Disappointed is a kind way to put my response to this movie. In fairness, two films are strung out interminably together (three hours, 12 minutes), and that was too bad since the whole film would barely fill up a 30-minute cartoon in terms of pace and plot.

One of the movies was good, one was awful.

The first Avatar has almost become a cult religion; people loved it so much. It was original and graphically powerful.

James Cameron liked it so much that he decided to do it again with some snazzier 3-D and high frame rate smoothness technology and gorgeous water scenes.

Cameron spent too much money to make this film, just like a kid in a candy store. The result was boring and leaden.

Avatar 2, The Way Of Water, revisits the Na-Vi (no subtlety, get it?) tribe from Avatar One. These people live happily, even idyllically (the point is to make us feel even worse about the persecution and slaughter of our own Native Americans).

The environmentally sound family of Sully and Neytiri are living in bliss with their children, stepdaughter Jurum and a kind of feral human boy called Spider.

Their beautiful, sappy,  and troubleless existence is shattered by the arrival of an ex-human mutant Marine with someone else’s mind inserted into his brain.  

He was awakened in a Frankenstein way and restored to consciousness as a giant murderous super marine posing as a Na-Vi and sent out to fool and find and kill Neytiri, who has been leading the resistance against the evil Sky-People (you know they are evil because they destroy the environment and torture and kill animals, many times and at great length.)

Cameron has all the time in the world. He blew his budget all the way to Mars. The middle of the movie, if you last that long, is worth the wait.

The color and graphics are mostly stunning, especially in 3-D, which Cameron loves, but it is the technology the rest of Hollywood forgot.

But it was not as stimulating or beautiful as I hoped, and honestly, it was not all that different from the first movie. I guess that one was a bigger shock and hard to top.

The movie is stuffed with all kinds of incomprehensible gibberish, from all the spiritual water chatter (we are one, to fish and plant spirits underwater to the stilted, almost humorous “wise man” voices of the tribe leaders.

I think Cameron thinks the people who come to see his movies are dumb.

In this movie, whales talk (before getting harpooned and torpedoed and the sea itself is full of supernatural powers, but hardly ever seen when they were really needed.

The underwater sequences, which the movie abruptly turns to for yet another hour, are almost worth the rest of the messy, dumb, and nonsensical film.

Frankenstein-of-the sea tries to kill the Na-Vi children but bungles it at least a dozen times before finally nailing one.

The children in that family seem to have one near-death episode a minute.

Even that gets boring. The Marine Monster (he is taller than the other evil human) is in ferocious pursuit on and off throughout the movie, threatening and killing and maiming all the way along.

He is cruel but without any style or menace. I’ll take the Joker any day of the week.

Neytiri is curiously averse to fighting for a resistance leader. At the first sign of trouble, he takes off, leaving the tribe to take care of itself. Forget the destruction of the planet, he says, a dad has to protect his family.

He is no Che Guevera and lacks the superhero personality and steel we have come to know so well. He’s squishy.

And absolutely no one in this movie has a sense of humor, cracks a joke, or has any fun. There is comic relief and wise cracking even the gloomiest Batman movies.

The kids are even grim when they are playing, which is mostly indistinguishable from when they are fleeing for their lives.

The Sully family flees to another island community – “sea” people live there, the newcomers are “forest” people – and ends up in another apparent Eden.

We know this can’t last long, and of course, it doesn’t. Cameron is reminding us to be welcoming and inclusive.  The villagers didn’t get the message. They don’t like “forest” people.

For the next hour of the movie, the bad guys show up with a sea-born armada that would have made the D-Day invasion look like a Church picnic.

Every boat had massive firepower (but dreadful aim) and nobody seemed able to hit what they were shooting at (except for some whales.)

The sea morphed again, this time into the land of a thousand big and loud fires and explosions.

The pristine sea turned into a Gulf Of Mexico oil fire and spill.

I don’t know how many of you out there would enjoy seeing friendly and spiritual giant whales tortured and slaughtered for what seems like yet another hour, but it didn’t work for me. I got squirmy.

I groaned by the end, but there was one more tortuous hour coming,  the eternal final battle scene between the Native Americans (you got it, right, Na-Vi?) and the rich, greedy, vicious humans who can’t wait to butcher people and ruin their culture (get it?)

Almost every one in the movie was killed many times, but they were just kidding. The Sully family had way more than nine lives.

(At this point, Maria stopped watching and meditated for an hour. She didn’t miss a thing.)

In the first Avatar, Cameron moved almost surreally between land to sea-based existence. It was a beautiful, exciting, original triumph, and creative pizz-azz.

Avatar 2 was as vital as a sponge for most of those three-plus hours.

But even the lovely visual underwater images felt flat because Cameron overwhelmed his own movie by spinning out of control and choking it with money and pomposity.

When you are that big and successful (Titanic, Avatar One), nobody can tell you when to stop, so you never do.

The Guardian newspaper’s critic Peter Bradshaw wrote that the “floatingly bland plot  is like a children’s story without the humor, a YA story without the emotional wound, an action thriller without the edge of real excitement.”

Ouch, but true.

Sometimes less is more. Avatar 2 could have lost a couple of those hours and been twice the movie.

This final battle (the ones that pull in 14-year-old boys involved at least a thousand water tanks, boats, planes, robots, greedy and slimy bastards, missiles and torpedoes, and depth charged against a handful of peaceable natives with bows and arrows and flying pterodactyl- like shrieking birds.

I lost count of the twists and turns at the ending; it could have been a movie all it’s own.

Are we over four hours yet?

Half of the movie was candy to look at, and a half was incomprehensible. In trying to make heavy political points and buy the most expensive toys Cameron forgets how to make a good movie.

The message: Humans are ruining the earth, the water is one (whatever that means), and we keep destroying other people’s habits and paradise.

We don’t need to be hit over the head with it. Or maybe we do.

Is there anyone out there who doesn’t know this? Cameron had too much money to spend -360 million dollars. It was too much, too long, too loud, too violent, and too stupid.

I know millions worshipped the first Avatar, and I wish I had better news to bring them. Maybe I’m just wrong.

True Avatar fans can only hope.