We’ve all seen Avatar: The Way of Water now, right?
Given the billion-troubling box office across the world, the answer is undoubtedly yes. Only the wilful have likely resisted James Cameron’s long awaited sequel to his 2009 monster, a blockbuster buoyed by 3D and IMAX uplifts to romp toward the biggest financial haul in the history of cinema. If we’re being honest though, Avatar’s follow up is not a film breathlessly anticipated by the masses. Cameron’s film has been, for over a decade, cast off, even laughed at by critics as his creative nadir.
In revisiting Avatar itself, what surprises with distance is the craft. Ignore the hammy narrative with evocations of Ferngully or Pocahontas, put aside those obvious cliched rebukes (of which this reviewer has been just as guilty), and what’s apparent is the skill Cameron retains in constructing a grand scale sense of deep world-building. Pandora lives and breathes and his combination of eye-popping CGI with pulsing set pieces marks it out among even blockbusters of its era, let alone the franchise-fodder that at points drowns us currently in repetitious and unimaginative storytelling.
This isn’t me saying Avatar is some kind of underrated masterpiece. Of course it isn’t. The performances are hokey, the script has more cheese than a Domino’s pizza, and you’ll guess very swiftly where the plot goes. Yet few filmmakers can put together a sequence like Cameron. He fully understands pace and spectacle and cinematic immersion. He is and wants us to be Jake Sully, as played by Sam Worthington, plunged into the alien vista he has built from both his imagination and a wealth of ecological sources. We are all meant to be avatars into his world.
The Way of Water doesn’t trouble us with the most detailed of recaps as we return to that world, moving the narrative forward almost the length of time we have taken between movies. How many other franchises have such a gap between the first and second films? Can we even call Avatar a franchise? Perhaps one day but not yet. Cameron’s film operates in the traditional form of a sequel from the days he ruled Hollywood as he propagated the high concept sequel, via Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Avatar was always intended to be the first of several films but crafts a told story with a beginning, middle and end. The Way of Water in that sense is no different.
As the film ended, we looked for a post-credits sequence, as modern blockbuster cinema has conditioned our minds to do. We should have known better with Cameron. He might not heap scorn on the idea of an overlapping franchise universe (given he long had ambitions to make a Spider-Man movie) but one senses he would never indulge in that method. Cameron wants us to approach each of these films as the chapter of one singular story, not a latticework of a cinematic universe. The Way of Water develops all of the ideas present in the first movie, charts new territory, and eschews the idea that Cameron is building anything more than his vision.
The Way of Water, in truth, isn’t all that much better than Avatar. The hammy dialogue remains in force. The characterisations are traditional and archetypal. Cameron indulges himself with long sequences in the mid-section where his characters engage with the watery archipelago they move largely to away from the forest setting of the original; sequences which threaten to stop the inertia of the narrative dead. Yet his film carries a unique sweep that is purely indebted to Cameron’s filmmaking sensibility. A refusal to compromise on length, to compromise on the execution of his end goal. He wants to create not just a story but a saga of mythic sweep.
In that sense, Cameron creates a sequel which distills many of the key concepts he has spent decades working with throughout his films. Focusing on the extended Sully family, the purely Na’vi Jake and his partner Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), plus their children of varying ages, Cameron focuses entirely on the multi-generational journey of indigenous people facing not just forced relocation but a Holocaust of intent by the ‘Sky People’, aka human industrial invaders seeking to mine, extract and colonise Pandora in the shadow of a dying, sundered Earth. Cameron long ago described Star Wars as “the film I wanted to make”, envious as he was of George Lucas’ rebirth of mythic archetypes fused with classic adventure storytelling, and in Avatar he is beginning to realise that ambition.
Indeed, Lucas—with his sixteen year gap between producing Star Wars films from Return of the Jedi to The Phantom Menace—is the only American filmmaker of the same era to equal Cameron’s long gap between films but singular focus on one property. Avatar is unlikely to beat Star Wars for sheer propulsive reinvention, iconic characters or popular culture reach, but Cameron visibly seeks to tap into those same kind of key archetypes Lucas brought to bear in the late 1970s. Jake is already being positioned as an Obi-Wan Kenobi figure of wisdom, with younger son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) moving throughout The Way of Water into the role of an empathetic Luke Skywalker. Cameron here proposes a series which, across multiple films, will develop into a generational saga to save a world, if not a universe.
Cameron, conversely, has an insular style of storytelling as opposed to Lucas’ outward framing of these myths and archetypes. He contracts when Star Wars expands, his climax of The Way of Water jettisoning most of the other characters to make the conflict key to the Sully family. Their battle is not to save the galaxy but rather the diverse world of Pandora, and even more acutely the protection of their own family unit. His vision has always been this way, from the mother-daughter allegory inherent in Aliens, or the personal family stakes underpinning The Terminator films even with the backdrop of nuclear Armageddon, through to the love story core to the tragedy of Titanic. He paints grand narratives on a small, familial canvas, and The Way of Water is no exception.
Equally, Cameron continues his love affair with the intersection between machinery and water, and how technology can equate to self-destruction. Here, the Sully family must flee the forests to protect their ecology from a returned Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), now in powered up Na’vi form, and head to ocean-dwelling tribes. As a result, the Sully’s commune with aquatic nature and the biology of a world Cameron very much suggests is in tune with all living things. Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) is the closest thing Avatar has to a nascent Anakin Skywalker; a girl born of immaculate conception (maybe) in communion with the ‘force’ of Pandora’s own Gaia, known as Awa. Cameron therefore taps a mysticism that differs from his traditional sense of a very human, prosaic messiah such as John Connor.
Machinery here is presented as dangerous and a marker of death, as we saw in The Terminator movies or indeed in the infallibility of the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic. The equivalent of whaling ships hunt innocent creatures to meet profit quotas. Giant ships burn forests with fire as we saw in Avatar. Human soldiers sport powerful destructive guns and missiles. Cameron is fascinated and obsessed with the power of machinery, and the terror of rampant technology, but like in Titanic he sees it impervious to the power of the natural world in the form of water. Water conquers all. Water is life. The Sully family here are forced to adapt to those surroundings in order to survive, transforming from forest tribes people born of flight into indigenous people connected to oceanic nature.
Cameron’s overarching ecological and environmental message in Avatar is even clearer in The Way of Water, and thanks to rampant climate change and growing emergency even more acute over a decade on. As Terminator 2 warned against artificial intelligence being given free reign, and Titanic reduced class distinctions in the face of technological hubris, The Way of Water continues Avatar’s mission to posit that protecting natural habitats and the environment, of working in harmony with all nature, is the only means of ensuring our survival. It’s not a new message but nobody has conveyed it on screen with the scope and grandeur as seen in Avatar and its first sequel, with a proposed three more films at least arguably developing and evolving a cautionary tale for the millions watching.
Though not Cameron’s best work, albeit a better film than Avatar was, The Way of Water is no aberration for this filmmaker. This is James Cameron, free with all of the cinematic tools at his disposal to create arguably his true legacy, even with a litany of iconic movies behind him. If the Avatar series continues to improve script and plot mechanics alongside Cameron’s ability to direct a set-piece, these films could grow into true modern classics, as opposed to simply 3D/IMAX baiting curiosities.
Whatever our thoughts, Avatar is here to stay. Only now, that could be a fact not to groan over, but grow ever more excited about.
★ ★ ★ 1/2
DIRECTOR: James Cameron
CAST: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Cliff Curtis, Kate Winslet, Sigourney Weaver
STUDIO: 20th Century Fox
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