After seemingly endless production delays, release date changes, and ever-shifting promises, a sequel to James Cameron’s uber-successful Avatar seemed, if not entirely outside the realm of the possible, then unlikely, existing primarily in Cameron’s head, scattered storyboards, and unfinished treatments or drafts.
When, finally, a seemingly firm date appeared on the release calendar, even Cameron’s most fervent admirers collectively responded, “Show me.” If nothing else, Avatar: The Way of Water, does, in fact, show fans and non-fans alike what a visionary like Cameron can achieve when given the time, resources, and imaginative power of hundreds, if not thousands, of collaborators. Avatar: The Way of Water delivers a deeply immersive, theme park-like experience, albeit one undermined by surface-deep storytelling, rote characterizations, and Cameron’s sometimes uncontrollable tendency for self-indulgence.
Avatar: The Way of Water opens with an extended prologue, reintroducing Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), the lead character, a disabled Marine who literally left his biological body behind and re-skinned himself permanently into the form of an “avatar,” a consciousness-free Na’vi clone. Jake left everything behind, including his transactional allegiance to the Earth-based corporation that created the Na’vi clone in an attempt to win over or pacify an alien moon, Pandora, to extract its substantial resources, specifically unobtainium (insert tired joke here). In true “white savior” fashion, Jake not only joined the Na’vi, but became their de facto tribal chief, military tactician, and senior strategist, leading the Na’vi in the battle to free their world from human colonization.
Except, of course, that was just a battle in a war, not the war itself, and in Avatar: The Way of Water, the colonizers, equipped with the newest technology available, have returned to Pandora, this time not to extract Pandora’s resources, but to settle it permanently. The Earth is, as always, dying, and the return of the first human ship serves as a punctuation mark on Sully’s seemingly idyllic life as unchallenged chieftain, husband to Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), and father of four, Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), the oldest, Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), the second oldest, Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), their adopted, teenage daughter, and Tuktirey “Tuk” (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), the youngest.
Cameron sets up simple, reductive intra-family conflicts, between Sully and the headstrong Lo’ak, between Lo’ak and Neteyam over duty, responsibility, and obligation, and between Kiri, perpetually feeling like an outsider despite the love and affection showered on her by Sully and Neytiri, and the family proper. The intra-family conflict is almost enough to power an entire melodrama, but with the arrival of not just a more aggressive, expansive nearby colony, but one of Sully’s oldest, revenge-seeking enemies thrown into the mix, Sully makes the smart, calculated decision not to fight a more powerful foe, but to flee with his immediate family, hoping for and eventually getting sanctuary, from another Na’vi clan, the Metkayina, as adapted to living near and in the oceans as Sully and Neytiri’s people were to existing in communal equilibrium with the forest.
The new, fresh setting gives Cameron and his visual effects collaborators the grand opportunity to show audiences how far motion-capture technology has evolved in the intervening 13 years. Short answer: The Na’vi remain, at least on screen, marvels of human invention, moving gracefully or athletically through texture-rich worlds where every detail, from the smallest blade of grass to the largest floating sky boulder, has been imagined. A plunge into Pandora’s oceans reveals all manner of glowing flora and fauna, each one tied to their specific environment. Where the Na’vi rode the equivalent of flying dragons in the first film, here they fly hybrids that swim underwater as well as they can soar above Pandora’s oceans.
Just as Cameron takes the audience on a journey to a world he obviously, obsessively loves, he also makes sure to include enough time for the human-Na’vi conflict, interspersing underwater sequences of Sully and his family adapting to their new environments to reconciling themselves to their new home and the green-hued Metkayina clan, he gives audiences splendidly choreographed, awe-inspiring action sequences, culminating in a 40-minute+ set piece in and around a futuristic whaling ship as first Jake and then various members of his family try to save each other from impending doom, natural and otherwise.
For all of Avatar: The Way of Water’s visual bravado, however, it’s hard to shake the clunky, occasionally bloated storytelling, barely functional, banal dialogue, and contradictory themes filled with more ironies than any one review can list. Here’s a start, though: Cameron’s earnest pro-environmental themes come with hefty price tags (namely an outsized production budget), while Sully’s journey, from human outcast to tribal leader, never escapes its origins as another “white savior” tale. Then there’s also the fetishistic depiction of indigenous cultures, Native American in the first film, and Maori/Pacific Islanders in the sequel. Despite Cameron’s best intentions, the cultural appropriation on display here borders on exploitation.
As always, though, your mileage may vary, especially for escapism-minded audiences eager to re-immerse themselves in Pandora’s sights and wonders on a superficial level, throwing themselves headfirst into the adventures of Sully and his family without giving too much thought or consideration to the implications of any of the ideas Cameron presents in the sequel. There, at least, Avatar: The Way of Water offers almost boundless visual and aural thrills rarely seen on the big or the small screen.
Avatar: The Way of Water opens on Friday, December 16th.
