There’s no denying what a profound undertaking Avatar: The Way of Water is. Like any sequel, the expectations were set by the original, which in this case happens to be the greatest commercial success of all time. Paradoxically, Avatar has also fallen into weird void in the zeitgeist in the 13 years since its release, putting The Way of Water in the precarious position of needing to surpass its success ($2 billion to break even, according to director James Cameron) while also reigniting an increasingly ambivalent audience. In mythologizing the original while striving to recapture the qualities that made it such a transportive experience, The Way of Water epitomizes the legacyquel. At the same time, it’s also the first chapter in a story that will unfold over the next three films, and it bears the burden of establishing characters, themes, and storylines that won’t pay off for years. It’s the world’s most expensive balancing act; a spectacle unlike anything you’ve seen before, where every spinning plate costs $100 million. Some would prefer to see it all come crashing down, but anyone rooting against it will be sorely disappointed. Avatar: The Way of Water is every bit as spectacular as it needed to be, and then some.

While the 13 year gap between films is less than ideal - particularly now that Marvel has shaped our perception of a successful franchise in the interim - that time has provided The Way of Water with significant technological advancements. Avatar was groundbreaking for 3D and CGI, and to live up to the original, The Way of Water has to represent the next step forward in cinema. It does that in remarkable and subtle ways, but it’s less definable than the original. The 3D and CGI are vastly improved, giving the film a more vibrant, clearer, and realistic look. It also has the best implementation of high frame rate ever. Varying between 48fps to 24fps from scene to scene, The Way of Water has a hyper-real look befitting of its fantasy world. High frame rate has led to big budget disasters in the past, most notably with The Hobbit trilogy (at least critically), but its implementation here is natural and enhances both the big action sequences as well as the small intimate scenes. Across its three-hour run time, I can only recount two instances when the artifice cracked and something unnatural pulled me out of the moment. A dip into the uncanny valley here and there is perfectly excusable when the world is this fully realized.

Related: In Defense Of Unobtanium

The sequel leaves the forest of Pandora to explore the planet’s oceans, where Sully and his family have gone into hiding. Beneath the surface of Pandora’s sea is a vast world teeming with life, history, and culture, with all of the depth and detail that made Pandora feel so real in the original. As the underwater world is revealed, The Way of Water occasionally takes on qualities of a nature documentary. Cameron’s experience as a deepsea documentarian and his fascination with marine life comes through in every lovingly arranged composition. The sea is a thematically rich setting. It’s vast and unknowable, yet simple and beautiful. It’s both dangerous and life-giving, indifferent and kind. The film uses the ocean to deepen its ecological themes and expand the world of Pandora, but it’s also a lens through which to view Avatar’s heroes and villains in a new way.

A lot has happened in the years since the Omaticaya ran off the RDA and sent them back to Earth, but we also discover a lot of things that happened before that. The Way of Water’s biggest weakness might come from a lack of forethought in the original film - something the sequel overcorrects to a degree as it looks forward to the future. Somehow, Stephen Lang’s Colonel Quaritch has returned as an avatar, a contrivance explained by a back-up program created before his last battle with Sully. Also, he had an infant son we never heard about on Pandora, who stayed behind when the rest of the RDA left. Meanwhile, Sully and Neytiri had three children and adopted a fourth - the daughter of Signourney Weaver’s Dr. Augustine’s Avatar’s corpse born of seemingly immaculate conception. All of this information is delivered in the opening minutes of the film through a Worthington voice-over, no longer framed diegetically as an audio diary, and you just have to roll with it. These retcons catch you off guard, but quickly it becomes clear they’re the right choices for this story, and the bigger narrative moving forward.

For all the new characters and elements the sequel adds, there’s an overwhelmingly cyclical nature to the story. It bears an odd reverence for the story beats and dialogue of the original. As if to dispel the common refrain that Avatar isn’t quotable, lines from the first movie are repeated verbatim here. When Avatar Quaritch meets his team, he tells his team they aren’t in Kansas anymore. The Matriarch of the Metkayina tribe that welcomes Sully’s family to the reef tells them they are like babies. When a new, more valuable resource than unobtainium is revealed, it’s explained using word-for-word the exact same speech Ribisi’s Parker Selfridge gave Dr. Augustine. It can read like sequelitis, but these frequent call backs recontextualize those moments and help us connect with Avatar’s overarching themes. Quaritch’s return isn’t just a risk-averse decision to bring back a strong villain, he stands as a symbol of the relentlessness of American imperialism. The dialogue’s ability to maintain a common vernacular while subtextually exploring the film’s themes was one of the strengths of the first Avatar, and remains such in the sequel.

The Way of Water raises the stakes in a sense. The RDA has returned after several decades, but this time they’re not just here for valuable rocks, they’re here to turn Pandora into Earth 2.0. As the colonists claim territory and expand, the Na’vi find themselves displaced from their home and incapable of facing the RDA’s even more advanced technology. But unlike the original Avatar, this isn’t the story of a people rising up to beat back their oppressors, but rather a family fleeing a war-torn nation and seeking asylum in a foreign land. The culture clash, identity issues, and all the struggles of immigrating are explored through the eyes of each member of Sully’s family, as well as the Metkayina people that give them safe harbor. It’s no small feat to balance such a massive cast of new characters, particularly when so many of them are children, and especially when they’re all CGI cat people. But through exceptional pacing that takes its time to develop each person, the film pulls everything together beautifully in the end.

The Way of Water is just one chapter in a bigger story, and it makes some narrative sacrifices in order to serve the bigger picture. Big, important things happen, but no one character is really given a complete arc here. There are threads yet to be explored, and unanswered questions that will continue on through the next three sequels. That’s not to say that The Way of Water is full of sequel bait in the MCU sense, but rather that its story is too big for one film. Even so, this is a spectacular return to Pandora and a movie-going experience unlike any other. It lives up to the original by maintaining its themes and sense of wonder while embarking on its own path, and sets up an intriguing future for the series. Avatar was an unmissable cinematic event in 2009, and The Way of Water is nothing less in 2022.

Next: Literally Everyone Is Wrong About Avatar