Avatar: The Way of Water

A sequel set years after the first film. Jake now leads a clan and has four children. An ordered life has been built in the forest. The humans come back. This time the aim is not mining but settlement; Earth has become unlivable and the planet is being planned as a colony. Someone familiar is among them. A dead officer's memory has been transferred into a Na'vi body and he is after Jake. The family leaves the forest. They go to the reefs and take shelter with a sea clan. From there the film is a story of adaptation. Learning to hold breath, a new language, new animals, and children who are not accepted. What the narrative is interested in is not war but family: the children are at its centre and each carries a separate problem; its best line is the distance between the middle son and his father. The tulkun line carries the emotional weight. A whaling industry is set up for the sake of one secretion, and the sequence is deliberately merciless. Water is the film's real subject. The team developed a new system to capture movement underwater; the actors trained at breath-holding for months and the scenes were genuinely shot under water. Some sections were shown at a high frame rate and the image moves noticeably differently there; the choice divided viewers. It runs over three hours. The film won an Academy Award for visual effects and entered the ranks of the highest-grossing productions worldwide. Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang and Kate Winslet are in the cast. James Cameron directed. Who it is for: anyone who wants to see the most technically advanced image there is. Who it is not for: anyone looking for story; the plot is thin and the narrative repeats the structure of the first film.