For most of it, I was enjoying it a lot and my review was basically going to be 'if you like spending time in this world, and you don't mind it feeling like a chapter rather than a standalone story, it's good'. It has loads of cool stuff going on, it looks incredible, it uses stuff from 2 in ways that makes everything feel a bit more cohesive, it examines some central premises, it's got some great fist-pumping action and Oona Chaplin's character finally achieved 'sexy cat person' for me. But then the movie really lost me in the last 45 minutes, in a very similar way to how the second one did. The big climactic battle has way too much back and forth, it's unclear where everything or why one side is winning at any given moment, and this one is really similar to the one in 2. I don't know why (it's tempting to blame Jaffa & Silver, his co-writers on the sequels), but Cameron seems to have lost the knack for tight, escalating climactic sequences. Even the first Avatar had it nailed - the goodies finally fight back against the baddies, their low-tech ingenuity makes a big dent, but the baddies' superior numbers turn the tide and it looks like all is lost, then there's a last minute assist and the goodies win, all that's left to do is a tense hand-to-hand fight between the lead goody and lead baddy and we're done. But here, we again have too many moving parts, too much hostage-taking, too many breaks in the action.
Hopefully 4 and 5 will really knock it out of the park and wrap everything up, so 2 and 3 will feel like slightly uneven but still enjoyable chapters in a really strong overall saga!
Rating: lots of cool stuff going on but stumbles towards the end (again)
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