REVIEW: ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’
19th December 2022
For much of its running time, Avatar: The Way of Water resembles nothing so much as one of those screensavers from the early 2000s that turned your computer monitor into a simulated aquarium. Remember? Fish floated by, there were some bubbles, it was very colorful and completely unrealistic. Soothing, though.
For a solid hour of The Way of Water—it’s the movie’s second in a complete running time of 3 hours and 10 minutes—we are treated to tall blue and green cartoon characters swimming and diving and riding on the backs of alien seahorses and having sign-language conversations with whale-like creatures. It’s like a nature documentary, only there’s no actual nature, just the world’s most unimaginably expensive computer-generated imagery blended with live-action performances the computer then draws over. (Kate Winslet is in this movie. You’d never know. It could have been me.)