Discounting the documentaries about voyages to the bottom of the sea, James Cameron’s last two movies were 1997’s Titanic and 2009’s Avatar. Titanic was the biggest grossing movie of all time, until Avatar replaced it at the top. Success breeds sequels but with the best will in the world it’s hard to imagine what a Titanic follow-up would be about (Titanic II – “it’s still at the bottom of the Atlantic”). The same cannot be said about Avatar, and so it came as no surprise when Cameron announced in 2010 that a sequel was in the works.
It took 12 years to get it onto the screens, in large part because Cameron decided to park up and wait for the technology to catch up with his vision.
So what have we? Well, in effect this is a melding of Cameron’s twin obsessions – water (see Titanic) and tech (see everything he’s ever done, most notably the Terminator movies, Aliens and Avatar itself).
Newbies, don’t start here. Go back and watch the first Avatar, it will help with orientation, though Cameron does ease us fairly gently into his story, reminding us that we’re on a planet called Pandora, where elegant blue aliens called the Na’vi are living in harmony with nature, among them Jake Sully, who was a paraplegic human marine in the first movie but is now, thanks to the avatar technology, the chief of the Na’vi and living with his wife, Neyteri, and family of real kids, an adopted daughter and a human boy called Spider.
A blissful blended existence which is upended by the arrival of bellicose humans, who intend to colonise Pandora, forcing Jake and family to seek refuge with the Metkayina, a water-dwelling tribe of Na’vi, who are a bit greener than the forest-dwellers, which makes identification a bit easier.
In essence it’s 1) A reminder of where we were at before everything got so rudely interrupted, before 2) Cameron and his writers set up a new idyll, with the watery Metkayina, then 3) there’s a massive bloody clash-of-civilisations showdown in which it’s humans versus Na’vi and tech versus nature, all of it a deliberate echo of the guns versus bow and arrow of a previous colonising showdown.
Cameron has drunk long and deep of the hippie Kool Aid, which means that Nature is benign as long as we live in harmony with it. The Na’vi – long of thigh, slender of waist, broad of shoulder and impossibly high of buttock and breast – reflect this. You could almost describe them as hot, though that would be to make them interesting. And whatever else they are, the Na’vi are relentlessly, almost pathologically dull.
Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang and more all return from the first film, with Kate Winslet now along for the ride (as a wise healer Na’vi whose potions and draughts work where science cannot), though in all honesty it could be almost anyone, particularly in the case of Worthington and Saldana whose characters are so bland there’s really nothing they can do with them.
Watch it instead for the special effects, which come in two distinct flavours. There is the shock-and-awe stuff, with a forensic attention to detail and conceptual technological leaps – particularly in underwater sequences – and you’ve really just got to marvel at the spectacle of it. There is a sequence where Sully’s son Lo’ak is hunted by a hangry whale/shark creature which is edge-of-seat exciting and so well rendered you stop wondering how they did it. Then there’s other stuff, when suddenly a man leaps into the air and the effect is like something from a 1980s arcade game. Bad perspective, jerky movements, implausible, unrealistic and naff.
It’s exceptionally well-done big-bucks entertainment for people who like really long movies – 3hrs and 12 mins – and all in all a better film than the original, thanks to its big, bold and clearly delineated storyline. The Way of Water sits at the number three position on the biggest-grossers list. Avatar 3, 4 and 5 are now in the works. The all-you-can-eat Avatar buffet is open.
Avatar: The Way of Water – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
