“Teach them our ways so they do not suffer the shame of being useless.”
On the one hand, Avatar: The Way of Water is a generic sci-fi fantasy blockbuster, its big screen excitations undercut by a poorly conceived, sloppily executed, and thematically shallow story that follows the contours of countless other hackneyed tentpole films. This is par for the course with James Cameron. But while one could argue that a narrative fast food diet is required when a film needs to make a billion dollars to break even, selling a lot of fast food doesn’t make it healthy. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.
On the other hand, its uncommonly idiosyncratic vision of a world unlike our own, as well as the grand technical challenge undertaken to realize that spectacular vision, is a radiant totem of big budget auteurism. Once it gets the initial obstacles of its crudely contrived story over and done with, The Way of Water immerses the audience in a richly imagined environ teeming with plausible, majestic biota derived from the director’s long-standing passion for the mysteries of the deep.1 As the film gets into the meat of its three hour runtime, we are drawn into this incredible world, given surprising leeway to explore and become enchanted by its resplendent hinterlands, and then bombarded with large scale action scenes so breathtakingly rendered that all of Cameron’s deficiencies as a storyteller basically cease to matter.
But getting to those sublime stretches takes time, much of which is spent begrudgingly setting the stage. To wit, not only does James Cameron’s uneven screenplay (co-written with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver) see the deceased Quaritch (Stephen Lang) reborn in the body of a Na’vi, it also introduces the children of Quaritch, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), and Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), giving the entire scenario built-in emotional stakes so that character development can be more or less sidestepped altogether. It even replaces the first film’s infamous MacGuffin with an even sillier one.
Set more than a decade after the events of Avatar, the sequel posits that the earth has been so depleted of natural resources that humanity is no longer looking to simply mine unobtainium from beneath the surface of Pandora. Now they’re looking to colonize it. But even if earth were in good health, the “sky people” would persist in their efforts to harvest the anti-aging enzymes that have been discovered in the brains of the whale-like creatures known as tulkun. Because who wouldn’t harpoon a whale or two for ten million bucks a whack?
Leading a team of other ‘recombinants,’ the freshly-awakened Quaritch immediately sets out to cut the head off the snake. Conveniently, this falls right in line with the reincarnated colonel’s personal vendetta against Sully, who, now fully Na’vi and the leader of the Omaticaya people, has spent the past decade building a family with Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and living peacefully in the jungle. Notably, though, where the first film seemed to suggest that this paraplegic soldier, sent to the habitable moon as a mercenary, had come to view the spiritually harmonious Na’vi way of life as his own, the sequel finds him equipped with Terran ordnance and operating his family like a military unit. He’s fully Na’vi in body, and maybe in spirit as well, but he still has a human mind.
Even so, against his wife’s wishes Sully elects not to fight but to flee from Quaritch, seeking refuge with an ocean-dwelling tribe far afield from their old homeland. They’re received only reluctantly, with the sea people’s leader (Cliff Curtis) and his wife (Kate Winslet) openly questioning the utility of the foreigners’ maladapted bodies and numerous tribesmen displaying antipathy toward the four-fingered Na’vi-human hybrids. Just as Neytiri was designated to instruct Jake in the ways of the Omaticaya in the first film, so the chief’s daughter Tsireya (Bailey Bass) is tasked with teaching “the way of water” to the Sully clan—Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), and Kiri (Weaver), the daughter of Dr. Augustine, whose spiritless avatar miraculously conceived and gave birth in a comatose state. An adopted human son, Spider (Jack Champion), who turns out to be Quaritch’s child, is kidnapped by his old man’s blue-skinned successor and made to translate his demands to various Na’vi tribes. No sooner have the transplants begun to comprehend their new culture than Quaritch has tracked them to the remote archipelago, commencing a drawn out firefight on, under, and above the coastal waters involving the entire Sully family and the Metkayina tribe.
