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Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)
Terrible film with great visual effects.
The movie is a dud. A big bloating carcass of something with incredible potential.
The dialogue, of course, is horrendous, if *very slightly* better than the first.
The plot and pacing don't make much sense, and leave you confused. The last hour is essentially one drawn out fight scene between two small -time gang leaders and their posses.
The characters are one dimensional, with shockingly little growth or development. This, together with the bizarre pacing and plot riddled full of holes, give an impression of randomly interspersed events that don't touch us much as an audience.
Any dramatic scenes in the movie, while being no believable due to the horrendous script, are also not given room to breathe and play out. We always see the consequences immediately, and usually because Cameron has them spelled out for us as if the main audience watching was a gaggle of pre-schoolers.
Casting: Because of the hackneyed script/director combo, it's difficult to tell when the lack of feeling and one dimensional aspect of the characters is due to poor casting, or bad dialogue. However, none of the actors seem to even make the best with the lines they've been given. The only bright star is Zoe Saldana as Neytiri, who brings life to her role as she did in the first film, even through her stilted lines. The rest are a mix of tolerable and poor casting choice.
Message:
James Cameron doesn't believe in subtlety. The picture I get from this film is of a man shouting that machines are bad while nature is good, because he once knew one family who abused technology for agression, and one family that used it for defense. Because of the alternately dragging and rushing plot (like in the iconic J. K. Simmons scene from Whiplash, but this time even a 5 year old could recognize both), I have to fill in guesses about the overall message of the film, as none of it is clear. One gets the impression of severe tunnel vision.
Director Cameron has cemented himself as a poor filmmaker whose primary vision has always been and seemingly will remain, visual effects. This he does well, and while it may be enough to do well at the box office, it is certainly not enough to mask the fact that overall, this is a very poorly made film with an incompetent director at the helm. Perhaps he is creating a new frontier of visual effects, but.