Welcome back to the Weekend Watch where each week, we take a look at a new piece of film or television media and give it a rating, review, and recommendation. This week’s topic, as voted by the blog’s Instagram followers, is James Cameron’s latest blockbuster hit, Avatar: The Way of Water, the thirteen-years-removed sequel to the highest grossing film of all time Avatar (2009). This film picks up a little bit more than thirteen years after the original, following main characters Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his mate (wife) Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) as they once again have to deal with people from Earth infringing upon the natural world of Pandora, this time with the help of their four children who have been born since the last film. Let’s get into it.

Letter Grade: B+; a lot of the issues (story) of the first film are greatly improved upon, but new flaws keep it from being an A-level feature.

Should you Watch This Film? Begrudgingly, yeah. If you have a friend with a great sound system and massive TV (or if you are that friend), you can wait for this one to hit Disney+ next year; otherwise, there’s enough here to make it worth seeing in theaters.

Why?

                Avatar: The Way of Water delivers on a lot of the hype surrounding the long-awaited sequel. The visuals and sound are gorgeously designed – accomplishing things that I’m sure James Cameron only dreamed of back in 2009. The story improves on the weaknesses of first by providing more personal character motivations and characters that feel a little bit more than just archetypes (sometimes). The action is amped up and feels more visceral, providing even more engaging set pieces than the first as well. Though not without flaws of its own, The Way of Water provides what you want from a blockbuster and leaves you thrilled with your theatrical experience. I’m not going to do a deep dive on the visuals and sound because other people can communicate the whys and whats way better than I can, but suffice it to say that this movie feels great in the theater.

                I think that I can (guardedly) say that people might actually remember a couple of more characters from this film than the first. The story inserts Jake’s and Neytiri’s children (Neteyam, Lo’ak, Kiri, Tuk, and sometimes Spider) to the unfolding saga of Pandora in a way that endears the film to audiences far beyond the first. Though Sam Worthington still can’t decide whether he’s American or Australian, giving Jake Sully children with individual personalities and character arcs helps make him a character worth caring about, though I can’t help but also notice that Neytiri does fall a bit to the background in this one and feels more like a tertiary character to her husband and children with even less of a character arc than the film’s villain.

                When I first heard that Avatar (2009) was getting a sequel, my first thoughts were “Why?” and then “How?”, since the first film feels so self-contained. For the most part, The Way of Water carries on in this fashion, containing a simple (if overly stretched) story of its own with a beginning, middle, and end. In this film’s case, however, we know that a sequel is coming in two years and, looking at some of the film’s less fleshed out details, that anticipation becomes immediately apparent. Part of what makes this sequel so overly long are character details and story points that feel completely irrelevant to this film’s story but that I am sure will come into play in the third, fourth, and fifth films. Kiri, in particular, felt like an annoyingly extra character (not just because de-aged, animated Sigourney Weaver strays a little too far into the uncanny valley for my taste), filling the role of weird, but make it quirky, daughter whose backstory is just that of Jesus or Anakin Skywalker. I’m sure Cameron has great plans for her (and also for Edie Falco’s character whose name I’ve already forgotten), but they do more to fill out the film’s overlong runtime than be legitimately engaging in their own right.

                Suffering from some all-too-familiar issues of overcrowding and a continued obsession with Papyrus font, Avatar: The Way of Water provides an imperfect, but superior, sequel to the original blockbuster with excellent effects and improved characters that have me mildly optimistic about the future of the PCU (Pandora Cinematic Universe), or whatever it is they’re calling this. If you have the time to see it in theaters, it’ll be worth your time. If you can’t, try to find somebody with a great television set-up to catch it on streaming in the spring (or sooner, who knows what these release schedules are).