Over a decade after the expulsion of the humans from Pandora, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) enjoying their lives with their family.
When the humans return, their peaceful existence is threatened. This threat is exacerbated by the resurrection of Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who is focused on terminating the Sully line.
Fleeing the forest, the Sully's head out onto the ocean, to find refuge…
After a dozen years, we are back on Pandora.
James Cameron is back with another multi-million dollar movie at the cutting edge of technology. The cast are all back - even the dead ones. And the papyrus font is nowhere to be found.
Internet nerds are sharpening their imaginary swords. And weary punters are trying to figure out the best time to take a pee break.
It’s Avatar time!
If it were not for the financial imperatives and success of the previous film, Avatar 2 would be better appreciated as a bizarre vanity project.
Does it justify three hours? If you are a fan of James Cameron and his obsession with the ocean, yes.
Cameron’s storytelling can be blunt and obvious in its functionality, but there is something almost poetic in the extended second act.
Now that he is not the sole focus of driving the story forward, Sam Worthington comes across as more invested and relaxed.
Stephen Lang, whose cartoonish posturing was a source of mockery in the original film, comes across better in motion capture.
It helps that the character has more dimension - Quaritch’s avatar (or recombinant, as it is called) has been loaded with the Colonel’s memories.
That complication - of having a species-est transferred into the body of the people he hates is not as developed as I hoped it would be.
Since he has the memories of Quaritch from hours prior to his death, Quaritch 2 (Q2 from now on) is running on the same hyper-focused hate as his prior incarnation.
He sees his new body as a tool for his goals - completing his mission and achieving vengeance.
The complication the movie cares more about is the introduction of Quaritch’s son, Spider - a human baby who was left behind when the humans evacuated, and has grown up among the Na’vi.
Q2 is torn between lingering love for his son, and a desire to use him to get to Jake Sully.
This conflict is interesting as it is one of the few aspects of the film where it feels like Cameron is allowing subtext to breathe without highlighting it.
Q2 spends most of the movie sticking to his usual persona - possibly a safety mechanism for coping with his new status.
It would have been cool to see more of this but then the movie would be four hours long. In a break from his bulldozing ways, Q2 uses his new status to worm his way into his son’s psyche.
Q2’s return picks up a recurring theme of Cameron’s - an implacable, unstoppable antagonist who will never stop. While essentially the same in motive and modus operandi, the world he drops into is very different.
In an inversion of his younger self in the 2009 original, Jake now has responsibilities and is obsessed with saving his family - Q2’s new attack comes with increased stakes.
The movie’s central theme is ‘what would you do for your family?’, and it covers every major character, including the villain.
That motivation also pushes the characters outside of the easy good-evil dynamic established in the original movie.
The biggest example is Neytiri, who is reframed as a possible antagonist in the eyes of Spider - she proves as willing as Q2 to kill for family members, and uses Spider as a hostage during the final confrontation.
In a major shift in their dynamic from the original, it is Q2 who relents in order to save his son - and Spider ends up saving him after he loses the final battle.
It is an intriguing dangling thread, one that will hopefully push for a less familiar story structure in the next movie.
While there are differences in specifics, in overview The Way of Water resembles the story structure of the first movie, down to a second act where our protagonists learn how to exist in a new culture, the reef-dwelling Metkayina clan.
This is also where the movie slows down.
Second son Lo'ak (Britain Dalton) forms a bond with a whale-like tulkun, Payakan, while Grace Augustine’s (Sigourney Weaver) mysterious Na’vi daughter Kiri (Weaver) taps into a deeper connection with ocean life forms.
There is good character stuff here - the subplot between Lo'ak and Payakan is touching - but I left wondering if there was a tighter edit of this section.
The third act follows the same dramatic bones as the original - Q2 arrives in force and it takes the entire tribe to overwhelm his force.
As far as the viewing experience, I always have trouble with 3D - I have one-short-sighted eye and it seems to screw with the effect.
The film was shot in 48 frames and I do not think the theatre I was in was formatted for that because I was getting a lot of motion smoothing, particularly in the early parts - or maybe I just got used to it.
The final act is exciting but there is a slight lack of catharsis.
Part of it is the sense of repetition.
Part of it is that the villain escapes to fight another day.
What makes it stand up is the focus on the kids, particularly in Lo’ak’s journey and how he finally gets his father to respect him.
Quaritch II is still stuck with the mindset of the original, and is still willing to destroy anything in order to achieve his goals.
His stasis feels like a comment on the difference between the Na’vi and their human foes - the humans are stuck repeating the same patterns over and over again.
His return also feels like a metaphor for the humans’ new project: a shift from a purely economic endeavour to domination - with Earth exhausted, the humans are intent on terraforming Pandora into a new home for their species.
It is a conflation of colonial history and an inversion of the typical alien invasion story.
The focus on the environmental impact of humans leads to the most emotionally wrenching moments in the film.
The scene where the tulkun mother and her baby are found by the tribe is horrifying - the creature’s eye has rolled into its head and is in the background of several shots. In a movie that is not that violent, it is a moment of visceral impact.
I really liked The Way of Water - I liked the ensemble, I liked the focus on a new culture and - while it feels a shade undercooked, I liked the theme that the movie is driving at.
Cameron is not a filmmaker known for subtlety and there is something weirdly rousing about how blunt the focus is on environmentalism. Is the tyrannical Hollywood filmmaker showing a softer side?
And while family is a dominant theme in the film, the role of fathers is constantly foregrounded. I spent the movie wondering if this was Cameron’s reflections on fatherhood, and trying to break free from regimented sets of behaviour and discipline. Is this movie a moment of self-reflection from the multiple divorcee?
I cannot say I feel passionately about it - the cliffhanger ending means the dramatic threads feel incomplete. Despite its spectacle, and its extraterrestrial trappings, The Way of Water is more concerned with people and the way in which they interact with each other, and their environment.
A respectable return from Cameron, one that will be overwhelmed by the hype of expectation.
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