Avatar The Way of Water trailer: James Cameron’s sequel promises a heart-stopping return to Pandora
The first trailer for director James Cameron’s long-awaited Avatar: The Way of Water was released on Wednesday, ahead of the film’s global debut next month. Avatar 2 has been in the making for over a decade, with Cameron going to his usual painstaking lengths to deliver the perfect sequel. The first film, Avatar, was released back in 2009, and remains the highest-grossing movie of all time.
In the new stunning trailer, we return to Pandora and are introduced to Jake Sully’s (Sam Worthington) daughter, and she confides in him that she feels ‘her heartbeat’ though it’s unclear who exactly she is referring to. In a gleam of blue, the trailer then shows the Pandora creatures against a pounding soundtrack. There are scenes of beauty and joy interspersed with terrors and threats as Zoe Saldana’s Neytiri yells, “This is our home”. The trailer ends with hope, as Jake makes Neytiri promise that she must be strong. Once again, the messaging promises to be just as heavy as the first film, with emphasis on family and nature. We see different aspects of Pandora that we hadn’t witnessed before.
Avatar: The Way of Water will take fans to new corners of the world of Pandora, and James Cameron has shot a lot of it using state-of-the-art underwater photography techniques. He also shot the third film simultaneously, but work on the proposed fourth and fifth films will commence in earnest only after Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 are successful.
The original Avatar told the story of a group of human invaders who arrived on an alien land with a mission to plunder it for resources.
There has been a lot of debate about the cultural relevance of Avatar, which broke box office records, but didn’t spawn the kind of multi-platform franchise that other big-budget films do. For instance, we didn’t get multiple television shows and video games to bide the time between the two films. James Cameron had earlier declared that he could picture himself making only Avatar movies for the rest of his career, but more recent reports suggest that different filmmakers could take the series forward once Cameron is done with his core story.
Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Cliff Curtis, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Edie Falco, Jemaine Clement and Kate Winslet star in Avatar: The Way of Water. The film will be released on December 16 in theatres.
