Spoilers Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) - Full Spoiler & Review Thread

In another place I actually described it as the best 3 hour nature documentary bookended by an Action Film.

 

I think the reason is that there isn’t anything on those planets/moons that will make them money. They keep finding McGuffins on Pandora.

 

I think at some point - if we're going to follow the rule of upping the stakes in sequels - the Humans will turn their eye to Eywa herself. There was skepticism in the first movie, but that skepticism will quickly fade if evidence points towards something to exploit.

One possibility: humanity's elite want to escape a dying Earth - do they want to spend their immortality on Pandora in Homosapien form, or upgrade to Na'vi? Jake Sully has shown them how it's done. However, Eywa needs to facilitate the transfer - right? Now, we know humans are capable of memory transfer in Na'vi form and of course the Avatar program - but permanent consciousness transfer? I don't know.

Even if it's not that, I still think humanity attempting to take control of Eywa will come into play at some stage.

 

I really don't see the humans trying to terraform Pandora, they're just trying to exploit it's resources to help them survive on Earth.

Yeah, because all of that kind of stuff really stopped in the 19th century....
The way we treat each other and the animals on Earth makes everything we've seen in both movies completely believable. Hell, there are highly intelligent animals on Earth that we treat just as bad, if not worse, than the tulkan, and let's not even get started on what we do to other people...
We saw this in HFR 3D this afternoon, and it looked amazing. Loved all of the new stuff we got with the Metkayina and the ocean, especially the ilu and tulkan.
I really liked the new characters, and Kiri's origins and Quaritch's return both worked pretty well for me.
Definitely some interesting things set up here to explore in the next movie or movies.
It will definitely be interesting to see what happens with Spider when his father show's back up.
It's really starting to look like Eywa is some kind of hive mind or consciousness controlling things on Pandora, and it looks like she must have been responsible for Kiri, at least I read things. Basically she's Anakin Skywalker to Eywa's Force.

 

I liked the original, but regard it as Cameron’s weakest entry in his filmography (though I have not seen PIRANHA II: THE SPAWNING). A technical marvel of a film but with no characters I find myself emotionally invested in. Appreciating the film, but at an arm’s length.

THE WAY OF WATER was a gigantic leap from the original and probably the best film Cameron has made since T2. I am still in shock by how much I found myself invested in the characters. Unlike the first film, I am actually open to seeing this on IMAX 3D a second time if an opportunity to see it with others arises.

I was not really looking forward to this sequel. I was pretty blasé about the trailers. It’s only because of Cameron I gave it a chance. If this film is any indication, I look forward to what he does in the following films.

 

So the movie is slowing becoming Man of Steel. They just need a World Engine.

 

For those interested in the box office performance (and with movies 4&5 depending on the movie doing really well, that should be a lot here), I recommend Dan Murrell's weekly BO charts show:

Dan is one of the rare true pros on YouTube, as he cuts through the clickbait and narrative-driven reporting to give a good in-depth analysis.
He shows not only that The Way of Water had a better opening weekend than any other James Cameron movie, but that this still holds true when adjusted for inflation.
He also shows how similar narrative-driven articles proclaimed both Avatar '09 and Titanic as doomed to failure after their respective opening weekends.
And he also warns that next week, the narrative will probably be that The Way of Water truly failed at the box office, because the coming 3-day weekend contains both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, both of which are traditionally days when most people stay home.

 

500 million in the first 3 days, Its a Travesty!.. Huh? Yes it needs to make bank to pay for itself, but it isn't going to do that in the first weekend. Like Titanic and Avatar 1.. Its about Legs. Its the perfect time to release a movie with legs because, well, nothing else is out! Will it make as much as the original? probably not. Will it crack a Billion, probably will. Is Avatar 3 coming, Almost definitely.
Just hate the Click Bait BS, Shade the crap out of somthing.. Ugh..

 

I distinctly remember how that $75m opening for the original seemed like a disappointment at the time because it wasn’t the $100m record breaker that became known for other films in the 2000s, and then we saw that movie just play for months because people kept going. THAT is the real test, to see what its legs are.

That’s how box office hits used to be back in the day where it wasn’t so too heavy from the opener. It was all about the long run. Everyone will see a Marvel film opening weekend and then never look back.

I wasn’t among the masses that wanted to see AVATAR a second time. But I might be for THE WAY OF WATER. That movie stuck in my head in a way few movie theaters do. So I’m most curious about how well it’ll do.

 

I'd definitely like to see it a second time on the big screen. I feel like there was so much to take in, it was almost overwhelming on first viewing.

 

unless the plan is to just convert people into Navi avatars. they're better adapted to the world, anyway.

 

I was severely disappointed when they announced Sigourney Weaver would be playing a completely different character, thinking that would be the silliest thing to do with a character (see: Star Trek: Picard). Now I want to eat my words, Kiri is the best thing to ever happen in either of the first two films, and we've barely gotten the prologue of her story.

