THE LOWER DEPTHS

“Avatar: The Way of Water” and “Living.”

- ANTHONY LANE

Another blue movie. Thirteen years after “Avatar,” we have a sequel. The director, as before, is James Cameron, who has promised (or threatened) further installments. The new film is subtitled “The Way of Water,” which sounds like the memoir of a celebrity urologist. Once again, the center of operations is a moon called Pandora, whose inhabitants, the Na’vi, have azure skin, luminescent freckles, and magic ponytails that they plug into plants and animals. They are at one with nature and at sixes and sevens with encroaching humans, most of whom are nasty, brutish, and so short that they barely come up to the Na’vi’s navels.

The hero of the first movie was a mortal man, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who went rogue, native, and nuts for a Na’vi named Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña). In the end, he became a full-fledged Pandoran, in body, mind, and all-round spiritual oomph. The big news, in “The Way of Water,” is that he and Neytiri have been busy in the intervening period, spawning three children and adopting a couple more. (Cameron is too prim to reveal exactly how the spawning works, but I’m sure it must be heavy on the ponytails.) They all live together in a forest, bathed in bliss, until, one day, descending spaceships signal the return of Homo sapiens—specifically, a military task force, led by General Ardmore (Edie Falco), which wastes no time in churning up the soil and setting fire to innocent trees.