BRIAN VINER reviews Avatar: The Way of Water

Avatar: The Path of Water

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Last Tuesday’s world premiere at the Odeon Leicester Square was predictably glamorous, with a plush blue carpet instead of a red one and the paparazzi clamoring for one more sneaky pose from Sigourney Weaver.

Accustomed to an adoring audience, the stars may have even thought the distant hooting was for them too. In fact, Moroccan fans were jubilant celebrating their country’s World Cup victory over Spain on penalties, and unbelievably they were still at it when we all stepped out into the cold over three hours later.

Yes, Avatar: The Way of Water is an incredibly long movie, but so was David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, which Cameron has cited as a major influence for its “good old-fashioned teenage adventure storytelling,” and that was even longer . Great movies can get away with being excessively long.

James Cameron’s sequel to his 2009 sci-fi blockbuster Avatar doesn’t rate as excellent, however, it is simply very good. For starters, especially behind a couple of 3D specs, it looks absolutely stunning. And the narrative is within everyone’s grasp, whether or not they’ve seen the original.

The unwritten rule for sci-fi blockbusters is: the bigger the budget, the more incomprehensible the plot. Although not this time. Kid-friendly, and grandparent-friendly, Avatar 2 is mercifully easy to follow.

However, it is not a film for all time, perhaps because it is tailor-made for our time, with ecological and environmental messages that could not impact the audience more strongly if they flew off the screen towards them, which of course sometimes they seem to.

We’re back on the exotic moon of Pandora, enough years after the story told in the first film for Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) to have inducted himself as a full member of the blue-skinned Na’vi tribe. He lives happily, deep in the forest, with his partner Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and his healthy children.

But then, breaking the idyll, arrive the ‘sky people’, invaders from Earth, led by General Frances Ardmore (Edie Falco, in a role she surely never saw coming when she was getting her nails done in suburban New Jersey. , like Carmela in The Sopranos).

If they want to make Pandora a new home for humanity, they must first ‘pacify the locals’, which means capturing Sully, who is leading the resistance.

That job goes to the terrifyingly vengeful Quaritch (Stephen Lang), whose death in the first film (like that of Sigourney Weaver’s Dr. Grace Augustine) is a trifle easily dealt with by Cameron and his co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, who simply they resurrect him as an avatar.

To make Quaritch an even more formidable foe, he and his elite squad arrive disguised as Na’vi.

With his teenage sons eager to lend their strength, Sully must get the family out of harm’s way and seeks refuge with Metkayina, the people of Pandora’s reef, who live in joyous harmony with the maritime world.

This sets up the film’s most seductive stretch as Metkayina, led by her king (Cliff Curtis) and queen (Winslet), introduces her forest-dwelling guests to her semi-aquatic life form. Some of the underwater scenes are really wonderful, and when Quaritch and his thugs show up and start slaughtering sea creatures to lure Sully out of hiding from him, it’s really shocking, like watching someone mug Sir David Attenborough.

That, without a doubt, is precisely Cameron’s intention. As with the first film, he wants us to see past the blue skin and pointy ears, and recognize the marauders, in a sense, as avatars of the conquistadors and all the white men who displaced the indigenous people, taking over and desecrating their land. But he’s too astute a storyteller to let the message, with a pun, sully the entertainment. This sequel is so much fun, even bigger and better than the original, but by golly it will tax your bladder.

Avatar: The Way of Water opens in cinemas across the UK on Friday.