Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B+
Special Effects: A+

Is anyone coming to see Avatar for the story, really? I can tell you that I wasn’t. I came with the expectation of a thrill ride of heart pounding action set pieces, and heart stopping special effects. On those fronts, Avatar: The Way of Water absolutely delivers. And it delivers beyond your expectations: I can’t say that its “wow factor” surpasses that of the 2009 original, but it’s stunning to note that it easily matches it. And how does it manage this feat? By making the special effects even more impressive than they were in the previous film.

I have to admit, I went in with skepticism on that front. Indeed, I did not think Avatar was as visually stunning as millions of others did back in 2009—particularly in 3D, which never managed to impress me. In fact, I went to see that movie a second time in 2D and found it a better experience. Well, call James Cameron a megalomaniac all you want, but this is a guy who knows how to get the job he’s looking for done, and the very reason he waited 13 years to make the sequel was because he wanted to the technology he was looking for to catch up. And I am here to tell you: it was worth the wait.

It amazes even me to say this, but Avatar: The Way of Water is a stunning experience in 3D. With the exception of the relatively few human characters rendered as human onscreen, every living thing in this movie is rendered with CD effects, the fauna of Pandora all invented creatures. And they all look as real as if they were right in front of your face. If James Cameron has anything to do with it, the days of 3D as a gimmick or a price-gouging distraction are a thing of the past. Every minute of the sensory experience of this film feels organic, like you are indeed immersed into a fully realized world. More than once I watched what I was seeing onscreen and actually thought to myself, This is incredible. Truly, it may very well be that this film advanced VFX technology further in a single go than any other movie since Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park in 1993.

The key difference, of course, is that Jurassic Park also has an incredibly tight, skillfully constructed script, which was just as much a part of that movie’s success as its visual breakthroughs. The same cannot be said of James Cameron’s scripts, which these days can have the surprise effect of making us wistful for the rote romance of Titanic. Now, to give The Way of Water some credit, this outing leans less heavily on the Dances With Wolves nature of the original—on which Cameron had sole writing credit—with a team of four other writers who worked with him on the story. That part is an improvement, albeit not by a huge margin.

If there is any particular disappointment to this movie, it’s the return of Stephen Lang as the villain—he wasn’t that great a villain to begin with; why do we need him again? And, okay, you may be wondering how this is possible, if the guy (spoiler alert!) died at the end of the first one. Well: cloning to the rescue! Cameron’s “innovation” in this case is not to bring back just a clone of the character Quartich, but to revive him as a cloned version of his Na’vi avatar—he and his troupe of military goons are Na’vi grown in a lab, so they never revert to their human selves. On top of all that, the Na’vi version of Quartich has had the original’s memories implanted. Viola! I now dread the idea that Quartich will be the villain in every single one of these movies.

Another actor from the first film whose character died returns, this one on the more compelling side: Cameron loyalist Sigourney Weaver returns, not as the original Dr. Augustine, but as Kiri, the mysterious offspring of the avatar version of Augustine, father unknown, adopted into the family by Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña). Some snide remarks are made about Kiri’s father being Augustine’s colleague Norm Spellman (Joel David Moore), but I don’t think we are meant to take that at face value, not least of which because it would suggest a nature far darker on Spellman’s part than ever gets otherwise suggested in the film.

Kiri is shown sporadically through The Way of Water to have an easy, special connection to the Great Mother, the natural world around her, with abilities to control certain forms of life, particularly (of course) under water. This element of her character is never fully fleshed out in this film, only steadily revealed throughout, and I suspect this will be more directly explored in the next sequel. Presumably so will her paternal parentage.

Which is to say, even at a ridiculously long three hours and 12 minutes, Avatar: The Way of Water leaves a lot of questions unanswered. It submerges us ever deeper into the world of Pandora, after settling into this new family life with the Sullys, who now have three children aside from Kiri: sons Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) and Lo'ak (Britain Dalton), and eight-year-old daughter Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss). Further adding to this mix is Spider, the fully human teenager who turns out to have been Quartich’s son, marooned on Pandora due to his youth precluding him from traveling back to Earth. With his special mask allowing him to breathe Pandora’s air, he’s befriended the Na’vi and integrated himself into their society as much as is possible in his human form—which includes wearing little more than a loincloth, which is all we see actor Jack Champion wearing for the duration of the film. He plays a key role, including an extended period when he’s commandeered into a sort of tour guide for Quartich and his troops. It was distracting to me that those guys never made Spider put on some clothes, rather unrealistically just accepting him as a “feral” human adopting the ways and culture of the Na’vi.

So, as always, the script in a James Cameron movie is its weakest link. Usually I place more importance on that than I will here, because nearly everything we actually see onscreen is so genuinely amazing, it goes a long way toward making up for stupid lines of dialogue like “You are not in Kansas anymore” (which Quartich literally says in both of these movies).

As it is, you could split The Way of Water into three, roughly one-hour parts. In the first, we are re-introduced into this world, and I have to give Cameron some credit here: he eases us into it instead of jolting us with an opening over-the-top action sequence, something far too many movies make the mistake of doing. We meet the expanded Sully family, and although this gets just as “bro-y” as most Cameron films (the Sully sons literally refer to each other as “bro,” too many times; we spend far too much time with trigger-happy military personnel), most of the kids each get key story arcs of their own—with the suggestion that the adopted daughter, Kiri, may yet be the most important. Cameron’s plot threads may lack the same dimension as his visual effects, but they do get surprisingly well fleshed out.

The second hour is when we get largely submerged underwater—hence the subtitle—when the Sullys, fleeing the vengeful advances of Na-vi Quartich, go into hiding in some faraway islands where a different, seawater-adapted tribe of Na’vis live. This is where a wholly unrecognizable Kate Winslet shows up, as Ronal, the wife of their chief, Tonowari (Cliff Curtis). Ronal and Tonowari have teenage children of their own, who vacillate between rivalries and friendships with the Sully children. They learn this tribe’s seafaring ways, and this is where a great deal of underwater footage is eye poppingly impressive; we also learn about their hyperintelligent, whale-like creatures, tukun, which can communicate with the Na’vi and ultimately play a pivotal role in the climactic sequence of the film.

And that sequence goes on a long while, mostly in the final hour, nearly all of it breathlessly mesmerizing. I would see this movie again just for its final third, it’s so well staged and thrilling—even though it features its own sequence of a sinking ship, which quite clearly (and deliberately?) recalls the last hour of Titanic. Still, I must mention James Cameron’s notoriously despotic attention to detail even here: we spend little time inside this particular ship when it is upright, and yet there is very attentive production design on things like floor-bolted dining tables we only ever see in passing after the ship has capsized. Which is to say, every physical setting in this film has a genuinely lived-in feeling. Although this movie has no hope of winning any top-tier awards, it’s already easy to imagine it sweeping both the technical and the creative awards.

Truly, the one and only thing that keeps Avatar: The Way of Water from being an even more stunning achievement than it is, is the fact that we’ve already gone to this world once before. Back in 2009, everything in Pandora was completely new to us (well, except for the story tropes). This time, we are returning to a world we’ve already been to, just far more vividly rendered. When it comes to how we see it, it’s a little bit like stepping out of black and white and into color, an almost Wizard of Oz moment. There was a time I always said CGI effects would become dated quickly, in a way that practical effects never did. But in this case, whatever practical effects or sets they had were integrated seamlessly. For now, at least, you can’t see the seams. It has been a long time indeed since a film transported its viewers so successfully.

It is somehow both imperfect and spectacular.

Overall: B+