Avatar 2 trailer breakdown: A big-screen manifesto from James Cameron

“Return to Pandora.” This, in all its simplicity, is the sell for James Cameron’s The Way of Water Avatar. The latest trailer does not tease “the saga continues.” There’s no mention of “the Na’vi are back.” There’s just a simple appeal: Remember that amazing place we took you to 13 years ago… Wouldn’t you like to go back?

Despite the fact that the movie as been in development for eons — and that Cameron assembled a writer’s room to draft the storylines for this and no less than three additional Avatar sequels — Water is the WayIt still uses a very vague scriptline. According to Disney and 20th Century Studios, the film “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.”

It doesn’t go into much detail. If you are paying attention, you can spot that Jake’s daughter Kiri (played, astonishingly, by septuagenarian screen legend Sigourney Weaver) gets a good deal of focus, and that there’s some kind of teen-romance subplot, as well as some tension between different Na’vi clans and some war-with-humans stuff.

The race took two and a half minutes to complete. The Way of Water Avatar trailer is even more stripped back than most early teasers — and it runs strongly against the grain of modern blockbuster marketing, which loves to build out plot and motivation, preview narrative and comedy beats, and drop lore Easter eggs for fans to pore over.

In stark contrast, Cameron’s approach is almost purely vibes-based. Although the trailer contains some thrillingly dynamic shots, it isn’t heavy on action. The trailer instead highlights majestic and sweeping images, bathing the viewer in them. Avatar’s unmistakably intense sapphire-and-emerald color palette, which is far brighter than anything else in modern cinema (outside animation, at any rate). Although it premiered on Good Morning America and online on Wednesday, this is a trailer that has been built to be seen in theaters — which pretty much the entire moviegoing public will soon be doing as they sit down to watch Wakanda Forever: Black Panther The next week.

It’s a running joke that AvatarThe film that was the biggest success at the international box office has no cultural legacy. It’s true that, 13 years on, I can’t really remember what happens in it. But I remember vividly the feeling of watching it, and it’s this feeling that the new trailer is tapping directly into.

Cameron is one of cinema’s great populists, with an unerring intuition about what audiences want to see. With The Way of Water Avatar, he’s leaning into a pure and typically unfashionable utopianism. Visual grandeur is often found in less spartan or dystopian forms these days: The arid deserts of DuneThe dank miserablism and despair of Batman, the coolly desaturated hyperrealism of Christopher Nolan’s films. Marvel movies tend to focus more on characters rather than the often blurred backgrounds.

Image courtesy of 20th Century Studios

Image by 20th Century Studios

Image by 20th Century Studios

Image courtesy of 20th Century Studios

What was your last film that took you to somewhere truly amazing and beautiful? The trailer The Way of Water Avatar This movie looks almost like an immersive natural history documentary about an alien land. This sounds like the perfect place to spend a few hours lost in the darkness.

Like any filmmaker working outside the major IP factories, Cameron faces a fight to overcome the “I’ll just watch it at home” culture and get people into theaters. For him — as for Nolan and producer-stars like Tom Cruise — this is about more than just about putting assess in seats to recoup the budget; it’s an article of faith. Cruise demonstrated his point with this year’s nostalgia, clean storytelling and practical spectacle. Maverick is the Top Gun.

Now it’s Cameron’s turn. He’s bringing every technical resource available to bear on the challenge of getting audiences to turn out, from 3D, to IMAX, to high frame rate. With all of its variants. Water is the Way It will be released in more formats than any previous film. While the technology is complicated, the pitch for the film is quite simple. He is familiar with half of what the world saw. Avatar, and he knows they’ve seen nothing like it since. This is their chance to have that feeling again, and there’s no way they can have it at home.