Avatar 2: The Way of Water (2022)

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Sound, Best Production Design, and Best Visual Effects    Honestly, fine.  Okay.  James Cameron clearly loves pushing the boundaries of special effects and that's great.  I'm sure other movies will benefit from this.  I just really wish he found better stories to attach millions of dollars of VFX and mo-cap to highlight.  Because this one sucks.  Content warning: animal death (it's CGI but still), whale hunting

Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) has settled down with his wife, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), and four children in the blissful knowledge that once repelled, no Earthlings are going to come back to the Planet Made of Money and try and steal its resources again.  Except that's stupid because of course they are.  In fact, his old nemesis Quaritch (Stephen Lang) got a brand-new avatar body just to try and fuck up Jake's world.  In an effort to keep his children and wife's people safe, Jake convinces his family to uproot and flee the forests to seek asylum among the Reef People of water-adapted Na'vi.  His Magical Girl adopted daughter (Sigourney Weaver) does just fine, but his younger son (Britain Dalton) finds assimilation much harder until he meets a fellow outcast in a Pandoran whale who violated his species' edict against violence.  Things are all good under the sea but Angry Smurf Quaritch isn't going to stop looking for revenge and enlists a whaling crew to draw Jake out.

It is extremely pretty.  Visual effects are top-notch, turning everyone into giant-eyed blue cartoon people in the most realistic way possible.  Sound effects are great, too.  Alien whales sound like alien whales.  Spaceships and maglev trains and explosions and all manner of wildlife.  Sounds great.  Production design is good.  Makes the Na'vi homes that aren't purely CGI look realistic, like somewhere you'd like as your Zoom background.  Best Picture?  Not on your fucking life.

The story was clearly a secondary concern next to the visual effects.  It is filled with cliché-ridden dialogue, boring tropes, and regressive 1950s heteronormative ideals of family dynamics.  It's over three hours long but you could easily cut 40 minutes of the characters just staring in wonder at their surroundings.  You get one (1) "staring in wonder" scene for effect.  Everything else is masturbatory on the part of the filmmaker.  And there was zero reason for the whale hunting sequence to go on as long as it did, unless you are deliberately trying to traumatize.  You could have achieved the exact same effect just showing the cluster of dead whales and the goo extraction scene.  You didn't need to have extended play-by-play showing the mother whale deliberately separated from her calf.  I promise, we get that the whalers are the bad guys.

It's currently still only available in theaters but it'll be on Disney+ in a couple of months.  It's not worth it.