Movie Review: Avatar: The Way of Water

 

Michael's Movie Grade: F

Complete and utter boredom. 

Yes many of the visuals in this movie look beautiful, but that is nowhere near enough to hold a film that runs more than 3 hours. This is especially true when there is nothing else good about this movie (with the exception of Simon Franglen's musical score). The main problem with this film is that the characters are incredibly boring. Our protagonists have little in the way of personality. They only have a couple of personality traits and those come off as simply bland and cliché. Though there are times when this movie tries to get into stronger emotional territory than the first film, these moments fall flat because it is hard to care about these characters. You never get to care for them because they never feel real. The villains however are even worse. They are so over the top that they feel like they belong in a parody rather than something you are supposed to take even semi-seriously. The storyline is just as horrible. It is simply a mess of clichés. The majority of this story will simply make you think of similar scenes from a thousand different movies, only those films did it much better. It also hurts that this movie has a very simple story that it stretched to over three hours, when the story could have easily been told in half that time. A great amount of the scenes in this movie feel like padding. The middle section of this film seems to be nothing but padding. This part of the film simply seems to drag on forever. This is a really long movie, but it actually still feels much longer than it actually is. It is stated multiple times that the way of water has no end and in hindsight this seems like a warning about what you are about to endure. To makes matters worse, there is a lot of really forced and awkward dialogue that does not sound at all like how people actually talk. This film also has messages about environmentalism and prejudice. Unfortunately, these messages are conveyed in the most awkward way possible. It is conveyed through over the top and silly actions from the villains and from dialogue that could not be more obvious. There is also the fact that this movie's messages are incredibly simplistic and there is nothing here you haven't heard a million times before. There is no new depth or anything thought-provoking said here. 

This is simply a terrible movie that even makes the vastly overrated original look halfway decent in comparison.