It’s abundantly clear from the wavering attentions of the film’s storyline as well as the lengthy gestation period between the first film and its sequel that Cameron is much more interested in elaborating the wilds of Pandora and seamlessly integrating CGI animation with live action than he is in developing a complex narrative within his fantasy world. He’s much more attuned to the intricacies and integration of his expansive creation than a George Lucas or a… well, truth be told, there aren’t that many other suitable reference points in cinema. The Matrix? Aliens? He’s a big ideas guy and a nitty gritty details guy, and I think we actually need to look to written works of science fiction to find worlds as complex and coherent as Pandora. Of course, those classic sci-fi books to which it might aspire typically have brilliant storylines to match their visionary worlds, and that’s where the comparison falls apart.
In any case, if we set aside the cookie-cutter narrative that served as the writer-director’s excuse to demand hundreds of millions of dollars to build a virtual world beyond anyone’s but his own wildest imaginations, The Way of Water is unequivocally successful in the conceptualization and realization of its natural habitat and social milieu. From its ingenious sea-to-air mounts, to its euphoric underwater excursions,2 to its moments of religious ecstasy when the living and the dead briefly commune via the ecosystem’s collective consciousness/mother goddess, Cameron’s extraordinary concepts and masterful craftsmanship are on display at every turn. This version of Pandora is certainly the most painstakingly-rendered CGI environment I’ve ever laid eyes on and it’s a pure sensory joy just to be immersed in it. At one point during the tulkun hunting expedition, I found a part of my brain idly wondering how a certain effect was achieved, only to realize that not only was the effect I was considering extremely well done, but a tulkun itself and the water it was swimming in were almost certainly CGI creations as well. A few trailers for other mega-expensive blockbusters with completely virtual environments played before The Way of Water began, and it put them all to shame.
Where the first film often felt like it sacrificed the attractions of its exotic world for the sake of its trite story, the sequel luxuriates in the exploration of Pandora’s nooks and crannies. Indeed, it doesn’t really ramp up the suspense until the Sully’s have already resettled with the sea people and Lo’ak has befriended an outcast tulkun who saved his life—a protracted sequence that makes time for the new pals to figure out how to communicate and jointly galivant about the open waters, even as the entire tribe searches for the missing youngster. Because the Sullys are unfamiliar with the flora and fauna of this region, we get to experience along with them the joys of discovery. For Lo’ak, this means perceiving that tulkun are an intelligent species with their own language, mathematical system, music, and philosophy. For Kiri, this entails a spiritual bond with myriad aquatic lifeforms (which, along with her possibly-immaculate conception predicts a messianic reveal in one of the next few sequels).
While the story’s themes of parenthood, gender roles, xenophobia, and environmentalism are there because the story needs some well worn and voguish tracks to follow, it is again Cameron’s worldbuilding that buoys the entire enterprise and provides food for thought—mostly as it pertains to its theological implications. Humans like to argue over which conception of God is the correct one or if a supreme deity exists at all, but what does it mean for humanity to encounter another sentient species elsewhere in the universe with a distinct religious system? What does it mean that the spirit of Dr. Augustine, a human, could be absorbed into Eywa? What does it mean that the Na’vi can bond to Eywa through the plant life of Pandora? For that matter, what does it mean that a human’s consciousness can be permanently transplanted into the body of a Na’vi? I don’t know the answers to these questions, and we’re in the realm of fantasy so ultimately they are merely an impetus for cogitation and an interesting reflection on mankind’s inherent spirituality.
Plus it’s all background anyway. Crucial background, but background nonetheless. Every part of the film’s construction, from its easily readable characters to its initially awkward exposition to its underbaked thematic ruminations to its director’s staple fixations (big guns, military grunts, cornball dialogue, mechanical exoskeletons, sinking ships), is in service of achieving a grandiose spectacle that could only have come from the mind of James Cameron—perhaps the only totally sincere and brazenly unsophisticated filmmaker working today who is capable of truly dazzling a wide audience with an utterly personal vision.
1. Throughout his career, Cameron has helmed two “underwater” films—The Abyss and Titanic—and made two documentaries in which the filmmaker himself took part in deep sea expeditions.
2. The underwater scenes were filmed wet-for-wet, contra the typical dry-for-wet process—a deliriously impressive feat considering that most of those scenes also feature motion capture animation. Read this insightful article from the New York Times that discusses some of Cameron’s methods for shooting underwater.