Avatar: The Way Of Water Review - 7 Ups & 3 Downs
Downs...
3. The Super Basic Script
Much like the first Avatar, The Way of Water is an almost hilariously simple, straight-forward story, upon which Cameron has hung his visually ground-breaking environmentalist parable.
But while that simplicity made total sense in the first film, which had to spend so much time introducing audiences to its world, given that Cameron promised a richer and more complex narrative this time, it's a shame that things feel, well, puddle deep.
So much of the film feels like a wetter retread of its predecessor, and even when it introduces a host of new characters, their development is largely paper-thin bar a few exceptions.
Likely to be the most divisive aspect of the story is the focus on a new human character, Spider (Jack Champion), whose arc throughout the movie isn't particularly convincing.
Beyond that the dialogue contains some of the corniest one-liners from Cameron's entire filmography, and while all of this might've been tolerable in a shorter film, it's exacerbated by another key problem...