Avatar 2 To Close Out D23 Panel

Director James Cameron’s long-awaited “Avatar: The Way of Water” closed out the Marvel, Lucasfilm and 20th Century panel at the D23 Expo Saturday by handing out 3-D glasses to everyone in the audience and showing off six extended scenes from the movie.

The new clips weren’t released online, but stars Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang and producer Jon Landau were there in person to introduce the footage. Cameron appeared virtually to debut the exclusive D23 clips, but surprisingly, he did not provide any advance context for what the audience was about to see: No introduction as to who the new characters are, what their relationships are to each other, or how each scene connects to the larger story. Indeed, whatever the larger story is for “The Way of Water” remains rather unclear after the presentation, beyond the Na’vi avatar of Lang’s (seemingly resurrected) character Quaritch menacing the family of Worthington’s Sully and Saldaña’s Neytiri.

Coming 13 years after the release of the original film, Cameron’s follow-up focuses on the oceans of Pandora, as new performance capture technology has been developed specifically for Cameron to shoot scenes underwater. Many of the film’s cast had to learn how to free dive and hold their breath underwater to be able to perform their necessary scenes.

The first scene unveiled at the D23 Expo was the best showcase for the underwater work, in which several younger Na’vi jump into a coral reef and swim around hundreds of vividly rendered aquatic wildlife. Some of the creatures can clearly breathe underwater, while others had to rise to the surface to gasp for air….