I was disappointed that Grace died in the first film, because she seemed to rub everyone the wrong way, both human and Na'vi, and stuck in an avatar with her particular scientific job, she would be in complete disagreement with whoever she ended up with. Her daughter seems to be quite like her mother in some ways, and seems to have learned a lot from her through recordings (Jaylah much?), but she's something else entirely. A much more worthy addition to the story than a stranded formerly human scientist would have been.

I love how she has, like her mother, has a knack for making everyone in the room just seem like a fool, but in a completely different way that makes it just delightful. She was unconscious on the floor, and made Norm and Max look like absolute idiots, much like Augustine made them.

Her Eywa connection is how I expected Grace to return before it was announced she wouldn't be returning, so it felt expected, though I'm utterly glad that her entire storyline foreshadowed a Eywa deus-ex machina that never happened (except on a personal level). Her midichlorians are off the charts, though.

Lang's return, equally silly to begin with, was also worth it, the knife stand-off was brutal.

 

I haven't seen this second film but I had this thought about the humans in the first film. Too cartoony for my taste as you say.

As for 19th century human...unfortunately I don't see humans becoming that altruistic. If the last couple of years have shown us is that it takes just a little disaster and we start devolving into greedy morons. Toilet paper anyone? At least that's relatively innocuous but water scarcity, climate change, etc....that's really gonna wreck havoc on society.

Perhaps this second movie mentions why humans seem desperate to take over this world but I don't discount plain ol' power and greed.

 

I don't see Humans getting along with Eywa; they fear her. Bridgehead is surrounded by a kill zone on land and sea, where they treat the land regularly with herbicides and protect with heavy weaponry. This is so to keep Eywa and "her network of vast sensors and fangs and flora" of Pandora at "arm's length" (Visual Dictionary for the movie, p. 46) This is reminiscent of the early colonizers of America who feared the perceived and real dangers of the forests.

 

Oh, right at the top of the movie, Neytiri was complaining about Spider spending so much time with their kids, saying that "he needs to stay with his own kind," which is a remarkably shitty thing to say to her husband, who is (or was, I don't know how the Na'vi feel about "dual citizenship") one of "his kind." Even so, while Neytiri was the only one to express outright antipathy towards him (and to also, you know, nearly kill him to punish his clone-father, utterly devaluing his life except as an emotional game-piece), I got the sense that the others could take or leave Spider, except for Kiri. I know Sigourney Weaver talked about the challenge of playing a fourteen-year-old while in her extremely late sixties, but it must've been weird to also play a puppy-love subplot with an actual fourteen-year-old. But, hey, I bought it, so that's movie magic for you.

I watched Jenny Nicholson's video on Avatar-Land at Disney World the other day and, interestingly enough, the lore of the park is that it's "set" many, many years after the original film, when the human and Na'vi have made peace, but, most interestingly considering the tidbit dropped about the humans planning to invade and colonize Pandora, they say that the reason humans are able to walk around on the area of Pandora represented by the park is a special giant plant that filters the air to make a bubble of Earthlike atmosphere. Now, am I saying James Cameron spoiled the ending of his five movie masterpiece epic to handwave how a tie-in theme park could exist? Well, let's go with, "I'm not not saying that."

Pandora would definitely be easier to terraform than Mars, even with the distance involved. One of the issues I have in real life with the "space colonization as lifeboat for humanity" idea is that it is essentially impossible for anything to happen to Earth that would make it more uninhabitable than Mars, Venus, Europa, Titan, and so on. Like, it is so difficult to make some other body in our solar system livable that under virtually any contingency, it would be easier to repair Earth (or build some sort of shelter or emergency supplies here to prepare for an extreme disaster) than turn another planet into a remotely acceptable facsimile.

It seems like the major barrier to humans living on Pandora is the somewhat-poisonous atmosphere, and the very unforgiving wildlife, both of which are solvable, and potentially, more solvable than fixing Earth up from the kind of total environmental collapse seen in the extended cut of the first movie. Like, if terraforming Mars was an option, they could do whatever they'd do there on Earth and make life a whole lot easier since they aren't starting totally from scratch.

 

I always find it odd when they try and give stories to their theme park lands. It just seems unnecessary

 

I tried to see it yesterday; the IMAX system broke down.
I went home.

After the hassle of getting a refund, and the traffic to and from, I was immediately reminded of why I hadn't missed going to the movies for these past 22 months.

 

When that happens at my cinema they usually just give everyone a voucher for a free showing. They even did it once when the 3D was misaligned for a second. I’m didn’t even notice.
I still have memories of watching Mummy Returns and the film biting out right at the end. Someone had to cut that section out and reattach the film. I think we missed only a few seconds but they still gave us a free voucher. They were valuable back then since you had to pay exorbitant prices to watch a movie. Now it’s like £7