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Editor’s note: This is a spoiler free review of Avatar: The Way Of Water. The Weekly Planet podcast also has a spoiler heavy discussion, listen to the full episode (linked below) to hear that version.
It's been 13 years since moviegoers visited the surreal world of Pandora, but after all this time is the sequel worth seeing in theaters?
Well, James Clement and Nick Mason (not the Pink Floyd drummer), hosts of The Weekly Planet, ventured out to the cinema for you to see if James Cameron’s latest passion project lives up to the hype.
Their verdict, it’s an enjoyable movie that outpaces its predecessor.
“As we recently talked about, we were not swept away by the original Avatar despite wanting to be,” said Clement. “Yet this one, I was swept away from a large majority of it.”
“I think it was a significant improvement,” said Mason.
While obviously the movie’s technical and visual effects are better than the first, the story is much more compelling this time around. While the hosts were both unimpressed with the 2009 film, they do not recommend skipping the latest installment to the Avatar franchise.
“I don’t think you should skip this one,” said Mason. “This is a better movie.”
According to the hosts, one of the film’s strongest points is in its story. While the first film was written entirely by Cameron, Avatar: The Way Of Water benefits from the director bringing a team of talented writers onto the project, adding a new perspective to the world of Pandora.
“Depending on the person or depending on the scene or what have you, there is an element of unreality to the visual effects that you can feel sometimes,” said Mason. “If you combine that with mediocre dialogue or characters that don’t act like regular people, you really feel the unreality and you disengage from it.”
“It is wild that none of this is real. I mean there are a few people in it, and they build very few environments,” said Clements. “For the most part, none of this exists in any reality.”
The film cost around $350 million to make the long-awaited sequel to Avatar and will need to make around $800 million to break even. The movie only grossed about $130 million domestically in its opening weekend, but that’s actually more than its predecessor made in its first few days at the box office. As Mason puts it, the franchise is a grower, not a shower.
“(Avatar) didn’t do well initially, but word got around, and then it became the big blockbuster,” he said. “If that holds true here, even if it didn’t do that great initially, maybe it’ll do $2 billion again.”
Check out “Avatar: The Way Of Water” to hear the full spoiler and non-spoiler review as well as commentary on the latest shakeups in the DC Universe. Next week will be The Weekly Planet’s last show of the year and the pair will continue the tradition of looking back at the best and worst movies of the year. Find the podcast on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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