Fourteen years after the release of 'Avatar', James Cameron transports us once again to the planet Pandora. A new opus even more ambitious than the previous one.
Decades of building a saga down to the last detail. In the early 2000s, James Cameron put his film career on hold to devote himself to a single project: Avatar, a science-fiction saga set in the imaginary universe of Pandora. An ecological and anti-militaristic fable that, when it was released in 2009, pushed back the limits of the 7th art. The director of Titanic used motion capture to imagine the Na'vis, blue humanoids living on this endangered planet. Above all, he popularised the use of 3D, which in the following years became an essential feature of blockbusters – to the great displeasure of epileptic or seasick spectators, who were gradually subjected to a cheap technology. The years have passed, but the memories remain: the poetry of a sex scene (later censored), the sensation of vertigo provoked by the aerial acrobatics, and the lasting impression of attending a new show. And suddenly the blockbuster became the world's biggest box-office success. An impossible miracle?
Like the first film, the Avatar sequel was seen as a crazy project. There is no doubt, however, that the 350 million budget was put to good use. With The Way of the Water, in cinemas this December 14, James Cameron extends the field of the possible and the imaginary more than ever. He mixes the extraordinary with the familiar. Ex-marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) now lives on Pandora with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), a member of the native tribe, and their children. He finds himself hunted by Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who was killed in the first installment but has been resurrected as another avatar. Naive dialogue aside, the film is charged with a new emotion, nestling in the on-screen construction of the family bond.
Instead of a complex plot, James Cameron favours a fleshed-out universe. Like Black Panther 2, Avatar 2 stages the collision of two universes: in this case, the meeting between an endangered Earth tribe and a marine people with distinct rites. To protect his clan, Jake Sully finds refuge with the Metkayinas. We are plunged into the discovery of a new culture, immersed in the depths of the ocean, as if to remind us of the underlying ecological issues. A great lover of the waters and author of several projects on the protection of the oceans, James Cameron recreates the childlike magic of exploration. As he had shown in his previous films, only he knows how to marry the spectacular and the intimate with such grace. At the end of these 3 hours and 20 minutes of beauty, it is difficult to leave the teeming world of Pandora.
