Despite somehow reclaiming its crown as the highest-grossing movie of all time, James Cameron's 2009 sci-fi eco epic Avatar remains that most curious of phenomena: the $2 billion mega-smash that seemed to sink without a cultural trace, consigned to a weird dustbin of history alongside other late 00s ephemera – Black Eyed Peas CDs, white people wearing feathers at Coachella, star Sam Worthington's tribal arm tattoos.
Thirteen long years after the first film revolutionised the movie-going experience (read: kicked off a short-lived phase of 3D films) and introduced "I see you" to the cultural lexicon (wait: it didn't?), Cameron is back with Avatar: The Way of Water, the first in a proposed series of four sequels that the director – his trademark braggadocio in full flight – expects will change the way the world sees movies.
But will audiences be sufficiently dazzled by a computer-generated spectacle the way they were in the relatively more innocent days of 2009, before the landscape shifted toward endless, enervating superhero tentpoles loaded with visual effects that are denuded of wonder?
