Avatar: The Way of Water – Review

First review of the year. Like many people when I saw the original I saw it in 3D, unlike most people however I thought the 3D looked terrible with blurry fights and floating text on flat screens. So while there were a lot of 3D screenings for this movie I avoided them and went with a 2D one instead which was a much better experience.

It’s a solid movie. With the original I had something of a middle ground opinion at a time when everyone seemed to love or hate it but with this movie I’d say my reaction is a bit more common. I enjoyed the film but didn’t feel a rush to write this review either (though it has been two weeks since I saw it so maybe I took a little more time than I needed to write this).

While the main cast of the first film return there is a timeskip meaning rather than focusing on Jake and Neytiri it focuses more on the perspective of two of their children for most of the narrative. Their youngest son has the most attention but the storyline involving their adopted daughter Kiri is what appears to the most important to the narrative moving forwards. On that note I do want to praise Sigourney Weaver’s performance in this, while she’s done voice acting before I believe this is the first time she’s played a character significantly younger than her and I think she does a good job, especially when there’s scenes involving her character from the first movie to compare the performance to.

With Avatar’s return focusing on a multiple movie storyline this time it’s hard to say how well the parts of the story tied to that will work once the sequels come out but focusing on the specific “save the whales” storyline of this one it’s a solid “boy and his aquatic mammal” movie with a sci-fi twist. While writing this review it got nominated for a few Academy Awards including Best Picture, while this is a good movie I think there’s plenty of other movies from last year that would have been better choices than this.

Plan for 2023 Reviews

Happy New Year everyone. Since 2016 I’ve written a review for every movie I’ve seen for the first time. I’ve liked that this has given me an excuse to write more and practice explaining my thoughts on things however there have been times where my choice to wait until I’ve written a review before watching another movie has messed with schedules and resulted in me waiting until the last minute to watch some movie marathon movies.

So this year I’m taking a break from this format. Will it return? Maybe, I’ll see how I feel this time next year. But I still want to write reviews as they have been pretty well received and are a nice thing to talk about in conversation with friends. So I will still write reviews for any film I see in the cinema plus a few other notable new movies from Netflix and Disney+.

But what about the movie marathons? Well some I might still review each individual film but if I’m watching an entire franchise for the first time I’ll probably just write one review for the whole series or the most recent addition. This is also a good opportunity for me to watch more films in franchises that have a lot more movies that I’d rather space out my viewings of but don’t want to flood my reviews with like Scooby-Doo, with those if I successfully catch up I’ll maybe make a top 10 list as an excuse to share the ranking image.

I will still make an effort to make note of every movie I see this year though. Rather than reviewing them I’m going to have a list in the Notes app of every movie I see in the order I see them and maybe I’ll share that list at the end of the year. This will also allow me to easily talk to people about what movies I’ve seen over a period of time.

Some of you might have noticed I neglected to do my awards show blog posts these last two years. Well one other plan for this year is to finally have my awards for those years when we get closer to this year’s award season. Also I’m not sure when I’ll have my top 10 movies of 2022 list ready but don’t worry, it’s still coming out.

I think that’s everything that I wanted to highlight in this post. And since there is at least one movie I want to see in the cinema this week it shouldn’t be too long before my next review despite this plan.