspecies. It renders in high definition the personal and cosmic stakes, blending pathos with bombast. Water is both savior and executioner, and aficionados of “Titanic” will half expect Leonardo DiCaprio to be shivering and floating just offscreen. Zoe Saldana and Sam Worthington in ‘Avatar: The Way of Water.’ 20th Century Studios via AP.Early returns indicate that “The Way of Water” slightly underperformed the expectations of Disney’s bean counters, sending shares of the Mickey Mouse company on a bit of a tumble. Leave that worry for the accountants and new/old CEO, Bob Iger. “The Way of Water” is a marvel of a movie that, like Walt Disney’s animations a century ago, wows with technology but hooks with heart. For its more than three hours of run time, “The Way of Water” is what modern magic looks like.

‘Avatar’ Returns to the Movies, and Hopes You Do, Too

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