14 years later, we return to Pandora. The thing about Avatar: The Way Of Water is that it is more interesting as a tightly wrapped up way of understanding the bloody-minded-ness of some corners of the internet than it is as a film itself. To address that first: the film’s good! It doesn’t outstay its welcome even at nearly 3 and a half hours. It looks incredible, even in 3D. I’m not going to tell you it has the most groundbreaking plot ever, but that’s not the point of it. The plot is more than sufficient to hang the rest of it on. Same for the characters. Same for the screenplay. They’re functional, no more, no less, and that’s fine. I wanted a reason to go t the biggest screen in Bristol, and I got one. As I write this, much delayed nearly two months later, Avatar 2 is the third highest grossing film of all time. The groupthink of cold takes echoing around their chambers is demonstrably disproved, for all the people saying no one wants to see it and it had no cultural impact. The terminally online have no understanding of how other people think, and it scares me that they’re running our world in some ways.