“Avatar: The Way of Water is a promise—like the titular Way as described by a beatific, finned Na’vi fish-people princess, the film connects all things: the past and the future; cinema as a generational ideal and one film’s world-uniting box office reality; James Cameron’s megalomania and his justification for Being Like That; one audience member and another audience member on the other side of the world; one archetypal cliché and another archetypal cliché; dreams and waking life”
“This was pretty much the philosophy of 2009’s Avatar, which never hesitated to literalize everything, and to do so with a degree of corniness and self-actualization that has become Cameron’s brand”
“Beyond trembling with a Thoreauvian spirit of deliberate existence in respect for and deference to every living soul, Cameron’s Avatar presented Cameron’s Pandora—the moon of a gaseous giant in the Alpha Centauri system and home to the tall, spindly cerulean Na’vi—as a giant physical network, a global, biological supercomputer/chthonic god that has nodes, or soul trees, all over the planet, providing the Na’vi with interfaces where they can basically upload their whole selves”
“The Way of Water’s story is a bare bones lesson in appealing to as many worldwide markets as possible”
“The Way of Water’s true achievement is that it looks like nothing else but the first Avatar, unparalleled in detail and scale, a devouring enterprise all to itself”
“Watching The Way of Water can at times feel astonishing, as if the brain gapes at the sheer amount of physical data present in every frame, incapable of consuming it, but longing to keep up”
“This is immersion for its own sake, moviegoing as experience vaunted to the next level, breathtaking in its completely unironic scope”
“After so many hours in Pandora, untroubled by complicated plot or esoteric myths, caring for this world comes easy. As do the tears. The body reacts as the brain flails”
“The first Avatar is still a gorgeous masterpiece of CGI, a claim no film since could attempt. Except The Way of Water, which looks even better. No film will ever be this beautiful in my lifetime, at least until the next Avatar”
“This movie has surpassed our capacity to see”
“Avatar proved it and The Way of Water codifies it: James Cameron is cinema’s only great colonizer, a man who inhabits and takes over ideas, genres, currencies, studios and the ends of the yet-discovered world to translate awe in human innovation and industry into populist spectacle that’s built to grow exponentially, swarming with tropes and genre to hide the dearth at the heart of his storytelling”
“Avatar has consumed James Cameron; it is his everything now, the vehicle for every story he wants to tell, and every story anyone may want to tell—the all-consuming world he’s created is such a lushly resourced aesthetic wonder that anything can be mapped onto its ever-expanding ecosystems”
“Pandora is a toolbox and ready-made symbol”
“At some point in The Way of Water’s 192 minutes I wondered if James Cameron ever thought about having gay Na’vi. I also wondered if Jake taught his children Earth slang like “bro” and “dude” and the perplexing “perv,” or if he heard the equivalents in Na’vi as their anachronistic counterparts”
“The film leaps from the screen; my heart leaps in kind, both so close I can grab them, all of it feeling unabashedly real”
“So then we have to wonder: How do Na’vi have sex? Poop? Give birth? Does James Cameron imagine their genitals, their organs, their waste and bodily fluids and everything hilariously hidden by a leaf or braid?”
“This is James Cameron’s dream; he dreams it for our sakes”