Film reviews for stressed, cynical students— Avatar: The Way of Water

‘London Gatwick’ burns down the Tree of Life out of pure spite in this scathing review.

tickets to Avatar actually lived to see the ending. Not because they left halfway through, out of sheer boredom though they would have been perfectly entitled to do so but because they literally died in their seats, internal organs caught in the blast radius of their ruptured bladder. An unpleasant image? Don’t blame me, blame James Cameron. That man has blood on his hands.

If you’re going to make a film so long people spontaneously combust in the middle of it, at least make it good. Make it really, really good. The last Lord of the Rings movie is longer than a very long marathon, but despite all that weird rolling around in bed towards the end, it somehow manages to earn every minute, every second, of its bloated runtime. Not so Avatar.

Humanity is beyond saving.

‘Humanity’s beyond saving? What’s he on about? Oh, I get it. He’s talking about Ukraine, inflation, gas prices, climate change that sort of thing. Right?’

No, I’m not. Don’t get me wrong. Ukraine, inflation, gas prices and climate change are all part of the reason humanity is beyond saving. But they’re not the main reason. Not even close. For incontrovertible evidence that humanity is doomed, look no further than the runaway success of the new Avatar film, poetically subtitled The Way of Water.

What does it say about us as a species that the most popular movie of 2022 was something as hopelessly dull, didactic and derivative as Avatar? Nothing good.

First up, the length. Oh my Christ, the length. No film should last longer than three hours. If you can’t fit the story into three hours, you should be making a TV show, not a movie. And while we’re at it, have some respect for people’s bladders. I’d be surprised if even half the people who bought

It’s not even a film. It’s just an extended videogame cutscene. Ninety percent of it is CGI. When I go to the cinema, I want to see people, real, living, breathing people, with human heads, human faces, human hair, human eyes, human limbs and, above all, human emotions not a bunch of overgrown Smurfs taking swimming lessons.

If only it were as funny as a Smurfs film. Instead, we get a plot even more predictable than the eventual collapse of human civilisation: bad guys want revenge on good guys for perceived slight; bad guys attack good guys; good guys pretend to lose for a bit before finally defeating bad guys. I mean, wow. I’d have been blown away if I hadn’t already seen [insert title of literally any other action film ever made.]

How has it been so successful? At the time of writing, Avatar has grossed $1.7 billion at the global box office and counting. I can only conclude that humans are such miserable creatures that we will use literally any excuse, even one as bad as Avatar, to escape from the equally miserable world in which we live. Either that or we know it’s a terrible film and are just a bunch of masochists. (Though it’s also worth mentioning the scarily large number of men with a ‘thing’ Na’vi, utterly sexless yet weirdly sexy. Apparently. Not that I’d know.)