Avatar: The Way of Water Review

It’s been over a decade since the first Avatar movie was released and became the highest grossing movie of all time. In 2009, at the time of its release, I had just gotten my first Facebook account and flip phone. Since then, the world has gone through many sweeping changes, from three different US presidents to an unprecedented global pandemic.

Still, the return of the world of Avatar doesn’t feel like a throwback. Even if there’s another decade between this and each of James Cameron’s three additional planned installments, I’m sure I’ll still find its themes just as resonant.

Of course, 30 years from now, we could be in dire environmental straits. The world is projected to have warmed more than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit from pre-industrial levels by then if we continue to burn fossil fuels at the same rate we currently do, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That amount of heating would be means exponentially more floods, wildfires, droughts, widespread displacement and mass extinction – and the only way to slow the rate at which Earth is warming is to make “rapid and unprecedented changes” now, according to Reuters.

Planetary annihilation looms over the Avatar franchise, which is based on the not-so-implausible concept that Earth has destroyed its resources and has now decided to violently colonize a lush extrasolar moon. Of course, its inhabitants, the Na’vi, are not…