Avatar: The Way of Water review – a soggy, twee, trillion-dollar screensaver

Thirteen years in the making, James Cameron's insipid, overlong followup to his sci-fi record-breaker is a very expensive beached whale

Drenching us with a disappointment that can hardly be admitted out loud, James Cameron's soggy new digitised film has beached like a massive, pointless whale. The story, which might fill a 30-minute cartoon, is stretched as if by some AI program into a three-hour movie of epic tweeness.

The first Avatar was a pioneering 3D sci-fi spectacular which Cameron delivered in 2009. Now, after 13 years of unimaginably expensive pixel-crunching, the aquatic followup has arrived, with a third and a fourth on the way. This one is available in 3D and 2D, and so at any rate keeping loyal to that three-dimensional vision that Cameron almost single-handedly revived but which the rest of the industry has quietly forgotten about. Yet the whole idea of the avatar" from the first movie - the artificially created body that can be remotely piloted into an unknown world and which crucially formed a dramatic part of the audience's 3D experience - has been left behind.