Avatar: The Way of Water (Twentieth Century Studios, Lightstorm Entertainment, TSG Entertainment, Walt Disney Enterprises, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (August 13, 2023) my husband Charles and I bypassed the three Lifetime movies – Trapped in the Farmhouse, Trapped in the Cabin (are you detecting a pattern here?) and A Lifeguard’s Obsession – and instead watched James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water, the 2022 mega-sequel to his 2009 masterpiece Avatar. Avatar: The Way of Water runs three hours and 15 minutes (33 minutes longer than the first Avatar) and so we needed a night on which we weren’t doing anything else to watch it. As Charles and I both thought afterwards, Avatar: The Way of Water is an overwhelming movie in both the good and bad senses of that term: it’s nowhere nearly as great a film as the first Avatar (though Charles and I both saw that in a theatre in 3-D rather than at home, even on a fairly large-screen TV that more or less did justice to the film) and it’s the sort of sequel that’s just more. It doesn’t really expand on the original’s themes and develop them further the way the best movie sequelae – The Bride of Frankenstein, Ivan the Terrible Part II, The Godfather Part II – have, and at 13 years since the original it’s been a long wait but not an unreasonably extended one. (The longest wait between an original film and its direct sequel seems to have been the 46 years between the original 1939 MGM The Wizard of Oz and Disney’s 1985 sequel Return to Oz, which I saw in a theatre when it came out and thought was woefully underrated. Actually, come to think of it, there was an earlier sequel to The Wizard of Oz, an animated film from 1971 called Journey Back to Oz in which Liza Minnelli, almost inevitably, voiced Dorothy.) Avatar: The Way of Water was only the second 3-D sequel to a 3-D film (the first was Revenge of the Creature, made by Universal-International in 1955 as a sequel to The Creature from the Black Lagoon the year before), and I give a lot of credit to Cameron (who has a writing credit on this one, but whereas he wrote Titanic and the first Avatar solo he hired help here: Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Josh Friedman and Shane Salerno) for starting the film with a big action scene instead of plunging us into yards of long, ponderous exposition. Fortunately I’d re-read my own blog post on Avatar (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2010/01/avatar-20th-century-fox-2009.html) before watching this one, and it was a welcome refresher course on Cameron’s world-building.

In case you’ve forgotten the first film and have only the dimmest recollections of what’s going on, Earth is attempting to colonize the planet Pandora. In the first film the Earthlings were after a rare mineral called “unobtainium” (an old engineer’s joke; when they’ve designed a machine that will function only if they have a material that doesn’t exist, they say it needs “unobtainium”), though this time around the “unobtanium” MacGuffin has been dropped and replaced by a yellow-orange jelly that can only be obtained by drilling inside the carcass of a dead Pandoran tulkun, essentially Pandora’s version of whales, though the tulkun are fully sentient and sing highly elaborate songs (which they memorize since they have no earthly or Pandoran way of writing anything down). The commercial value of this jelly is it can be used to create a medication that instantly stops the aging process. As before, humankind’s presence on Pandora is divided into a military and a scientific component; the science side is headed, as in the first film, by Kiri (Sigourney Weaver, a bit long in the tooth for this sort of thing), while the military presence is run by a woman general, Ardmore (Edie Falco), who openly and proudly proclaims her intention to wipe out Pandora’s indigenous people, the Na’vi (who look humanoid except they’re seven feet tall, have tails and only four fingers on each hand instead of five, and have blue skin with darker blue tiger stripes on light blue body surfaces). She tells us that Earth is a dying planet and for the human race to survive, it has to be evacuated somewhere else, and she intends to do that to Pandora once they’ve “cleared” the native population. Her field commander, Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang), was killed at the end of the original Avatar but has been cloned in the form of a Na’vi, since Kiri has figured out that the entire planet of Pandora has a combination force field and biosphere that detects non-indigenous invaders and mobilizes all Pandoran life forms to fight them. Kiri has theorized that if human warriors are rebuilt and cloned as Na’vi, they can be infiltrated onto Pandora and not trigger the planet’s immune system because the planet will recognize them as “self.”

