With a wave of new information about the upcoming release of Avatar: The Way of Water, a newly revealed image via an Empire Magazine exclusive offers a new look at the breathtaking underwater imagery that audiences will experience in the film. The image reveals a young Na'vi swimming with a smile under the oceans of Pandora.
The character in focus is likely one of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri's (Zoe Saldaña) children that will appear in the film. The young Na'vi is swimming through a school of small alien fish, teasing that the oceans of Pandora will offer audiences a rich and detailed ecosystem. The first Avatar was praised for its detailed world building, especially with the speculative evolutionary designs of Pandora's wildlife. With the release of the long-awaited sequel, the world will finally expand as audiences are transported to the planet's oceans later this year.
Teasing the photorealistic CGI that audiences will get to experience from the film, the sequel will offer its own visual wonders that will stand out among the first Avatar. The image does an effective job at showing the visual leap that Avatar: The Way of Water will have compared to the original film from 2009 which was lauded for its advancement of motion capture technology and 3D filmmaking, becoming a landmark in the evolution of filmmaking.
Avatar: The Way of Water will also stand as a landmark on its own as the film will be the first to utilize underwater motion capture technology. The recently revealed image, alongside some brief scenes in the film's trailer, offers a brief glimpse of what audiences will be expecting with the new technology which will give more realistic physics to the CG animation than anything ever seen before.
With the release of a new image, director James Cameron revealed in an exclusive with Empire Magazine that the film will be around three hours long, reflecting the grand scale of the sequel. “I don’t want anybody whining about length when they sit and binge-watch [television] for eight hours,” the director said.
With 13 years of development, audiences will only have to wait a few more months to return to the world of Pandora. Going off of what's been shown from the wave of new images, the film is guaranteed to be a visual marvel when it releases in theaters later this year.
Avatar: The Way of Water will be released exclusively in theaters on December 16. The first Avatar will be re-released in theaters on September 23.