... and is already considered the most momentous dive movie ever made?
The Avatar saga will evolve into five chapters and is James Cameron’s personal story with the distinctive message to not sacrifice everything for pure greed and conquest. It might take all five movies to really make that message loud and clear for the whole world. James Cameron is a free- and scuba diving explorer at heart and he wants to share his inspiring vision of the underwater world in Avatar II. The movie is said to last about three hours and currently only the following is known about the plot: 12 years after exploring Pandora and joining the Na'vi, Jake Sully has formed a family with Neytiri as they are wandering across the expansive world of Pandora, meeting new allies in the form of the water-dwelling Metkayina clan led by Tonowari. Everything changes when the R.D.A. (Resources Development Administration) once again invade Pandora to finish what they’ve started.
Many of the actors doing a lot of underwater work themselves, a substantial part of that involves freediving, which many of the crew including stars Kate Winslet and Sigourney Weaver had been trained in by Kirk Krack, a world-renowned expert in freediving. The cast, among a seven-year-old child, are up to four minute breath-holds. He himself spent two years working on the film as a freedive safety, training and educational consultant. Most other movies with underwater scenes are using the “dry-for-wet” method, where the scenes are shot in the dry and the water is only simulated by technical manipulation, quite to the contrary of Avatar II where all scenes are “wet-for-wet” shots, hence real performance capture underwater. It is said that the crew logged over 200’000 freedives between the cast, safety, camera people, grips, special effects technicians. On principal cast days some crew members spent about 12 hours in the water tank. Apparently, two of them logged 3 ½ hours of breath-holding on one busy day.
Even though the principal photography has been wrapped by the end of 2019, the movie will not be released until 17th December 2021, due to the extremely complex post production.
That gives you plenty of time to dive into the magical, somewhat AVATAR-like cenotes of the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico.
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