Quaritch specifically targets former Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who in the first film was infiltrated into Pandora in the form of an avatar – a physical body which its user controls by laying in a coffin-like box filled with a foam that transmits his or her actions to their avatar – only he “went native” like Kevin Costner’s character in Dances with Wolves, took up with Na’vi woman Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and ultimately led the successful (so far) Na’vi resistance to the Earthlings. Quaritch wants to kill Sully not only for revenge for Sully’s having killed his earlier incarnation at the end of the first film but because he figures taking out Sully will decapitate the Na’vi resistance movement and render them helpless in the face of Earth’s superior firepower. To do this Quaritch has an unusual ally, albeit a reluctant one: his half-human, half-Na’vi son Spider (Jack Champion), who inherited Na’vi markings on his body but didn’t acquire a tail and his overall skin color is that of a normal Caucasian. Spider is captured and brought on board an Earth spaceship, where he’s wheeled around in a torture device and ordered to tell where Sully is – which he doesn’t. This film switches the usual iconography of science fiction in making the scientists the sadists and the military men at least gentler, willing to play the “good cops” to the scientists’ “bad cops.” Quaritch, who alternates throughout the film between accepting Spider as his son and forcefully telling the kid that he means nothing to him (the parallel with Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker is almost too obvious), more or less adopts Spider as his Na’vi whisperer, having Spider teach him about Na’vi culture and language (and there are a few good laughs at Quaritch’s difficulty in pronouncing simple Na’vi words). To save his family, Sully, his wife and their four kids – two boys and two girls – evacuate from the Forest to the Reef lands, where they ask for asylum from Reef People chief Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and his wife Ronal (Kate Winslet). At first the chief is reluctant to let them in, fearing that they’ll bring their war to the Reef People and endanger them, but eventually they are admitted – only Quaritch and his squad of Na’vi-equipped humans commandeer a whaling ship and ultimately find them. In the film’s big final action set-piece, Sully’s daughters are captured, along with scientist Kiri’s daughter by a Na’vi dad, and one of Sully’s sons is killed before ultimately the bad Earthlings are defeated. A dying Quaritch is rescued by Spider, who still regards Quaritch as his dad no matter what he’s done.

Avatar: The Way of Water is a big movie and a rather ponderous one, though Cameron is skilled at staging action scenes and his reverence for the ocean – notable not only in this and the original Avatar but also in his most unjustly neglected film, The Abyss (1989) – is apparent. Among the lessons Sully and his Na’vi family learn from the Reef People is how to slow down their metabolism so they can stay under water for long periods of time before having to come up for air, much like modern-day marine mammals; at first I thought Cameron and his co-writers might have made the Reef People mutants with both lungs and gills so they can breathe both water and air, but wisely he didn’t go there. Avatar: The Way of Water is also a film about family and about how blood ties matter even when they’re as strained as they are here; throughout the film Sully insists that he and his family are as one, and the finale hinges on Spider’s refusal to let Quaritch die even though the parental relationship between Spider and this incarnation of Quaritch is pretty minimal. Avatar: The Way of Water is also imbued with the same liberal politics that incensed America’s radical Right about the first film; the Na’vi are the good guys, the Earthlings are the bad guys, aside from Spider there’s no truly conflicted character, and the equation between Na’vi and real-life Native Americans is almost too obvious, especially in their spirituality and their belief (literally true in the films) that they are meant by their creators to live in specific places on the planet and the trees hold the memories of their culture and can be tapped for their wisdom.

At the same time it’s also filled with the lacunae that are one of James Cameron’s biggest weaknesses as a writer: he never bothers to explain how humans and Na’vi can have sex and produce viable offspring (but then Gene Roddenberry didn’t explain how Mr. Spock came to exist either, especially given the original Star Trek episode “Amok Time” with its elaborate explanation of how Vulcans pair up, which doesn’t seem to allow any species from another planet to, shall we say, horn in), and though the first film stressed that the Na’vi atmosphere is toxic to humans, in this one the captain and crew of the whaling ship Quaritch commandeers seem to be able to function in the Na’vi air just fine without any of the protective gear of the first Avatar. Cameron and his co-writers also don’t bother to explain just how General Ardmore and her bunch of human génocidaires propose to terraform Na’vi and make its air safe for humans once they’ve killed all the native Na’vi. Avatar: The Way of Water is an excellent production technically – though we weren’t watching it in 3-D the illusion of depth remained quite convincing – and it was reportedly the first film ever made that cost over $1 billion to produce. The money is all there on screen, too; making the sequel to a mega-hit, Cameron and crew had all the budget they needed to make an utterly stunning film. It’s just that, while the first Avatar was a revelatory masterpiece (I was convinced it was the best science-fiction film since 2001: A Space Odyssey and it would revolutionize the movie industry; among my wrong predictions for it was that it would inspire future filmmakers to make all major productions in 3-D), Avatar: The Way of Water is just another big-budget blockbuster, cut to formula — albeit a particularly different and unique formula with some interesting innovations.