192 min | PG-13 | December 16, 2022 | 20th Century Studios
Jake Sully and Neytiri flee the forest for the reefs, dragging their kids and the Sky People’s war behind them. James Cameron builds a planet you can feel the water pressure of. Then he runs three hours of plot through it like a garden hose.
Jake Sully has gone native and gone domestic. He leads the Omaticaya, raises children with Neytiri, and lives in the kind of peace the first film never granted. Then the Sky People return and Quaritch comes back wearing a Na’vi body and a grudge. The family flees to the reef clans of the Metkayina to hide among water people who do not want them. Underneath the spectacle, this is a film about a soldier who keeps choosing exile and the children who inherit the running.
Sam Worthington plays Jake as a tired father first and a warrior second, and the fatigue reads as the truest thing in his performance. Zoe Saldaña gives Neytiri a fury that the script keeps holstered until the final act, and when it fires the film finally has weight. Stephen Lang plays Quaritch as a recombinant ghost chasing a son he barely understands, which is the most interesting idea in the movie. Sigourney Weaver plays Kiri, a teenager, and the performance-capture lets her vanish into the strangeness of a girl who feels the planet breathing. Kate Winslet appears as Ronal with a coiled hostility that the film never gives enough room to pay off.
James Cameron directs from a script he wrote with Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, and Josh Friedman, and the direction outpaces the writing at every turn. The underwater performance capture is the real achievement. Faces hold subtlety while bodies move through volumes of simulated water, and the buoyancy changes how every actor carries weight. The high frame rate makes the action scenes glassy and clear and makes the quiet scenes look like a nature documentary shot on another world. The visual system is years ahead of the story it serves.
The structure is the problem. Cameron spends an hour teaching you to dive and then stages the same emotional beat three times before the climax arrives. The plot moves like the first film moves, which means you have seen this shape before and you know where it lands. What saves it is the craft and the conviction. Cameron believes in this world completely, and for long stretches the belief is contagious enough to carry a story that is thinner than the ocean it floats in.