James Cameron is really banking on how much you want to hang out on Pandora. The final final trailer for Avatar: The Way of Water is all swoopy Pandoran creature-riding among the waves—a sea of blue interspersed with the metal and gray of human war. And a flamethrower, for a bright splash of red!
It’s very hard to get a sense of the scale the phrase “the motion picture event of a generation” implies. Cameron and his team have been working on this film—the first of four Avatar sequels—for years; actors learned to hold their breath for incredible periods of time; technology, one assumes, continues to shift as the groundbreaking director works. But none of that can make a movie great if it doesn’t have a good story.
The sequel’s summary says only, “Set more than a decade after the events of the first film, Avatar: The Way of Water begins to tell the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri, and their kids), the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive, and the tragedies they endure.” The trailer suggests that Sully (Sam Worthington) and fam have fled their forest home to hang out with a water clan, where at least one of the kids faces some (friendly?) hazing and develops a determination to be a warrior.
One of those kids is voiced by Sigourney Weaver; Jamie Flatters, Britain Dalton, and Trinity Bliss play the other three. Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldaña return as Jake and Neytiri; Stephen Lang also returns as Colonel Quaritch. The rest of the cast includes Jemaine Clement, Cliff Curtis, Edie Falco, Joel David Moore, Kate Winslet, and Michelle Yeoh.
According to a Fandango poll, Avatar: The Way of Water is the movie Gen Z folks most want to see this holiday season. They’ll get their wish when it splashes into theaters on December 16th.
