James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water is punishingly long, with so many narrative digressions and self-indulgent, disconnected sequences that the film pushes itself into a tedium that never earns its runtime. While the film’s computer-generated effects and motion captured performances are frequently stunning throughout much of the film, the moments in which the effects aren’t seamless truly stand out. Cameron stages a few truly spectacular action scenes that are well-choreographed and nicely paced, but far too many of them go on for too long and begin to lose the clarity of action that makes them so compelling early on and differentiates them from other modern action scenes. The Way of Water also falls into the problem that far too many “serious” action films succumb to – making depictions of an atrocity appear to be exciting and thrilling through the use of traditional action editing, bombastic music cues, and favoring the viewpoints of the perpetrators of violence.

The narrative itself is too thin to support the grandiose scale that Cameron is trying to achieve here – characters are constantly making unmotivated decisions for plot convenience and to advance the story to the next moment of visual spectacle. The patriarchal “father protects his family” worldview gets tiresome quickly, and the potpourri of Indigenous cultures that Cameron borrows from with no sensitivity and little understanding is backwards and regressive. Cameron continues to show that he is unable to write convincing dialogue – conversations are wooden and plodding, with the same lines and even series of lines repeated over and over again. Zoe Saldaña‘s performance through motion capture is very strong, and while there are a few inspired sequences and ideas throughout the film, but those ideas are never developed and those sequences are diluted by being drawn out far too long. This is a film (and franchise) with so much squandered potential due to Cameron’s problems with story, pacing, and dialogue, as well as his own inability to see outside of his own limited experiences.