A full 13 years after Avatar broke global box office records to become the highest-grossing film of all time, director James Cameron returned late last year with its long-awaited sequel The Way of Water. I missed its theatrical run – a combination of disabled life and a reluctance to watch a three-hour-plus feature in a cinema – but it is clear many people didn’t. With the dust settled, and its box office gross tallied, The Way of Water is currently the third highest-grossing film ever behind its predecessor and Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame. With the film now available on Disney+, and the home video version coming out within weeks, it seemed a good time to catch up and see how Cameron’s mega-successful saga is going.

The action picks up many years after the original film. Former human Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) lives among the Na’vi of Pandora, and with his partner Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) is raising an assembled family of biological and adopted children. When a resurrected Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) returns to Pandora on a mission of revenge, Jake and his family must take shelter with the Metkayini – aquatic cousins of the forest-dwelling Na’vi.

On technical and visual levels it is a difficult film to fault: Sully’s journey to Pandora’s oceans opens to an astonishing and beautiful world of plant and animal sea life. The various invented creatures are inventively designed and wonderfully attractive. Photorealistic CGI realises these creations in a rich and consistent world. Even more than the original Avatar, The Way of Water relies almost wholly on animation. The presence of live-action performers is remarkably limited. This is not a claim that The Way of Water is an animated film, so much as that the gap between animation and live-action really is getting so narrow as to make the distinction irrelevant. There is a huge global audience for what is often called ‘eye candy’, and I think this film’s enormous commercial success points to that.

Credit where it is due, Cameron – with co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver – have developed a much stronger story this time around. There is less reliance on worn-out tropes. It was easy to compare the original to pre-existing films like Dances with Wolves or FernGully: The Last Rainforest, and those sorts of comparisons are not as simple to make now. There is still a relatively generic storyline here, but crucially this time around it feels more like playing archetype than relying on stereotype. Jake’s long-established existence as a Na’vi also enables the film to side-step awkward representations of disability that dogged the original.

The characters seem more original now, whether it is Quaritch’s self-awareness that he is a copy and not the man himself, or the 14-year-old Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) manifesting unusual powers in relation to Pandora’s enveloping life force. It is a great performance by Weaver too, and one that more than anything demonstrates the creative possibilities of motion-capture and CGI. Cameron directs a 73-year-old to play a 14-year-old, and between his direction, Weaver’s performance, and the effects team’s talent, the result is genuinely remarkable. It is interesting how the visual effects are so effective as to enable several accomplished actors – notably Kate Winslet and Cliff Curtis – to be so immersed into their characters that you would not even know they were in the film were it not for the credits.

Another highlight of the film is Payakan, an exiled hyper-intelligent whale, who despite its CGI presentation winds up one of the most interesting new elements.

The underlying story, while competent, is ultimately functional. The extended run-time – a colossal 192 minutes – exacerbates that. In a tighter or more condensed form, The Way of Water would be a notable creative success. In its bloated and over-long form, that success is only really partial. Attractive alien vistas can only get a viewer so far, and for long stretches of the film things have a tendency to get remarkably dull. The later Roger Ebert’s description of Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor (“a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours”) came to mind more than once. James Cameron’s films often run to the long side, but former classics like Aliens and Terminator 2 (both 137 minutes) never felt quite so self-indulgent.

So do we need an additional three sequels, as Cameron and 20th Century Studios have committed themselves to? Had you asked me 13 years ago I would have firmly figured no. After this superior, visually remarkable sequel, I am more prepared to allow Cameron to show us where his narrative ambitions are leading. We’re nowhere close to Cameron at his best, but I feel we’re approaching something worth experiencing.

Avatar: The Way of Water is now streaming on Disney+. It will be released on Australian DVD, bluray, and 4K on 28 June 2023.