Avatar: The Way of Water

James Cameron's Avatar: The Way of Water works so well because the cinematic epicist knows how to properly stack threat, disaster, recovery, family, chaos, tragedy, romance, vengence, suffering and sacrifice in the right order and in the right amounts. No one does it better, IMO.

Cameron knows how to please an audience, as evidenced by the film's opening weekend take, which doubled its $250 million production budget. Every penny is on the screen in brilliant, spectacular color with sequences of aerial and aquatic flight that beg for VR expansion (no doubt, already in the works).

Few directors are more assured in the realization of imagined worlds. His arboreal paradise, Pandora (introduced in the 2009 original Avatar), is expanded in this sequel to include a fantastic region of island villages, home to breathtaking animal and plant life and people committed to peacefully co-exist with the world around them.

It is there among the water people where genetically modified Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), both heralded Na'vi warriors among the blue-skinned giants, take refuge with their children after "Sky People" come looking for Sully, whom they believe is the leader of insurgents trying to turn back attempts to settle and claim Pandora for a dying Earth.

Cameron is not one to create new narrative themes; he's no philosopher. He's an exacting craftsman, a technician, who takes the familiar -- heroism, love, trust, disappointment, pride, hate -- and repackages them in fabulous ways. Audiences will recognize (and welcome warmly, I trust) the film's messages about community and duty, female empowerment and evironmental protection, obligation and loss.

Those familiar with Cameron's filmography know that a rogue and compromised military officer is one of his favorite villains, and Stephen Lang as Colonel Quaritch more than fills the bill as the expedition leader looking to take Sully, dead or alive, preferably the latter. The extended battle between Sully and Quaritch, that closes the film, sets up the inevitable third round of Avatar, release date December 2024.