It’s been 13 years, and Avatar: The Way of Water is finally here. Was it worth the wait?
No.
There are many reasons why James Cameron’s follow up to 2009’s smash blockbuster isn’t a good movie, but most central is a surprising lack of imagination. Cameron has directed some of the best sequels of all time (Aliens, Terminator 2) by cleverly subverting or expanding upon the material of the original film. The Way of Water, however, merely retreads the first installment in both story and style. The result accordingly suffers from all of Avatar’s (2009) weaknesses while failing to provide the novelty that, in the first film, distracted from them.
Foremost among those weaknesses is unbearable seriousness. The Way of Water, like its predecessor, is no fun. To be sure, the characters occasionally have fun, for example adapting with joy to an aquatic lifestyle. But Cameron delivers even these moments in a crushingly reverent, pious tone, as if he wants us to believe (or he himself believes) that, for instance, a blue creature befriending a CGI whale is self-evidently a monumental, poignant event.
Because of this approach, the movie is dead on arrival. By demanding that we take things so seriously—via triumphant choral music, grand long shots, etc.—Cameron keeps us outside the experience. That we would enjoy the scene isn’t enough for him: he wants us to believe in it. But that’s too big an ask.
A useful comparison is The Lion King (1994), which is the heaviest influence on The Way of Water other than the first Avatar. (Cameron has a thing for Disney: he took from Pocahontas (1995) for the previous film.) Like The Lion King, this film leans on tribal spirituality, emphasizing harmony with nature’s cyclical rhythms. But Disney, unlike Cameron, knew to crack a smile every now and then—giving, for example, Timon and Pumba significant screen time. Without characters like these, we’re left only with stoic, smothering dogma.
It’s almost as if Cameron made this movie not for humans, but for the Na’vi. They would surely have rejoiced with much more enthusiasm than I did about, for instance, the seasonal return of the mighty tulkun. I didn’t see any Na’vi in the theater, though, so here we are.
Another weakness that has carried over from the first movie is reliance on cliché storytelling. It’s painful to watch a film with so much visual detail spend so little energy on character and story. A stock bully asks, “Why are you a freak?” Later, the recipient of the dig asks, “Why am I different?” And so forth.
And as in the first movie, characters repeatedly make implausible decisions. In one scene, a group of avatar baddies inexplicably explores Pandora wearing full camo gear, which, of course, does the opposite of camouflage them: it reveals them as obvious intruders. Their identities would have been otherwise impossible to discern, since they look exactly like natives. Again, with so much attention paid to visual detail, blunders like this are that much more difficult to understand.
I can’t write a review of this film without mentioning the quality that, for many, will most influence the viewing experience: its horrendous length. Cameron has never been one to curtail his runtimes, but we’d have to go back to The Abyss (1989) to find something this egregious. The final battle of The Way of Water takes—completely unnecessarily—something close to an hour and a half. The full movie is 3 hours 12 minutes. Plan bathroom breaks. I’m typically forgiving of movies that take their time, but The Way of Water truly seems, like its titular worldview, to have “no beginning and no end.”
Exactly one element of The Way of Water is improved from the original: the villain. It’s theoretically the same villain, but this version of Colonel Quaritch is newly cerebral and formidable, a far cry from the gung-ho fanatic of the first film. He also has a more interesting backstory. Unfortunately, the premise of his origin largely goes untapped for its existential possibilities. Nevertheless, the character inspires more fear and hatred than he did in the first movie.
My essay on the original Avatar criticized the film for deploying video game aesthetics in the cinema, where they don’t belong. This new film does so even more obviously. A character meets a beast with a torpedo in its fin, removes the torpedo, and gains the beast’s help. This kind of mechanical, cause-effect plot point is sufficient for video games, which have relatively few storytelling resources. But a long-awaited movie? That took 13 years of development?
Not good enough.
–Jim Andersen
For my thoughts on the first film, see my essay on its CGI visuals here.