Avatar: The Way of Water Review

The technical case is unanswerable. Cameron solved underwater performance capture, shot at a high frame rate that he varies within scenes, and the result is a reef environment with a physical logic to every current and bubble. The tulkun hunt is the best thing in either film, a whaling sequence that turns an intelligent animal's death into something genuinely sickening, and the final act inside a capsizing ship is Cameron returning to Titanic with better tools.

The problem is the two hours before it. The Sully family flees to the Metkayina, and the film settles into a long middle stretch of teenagers being bullied, learning to hold their breath and bonding with sea creatures, with dialogue that runs on borrowed teen movie rails. Quaritch's return through a recombinant body is a contrivance the film never bothers to sell. Three of the four children are interchangeable. At one hundred and ninety two minutes it asks for enormous patience and repays it only in the last forty. Worth seeing large, and only large.