MAKES A HUGE COMEBACK

BY PETER CARAM

After fourteen years in the making, Avatar The Way Of Water has finally arrived! This film is a sequel to James Cameron's film Avatar that came out in 2009, and now that it's finally here, audiences are curious to see if the film was worth the wait. The story starts off with Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington) narrating the events that have taken place since the previous film. He and his wife Neytiri (played by Zoe Saldana) have started a family and are raising four kids. They live a quiet, peaceful life in Pandora until the humans - “the sky people” - destroy nearly everything in Pandora. After a year passes, Jake and Neyteri lead a squad of Na'vi to ambush the sky people, but their youngest son L’oak (played by Britain Dalton) and oldest son Neteyam (played by Jamie Flatters) nearly get hurt in the battle field raising the ire of Jaket. Meanwhile, the “sky people” are able to bring back Colonel Quaritch (played by Stephen Lang) by putting his consciousness in a Navi body. As soon as he gets used to his new body, he wants nothing more than revenge on Jake for what he did to him in the first film. He leads his squad in an ambush that results in Jake and his family abandoning their Pandora home and running away to live with the Met - kayina clan. Differences between Jake’s family and this new clan raise questions on whether they can survive. The film scored a seventy-six on Rotten Tomatoes and has made more than $2.1 billion at the box office.

I enjoyed this film from start to finish. The storyline is easy to follow and more creative than the first film, and the main theme of the story is family as shown through the eyes and emotions of the Sully family. The film mainly focuses on the Sully kids rather than Jake and Neytiri, who are considered the main stars of the franchise, setting up several possible storylines for already planned sequels. But the best part of this film are the beautiful and mind-blowing effects - the landscapes and visuals which caused audiences to fall in love with the first film are magnified with this film taking place in a water tribe near an ocean with the characters swimming and exploring this new part of Pandora. Overall, I give this film a perfect 10/10 - it not only is a sequel that's better than the original, it somehow makes the fourteen years it took James Cameron to bring this film to life worth every second of the wait. Avatar The Way Of Water is now in theaters and is the perfect film for audiences to dive into this winter season.