Movie Review : Avatar - The Way of Water (2022)
No one wanted James Cameron to make a second Avatar movie. The original was trite, overproduced and overreliant on novelty technology to captivate audiences, but everyone saw it anyway. Because that's what people do when such a big budget adventure film is released in December. Families go see it together and no one wants to be the snob that's too good for it. It's a fucking scam and everyone gladly falls for it anyway. I fell for it again last week and, to my surprise, I didn't completely hate it.
Avatar : The Way of Water picks up right where its predecessor left off. I mean this literally. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who is now a Na’vi for a reason I can't quite remember, is chilling and living the happily ever after with his wife (Zoe Saldana) and four fucking kids on Pandora when literally the same army invades the planet again and they are lead by, I shit you not, the same bad guy than last time Quartich (Stephen Lang). The one they killed at the end of the previous movie.
Oh and he’s a Na’vi too now. No, it doesn't make sense, but it doesn't really need to. You forget about it at some point.
What matters
Alright, these characters are bad. Irremediably bad. Except for Sully's youngest son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), none of them has any defining personality trait aside from the fact that they're all incredibly virtuous and connected to their environment. Disposable Quartich and his merry band of artifical Na'vi aren't much better. They are placeholders for evil with not much in common with the real Na'vi except the fact that Quartich and Sully both inexplicably have a son on Pandora.
Quartich having sex in Avatar also something I had wiped from my memory. If anyone has reminiscence of how and why it happened, hit me up because I don't remember Spider at all.
But again, bad characters matter less in Avatar : The Way of Water than they did in Avatar for a very simple and obvious reason : the storytelling is much better. It's pretty fucking silly for the first hour, but when Jake Sully and his family exile themselves into waterworld and that James Cameron hits the brake pedal to PROPERLY SET HIS CONFLICT UP, Avatar : The Way of Water becomes… low key enjoyable? God, I feel dirty just saying it. But it doesn't make it any less true.
When the Sully family settle into waterworld and Lo'ak starts learning about the bond between sea Na’vi and super intelligent whale-like creatures called Tulkun, Avatar : The Way of Water finally turns into the eco-friendly action movie James Cameron promises us all these years ago. The Tulkun are somewhat of a MacGuffin, but they set up one of the most heartfelt, riveting confrontation I've seen in a big budget movie I've seen in the longest time. Sure beats whatever Marvel ever came up with.
Through this confrontation, which painstakingly echo whale and shark fishing on Earth (that scene takes forever and feels gratuitously morbid, but I swear there's a payoff), Cameron and his screenwriters elaborate a confrontation that is more than the asinine good v. evil shit that you've been fed over the last decade. The characters all have something personal on the line AND NOT JUST THE DESTRUCTION OF THE UNIVERSE. It might seem obvious, but it's what matters.
Anti-revenge movie
Another point I think Avatar : The Way of Water shrewdly makes is turning the old revenge trope upon its head. Revenge is about the laziest, most overused trope in action movies. Because it's normal for the common man to feel that he's been wronged about something (anything really) and that he's "so going to relate to a character who right the wrongs bestowed upon him". In Avatar : The Way of Water, the vengeful party is Disposable Quartich, who was unceremonious killed at the end of Avatar.
Cameron and his screenwriters frame vengeance as this dumb, destructive endeavour that doesn't really serve any purpose. Disposable Quartich - who is not really Quartich, by the way, just a lab creation imbued with his personality and memory - is brought to Pandora to eliminate Jake Sully and pacify the Na'vi in order for humans to colonize the planet, but he is so grotesquely over the top that he riles up and extreme hostile response from native population he tortures and ostracizes.
I don't know if this was by design. Any other movie villain would've done a better job than Disposable Quartich at locating and eliminating Jake Sully and his family. I believe the point was to illustrate how courage and fighting is the only response in the face of oppression, but it does make a competent (and compelling) point for the pointlessness of vengeance too. Of course, everyone will be too busy talking about the anti-colonialism to tell you about it, but it's why you come here.
To skip the obvious. Isn't it?
*
I was surprised by how aggressively adequate Avatar : The Way of Water was. I will always prefer Indiana Jones or The Lord of the Rings or any epic movie franchise of my youth to it, but in fifteen to twenty years kids will remember this movie like I remember Indiana Jones and The Lord of the Rings. Because it will have provided them these big, swelling emotions first. Avatar : The Way of Water has built-in flaws the franchise will always carry, but it might've made its franchise worth existing.
