When 'Avatar' premiered in 2009, it became the highest-grossing film of all time, earning USD 2.9 billion in revenue. Director James Cameron is always known for his innovative filmmaking and for using the latest technology to make masterful visual effects for his films.
Avatar was no different; Cameron waited a decade to use the appropriate technology to make its worthy sequal.
After its massive worldwide success, he took the initiative to make the sequel in 2010 but was again constrained by the technology of the time.
The new Avatar sequel includes underwater sequences, so it took 13 years to release it. On December 16, it's finally here; Avatar: The Way of Water, with more groundbreaking technology-backed visual effects than ever before.
This film's story starts more than a decade after the events of Avatar. Humans are exiled from the lunar planet Pandora by the native Na'vi race. Jake Sully became the leader of the Na'vi, left his human body to fully become one of the Na'vi, and raised a family with Neytiri.
Jake is living peacefully with his family and leading the Omaticaya Na'vi clan. But peace doesn't last long; humans are trying to colonise Pandora again as the earth is dying.
Jake finds out their nemesis, Colonel Miles Quaritch is still alive and looks for Jake and his family for revenge. Jake doesn't want to jeopardise his people, so he and his family exile themselves and seek refuge in the Metkayina clan, a Pandoran clan living near the sea.
But Quaritch will never stop until he finds Jake, so he hunts down Metkayina's sacred animals until Jake appears before him. Jake and his family have no other option but to fight. Can they save their sheltering clan? Can they fend off human colonisers for the second time? James Cameron answers these questions in the 192-minute film Avatar: The Way of Water.
The sequel has almost the same structure as Avatar - repel colonisers who want to obtain valuable resources by disrupting the planet's ecosystem.
But one new take is that two generations of Pandora are fighting against the same human colonisers. Jake, Neytiri, and the Omaticaya clan won against them in the previous film. Now the colonists are back, but Jake can't go all-out war on them as he has family commitments. The new generation of Na'vi—Kiri, Lo'ak, and other children of Jake and Neytiri—takes up the torch to serve and protect their planet Pandora.
The best part of the sequel is the visual effects. Motion capturing underwater has never been made before, so to achieve this feat, director James Cameron had to wait several years.
To say the visuals were stunning would be an underestimation. The underwater world of Pandora and the creatures designed were mesmerising and intriguing to watch.
The sequel is over three hours long and might be disliked by critics for being monotonous. But Cameron delivered a simplistic story, which makes it worth watching with family on holiday.
With an ensemble cast including Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, and Kate Winslet, among others, Avatar: The Way of Water is surely a visual effects masterpiece.
