Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Courtesy of 20th Century Studios
Avatar: The Way of Water isn’t a movie meant to be watched so much as experienced. You have to kick back in one of those massive reclining theater seats, bolt 3D glasses to your face, and stare at the oversized screen straight-on, shoving popcorn into your mouth to remind yourself that you don’t actually live on Pandora.
Which is both too bad and a very good thing, actually. Pandora, the alien world that Avatar takes us to, is composed of an array of gorgeous vistas. The first film (so I’m told; I never saw it; I’ve got too much life to live) is set in a lush woodland area, where our heroes settle down.
This sequel forces Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), and their family to abandon the forest for the sea, where they take refuge from the humans hunting them down. These Pandoran waters are an otherworldly blue, home to extraterrestrial whales and jellyfish; the sea in Pandora is an excellent place to think of the future, one where the humans haven’t destroyed everything in an effort to revive Earth.