Back when the MCU was a mere twinkle in Kevin Feige’s eye, the biggest multi-million-dollar CGI extravaganza we had was Avatar. Director James Cameron has been hidden away in a studio somewhere ever since pumping out sequels, and the first one is finally here. But the landscape has changed a lot in 13 years – when many people recall their relationship with Avatar, they remark that it was certainly a spectacle, but they cannot remember much else about it. Physical cinemas are also not the almighty draw they used to be, and it’s becoming more common for big movies to not make their money back. But Jim Cameron don’t flop – he’s a proven record beater, and the mere idea of it is absurd. More importantly, Cameron don’t dud neither – this is a filmmaker who resides ahead of the curve, so let’s ride the wave with Avatar: The Way of Water.
After some years of peace, the sky people are back in Pandora. Former avatar Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), leader of a forest clan of the native Na’vi, has managed a family with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), made up of three of his own, and a mysterious child birthed by the late Dr. Grace Augustine’s shutdown avatar. When Earth’s Resources Development Administration (The RDA) make it clear they harness a personal vendetta against Sully, Sully moves his family out of the forestlands, and far away into Pandora’s bays, hoping to find refuge among the reef clan, Metkayina. They study the way of water, providing the movie with many opportunities to explore the great depths of these foreign oceans, and for Sully’s family to build enduring connections amongst a new tribe.
Yes, you may have already heard the whispers, and if you’re not all-in with Avatar, then this movie is incredibly boring. The king of ground-breaking sequels – James Cameron, with Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgement Day in his bag – has really bogged himself down in this one, and for this movie to gain a following, audiences are going to have to be happy sitting through a slow 3-hour runtime, and parents are going to have to be okay with the swearing and scares that occur along the way. Since Cameron’s movies are notoriously long, once it got going and I could feel the tedium seeping in for me, I knew there was no escape. Sadly, there isn’t an impressive thing about this story, which is nearly a complete copy of the first movie, but set in water. This time, we see the deceased Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) return as an avatar, because hours before he died, he had the wherewithal to record his consciousness onto a scientific device that could be transferred into a synthetic Na’vi 😮 As he attempts to bond with a flying mountain banshee, as Sully did in the last movie, it would’ve been more interesting, considering he was so against the avatar program in the beginning and beaten, if he hadn’t already bit the dust – but with old-man Luke Skywalker ringing my ears: ‘no one’s ever really gone’ 🙌 I thought it cheapened the death, and conversely, I like the way the movie has Sigourney Weaver return for motion-capture, as a completely new character, and I would’ve preferred if Stephen Lang was honoured in a similar way.
My favourite scenes probably involved the villainous marine Captain Mick Scoresby, but that could just be because I enjoyed seeing Aussie actor Brendan Cowell in a big budget movie, along with the gnarly way he loses an arm. Casting half the Flight of the Conchords crew in Kiwi’s Jermaine Clement, as a new sympathetic human character to stand alongside Scoresby, and having him do a jolty American accent, was a strange choice though. With the knowledge that we have sequels ahead of us, I didn’t expect anyone to die in this caper, so props to the movie for killing the youngest son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), and reminding me that there were still stakes to take seriously, even if minimally. Yet remember when Zoe Saldana used to be in Avatar? Neytiri had such spirit in the last movie, but in her brief and infrequent scenes here, all she does is moan and snarl. Even worse than her is the pregnant Queen Ronal (Kate Winslet) – she’s… she’s not very friendly.
At least the first Avatar dealt with colonialism, and had the scientists pitted against the corporals pretty hard for intellectual control. I appreciate how much the first movie made a point of how all the things on Pandora were connected, which is not so far removed from the ecologies of our own, but repeating the wonder of this virtue in Avatar: The Way of Water just feels like ground already well established. The movie feels more like a trip to the aquarium with racist unruly teenagers, and I felt like I would’ve been better off watching Animal Planet or David Attenborough, and learning something real. The movie leans so chorishly on ‘family’ to find any emotional root, and it reminded me of when I heard Stephen Spielberg once say that as he’s gotten older, he values and prioritises differently, and if he’d have written Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the nineties, after he’d had children, then the ending would’ve been more wholesome – there’s no way Roy wouldn’t have left his family to go exploring with aliens. I say this to point out that maybe I’m not sensing the same bite with Avatar: The Way of Water because Cameron has aged up, and this is now what interests him the most, where it’s lacklustre sappy nonsense to me. Maybe he made this for his grandkids, where I think he might’ve got so bogged down in the detail that he forgot to make the movie accessible.
This is not to say there isn’t lots of CGI to be impressed about; there’s frames and tracking shots that make you awe at how they were created. It’s just that I’m a story guy, and I see the CGI as a means of telling a good story – Avatar seems to strike that, reverse it, and use its story as an excuse to string CGI together. Specifically, to when something does happen, it’s so obvious to me that the corporals would be tracking their own ships, so when the human doctor allies go to aid a stricken Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) after a seizure, they lead the bad guys to their target – and after spending so much time learning how to swim in the oceans, I can’t believe there’s no time for moral quandary, no conversations between the Metkayina and Sully’s family on the risks of alerting any humans or avatars to their hideout before making the call – maybe those scenes were cut out. I didn’t mind Spider (Jack Champion) though, who is essentially a Na’vi learning and abashed by the human way, flipping the dynamic as it were in the first Avatar well, and the tension between him and his father will grow in future movies if fostered. I was drawn to Kiri too (a little pervy in my own way), although she’s clearly going to be Avatar-Jesus. In fact, all the kids were well-defined, it’s the story that’s noneventful.
Ashamedly, there were huge chunks of the movie where I was Sonny Cofax in Big Daddy, watching the Kangaroo Song – “I can’t take this shit; are you serious?”. The final act showdown is long, like everything else, but definitely the part I enjoyed that most – although if I’d not paid for my ticket, beholden to my seat, then I’m not sure I would’ve made it. Transparently, I mightn’t have been all that excited to see another Avatar movie like some folks out there, but I was open to the experience, and genuinely joyous at the prospect of seeing a new James Cameron movie in theatres, as it’s been 13 years since we’ve had the opportunity to do that as well. I’d ultimately describe the flow of Avatar: The Way of Water as productivity with a low mood – sure, there’s a lot of great detailed work completed, but was it any fun? And I can only assume what the next movie will be – Avatar: The Way of Fire, where Jake moves his family inside a volcano, and they learn a new skillset with fire; the volcano people would be purple, of course; a mix of red and blue. Sure, this movie may benefit from being a chapter in a larger story, but Avatar: The Way of Water feels mostly like setup again, repeating a lot of what has come before. If the Fantastic Beasts series hadn’t been canned by Warner Bros., I’d be tempted to put Avatar in the same unimpressive category, knowing there’s more to come but dejected by the idea already. I gave Avatar a 4.0 back in the day because it was innovative, but this is much lower – a sour note to end the year.
2.5
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