Review Round-Up: Avatar The Way of Water
With the first 34 critic reviews in, Avatar: The Way of Water has a Metascore of 72: https://t.co/MYIcO27htX
"This is not just content you ingest. Avatar: The Way of Water is a movie you bodily inhabit for three stunning hours. We come to this place for magic, indeed." - Playlist pic.twitter.com/A8Fqs4X3ip
- metacritic (@metacritic) December 13, 2022
Reviews officially dropped for Avatar: The Way of Water. So far has been generally positive, but as usual, the immediate universal praise on social media isn't aligning with actual critical reception. With 45 reviews, the film currently has a 71 on Metacritic. On Rotten Tomatoes, it currently has an 84 with 123 reviews. For comparison sake, the first film has a 83 and 82 respectively.
Let's see what some of the critics are saying. All reviews in full can be found at the source:
EW -- The world both above and below the waterline is a thing to behold, a sensory overload of sound and color so richly tactile that it feels psychedelically, almost spiritually sublime. [Its] created its own whole-cloth reality, a meticulous world-building as astonishing and enveloping as anything we've ever seen on screen.
The Associated Press -- Will make awe-struck believers out of even Avatar agnostics like me, at least for three hours and 12 minutes. The film isn’t just visually compelling, either, it’s spiritually rich as well - a simple but penetrating story about family and the natural world that is galaxies better than the first.
Vulture -- Cameron’s divided self finds its fullest expression on Pandora not just because he can create vast new worlds and matrices of spiritually interconnected beings but also because he can fight battles he can’t fight elsewhere. For even here, he’s ultimately telling an Earth story.
Variety -- Cameron remains a fleet and exacting classical popcorn storyteller, but oh, the story he’s telling! The script he has co-written is a string of serviceable clichés that give the film the domestic adventure-thriller spine it needs, but not anything more than that.
BBC -- The stage is set for a rip-roaring adventure, a space opera sprinkled with debates on the ethics of colonialism and assimilation. But then Cameron takes the film in a new direction - and The Way of Water becomes a damp squib.
The films global rollout starts tomorrow and is Disney's widest global release in history. Its currently tracking to have a global opening weekend of $525 million.
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