A decade later and we’re under water (literally) – Jake Sully, Neytiri, his children and Tarzan (Spider) face the turmoil and tragedy of choosing to fight for their home or flee from it. Avatar: The Way of Water is absolutely endearing. It pulls on the heart strings of every movie goer, any passer-by. It is good. Avatar is a story about a family, a family that will go above and beyond and most importantly UNDER, to protect themselves. However, the movie shows us how far, how wide, and how deep this protection goes.
The Sullys and basically all of Pandora is under attack because of this family. Jake Sully’s vengeful what we thought was the dead commander in chief comes back and he’s coming back for blood. Scorned by Jake’s decision to stay and protect the woman he loves and by extension betray him. The earth people (you and me apparently) have returned to colonise Pandora in a not so Pocahontas way. No one is falling in love like the first movie. It’s just a battle for blood. Now this Colonel (fondly called demon)? and his crew of “yes captain” “ how high” captain men embark on a journey to break the Sullys and inflict as much pain as you can possibly imagine, and you know if they could destroy their home and everyone and everything they love it will just be a bonus.
Now let’s get to the real question: Did we really have to wait ten years? For this? I’m still torn. Yes and no but why? It’s excellent but couldn’t excellence have come a little faster? When I was done with the movie – the entire 3 hours 12 minutes, that’s 192 minutes, 11520 seconds. People are busy do you KNOW what people could be doing in 3 hours 12 minutes? A lot. You can fly to Greece, Italy, Spain. This movie that took 10 years, 3 hours, and 12 minutes to get to you it better be worth it.
And it was (for the most part) – the movie was excellent in design; the characters were funny and flawed. You could connect emotionally to them, you understood how they wanted to be there for each other and with this cost-of-living crisis you know how hard it is to be far from home. We get all that. BUT – and this a big but – for a 3-hour movie they seem to rush through the basic understanding of the movie. We get that colonel wants to ruin the Sullys but that wasn’t the aim. What happened to the literal plot of the movie? Did they just ignore colonisation or is this a France thing where everyone knows it’s happening but doesn’t care.
Overall, there is an excellence to the movie but maybe the message lies solely in family as a unit and here lies the main problem. It makes you care a lot, but you won’t care enough.
Michelle Kadiri
Image credit: 20th Century Fox