Avatar – A Bigger Splash

The long-awaited sequel to the highest-grossing film of all time and the opening chapter in a fully conceived four-film saga, Avatar: The Way Of Water is a 13-years-in-the-making return trip to cinema's most immersive world. Total Film plunges back into Pandora with James Cameron, the film's cast and its crew to uncover the bigger, bolder, even bluer sequel.

- By Jordan Farley

There’s a good reason why James Cameron is running 15 minutes late when Total Film calls. It’s five weeks until his deadline to deliver Avatar: The Way Of Water when we speak over Zoom in mid-October, and the legendary filmmaker is spending every waking moment on Pandora. “It’s going to be a bit of a photo finish, but the issue is not that we won’t get done,” he starts, pausing to grin. “The issue is: will there be some little compromises here and there throughout the film that probably only I would notice?”

Cameron has never done things by halves, and the Avatar sequels may be the ultimate example of that thinking in a career built on pushing the limits of what’s possible on screen. Subject to a disproportionate level of scepticism before release in mid-December 2009, Avatar resonated in large part thanks to the allure of its richly detailed, exquisitely realised alien world of Pandora, inhabited by the lithe, blue-skinned Na’vi. It would go on to obliterate box-office records as audiences returned, again and again, to experience cinema’s unrivalled escapist fantasy, in still-novel 3D.