Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

PG-13, despite two solid f-bombs in the movie.  I mean, this is a movie with a lot of death, including gun and fantasy violence.  Not fantasy gun violence, although I suppose that's kind of true as well.  It's got a bunch of creature stuff that could be considered a bit scary for younger audiences.  Also, there's the whole racism idea that runs all the way through the movie.  It's Avatar.  It's that weird family friendly language that's for some reason okay because it's a big budget movie.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  James Cameron

I'm going to commit heresy here.  I know.  I've done it before on this blog, but I'm going to do it again.  I am not the biggest James Cameron fan.  I like Terminator, so I don't necessarily hate James Cameron.  It's just that the rest of the James Cameron ouvre is mid.  Yeah, even Aliens.  It's just that he's a special effects guy to me.  He's a bit Hallmarky and everything is a bit too fluffy for me in the grand scheme of things.  I know, Aliens seems to fight that.  But Cameron, for all of his innovations in terms of visuals, kind of lacks anything of bite when it comes to storytelling.

That's a huge swath.  I know it completely simplifying things.  But I just don't get why people lose their minds for him. I honestly consider Zack Snyder to be the darker version of James Cameron.  Both of them are extremely visual storytellers.  Everything is about imagery and that's not necessarily a bad thing.  But I'm a guy who loves nuance.  I love something original and I don't think the Avatar movies are the movies to sell that idea.  They are very pretty movies.  (Although I have some yellow flags about Avatar visually as well...)  I have a older friend.  He was my high school English teacher.  Then he became my boss.  I really pray that he doesn't read this blog because I respect the world out of this man.  He's getting up there in years and his Facebook (which makes sense) has become very touchy-feely.  Maybe it is something that comes with age.  Maybe my 40 year old self needs something that dives deep into the human condition and says something uncomfortable about it, but I don't really like fluff.  Now,  I will say that my boss's politics and James Camerons politics (for the most part, shy of the White Savior narrative) seem to align.  But even me, who wants to gripe about the American military complex / violent late stage Capitalism, finds these stories to be so black-and-white that it almost feels absurd to use this as a defense for an argument.

I never got around to rewatching Avatar since this blog was made.  I watched the first half of the family edit of Avatar with my kids before my eyes rolled back into my head out of boredom.  But I was reminded that Avatar is so lacking nuance.  Military is bad (which I don't disagree with, but make them human!)  There's this almost pride in being villainous with these characters.   Corporations are also bad.  Again, this is something that I agree with.  But there's borderline cackling from Giovanni Ribisi's character in that movie.  If you ever watched Captain Planet, a lot of the same character beats. The indigenous people have that kind of proud nobility that would be seen on Al Momaday paintings.  It's kind of a lot of what White people think about indigenous people.  Of course, this leads to a lot of co-opting of culture, which is a little bit gross, but done with the best of intention.  But let's shift away from the entire franchise and look at The Way of Water.

I wasn't very hopeful for The Way of Water.  I'm sorry to go in with expectations.  But all of those trailers did nothing for me.  I remember the original Avatar fever and left thinking that the movie was fine at best.  But midway through a three-hour movie, a movie that I was already disliking, I gave it an active shot.  I told myself I gotta stop griping about this movie because I shouldn't want to hate movies.  I do like movies and if I was going to make it through the rest of a three-hour movie, I should at least go in with a positive attitude.  And there is some watchablility to this movie.  But the biggest frustration with this movie is that James Cameron not only didn't learn from any  mistakes from the original Avatar; he put the original movie on a pedestal.  To James Cameron, the original Avatar is a perfect film.  As I've clearly established, it's a very flawed film.  (By the way, if you love the original Avatar, keep loving the original Avatar.  It's a very fun sci-fi movie that I just happen to dislike.) But the original Avatar, for all of its prettiness, is a movie that is uncomfortably derivative of other tropes.  

I need to do the paragraph break here because I should absolutely stress that everything is derivative.  Everything borrows or steals.  But I am going to say that Cameron's level of borrowing is so boring and safe.  The original Avatar stole every White Savior movie.  I am going to list Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, and others. But if you want to simplify it into one movie, it's just a live action Ferngully: The Last Rainforest.  So much was repeated in that first film that I found it annoying.  But sequels like The Way of Water have the opportunity to do something special.  I'm going to look at Spider-Man 2 as the perfect example.  When a movie is high concept, often the first movie has to focus on setting.  That happens.  Avatar is a film all about setting and very little about doing anything that is going to confuse an audience more than it needs to.  But a sequel doesn't have to worry about setting up rules.  As much as people don't like Age of Ultron, it has that nice cushion of getting the concept of the Avengers out of the way.  But, I have to remind you, James Cameron really likes the first Avatar movie.

So instead of making the characters deeper, he just wants to show other parts of Pandora.  It becomes even more about setting than it does about story.  If anything, Cameron repeats the same beats that he does in the first film.  He brings back the same villain.  He takes Jake Sully and makes him (pun intended) as a fish out of water again.  The movie, once again, becomes about discovering a foreign land where Jake isn't accepted, only for him to learn about the ways of a different people before he has to fight Quaritch in the finale against the military complex  There's no growth.  If anything, I really think that Sully backslides a bit because he's so convinced of his rightness throughout this film.  So if the first one copied Ferngully and company, this movie copies Avatar, which is a copy of Ferngully and then adds a little bit of Free Willy and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

There's this element of missing the forest through the trees. (I'm not actually sure that's the saying, but it makes the most sense to me.)  James Cameron loves visuals.  There's something a bit off that, as a director, he's really concerned more about visuals than really honing that story.  I mean, this is me being incredibly dense and awful considering that I consider that directors of animation are valid, visual directors.  I consider directors who work closely with cinematographers are amazing visual directors.  But honestly, the heavy lifting is done by WETA workshop and all the CGI guys.  I think that Cameron might be able to communicate what he wants well.  I think that he can give grounding elements and approve or disapprove of things.  But when we all gush about James Cameron, he's a guy who points to how pretty things are, but doesn't really tell a good story.  And here's the kicker.  As amazing as the visuals are in The Way of Water, it still has a really uncanny valley element.  I mentioned this when I saw the trailer for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. My friend Pat always gives movies the benefit of the doubt when it comes to visuals, especially when it comes to fantastic concepts.  After all, we don't know what swimming blue people would look like.  But then Wakanda Forever came out which had, coincidentally enough, swimming blue people and I thought, "Oh, THAT'S what it is supposed to look like."  So for all of the impressive visuals, it is still missing that sense of verisimilitude to the whole thing.

But this movie just keeps hitting the beats.  This blog, too, keeps hitting all the same beats.  I want to talk about Spider before closing up.  Because this is a movie that so embraces tropes, this movie has a scene where the biological outsider has to choose between his monstrous biological father and his chosen family. Sure enough, in a desperate attempt for acceptance, he sees through his father's cold exterior and finds the good in him.  But as the film progresses, the dad shows his awful true nature and he chooses his adoptive family.  We've been here so many times.  I don't need to explain this trope beyond this.  But usually, these stories have a character like Spider misread a situation.  After all, Jake and his family fail to get Spider back, so it can expand a rift between the families.  But I'm going to say, Spider should be hostile towards Jake's family, especially Jake.  They didn't look for him even for a second.  If anything, there wasn't even a discussion about getting Spider back.  He was gone and it was a very much, "Oh well" moment.  Then Neytiri decides to hold Spider hostage?  She cuts him and there's no repercussions?  I mean, sure, that could be addressed in one of five sequels on the horizon.  But it seems like Spider is this completely lost opportunity for the sake of a third act that is pretty watchable.

I don't like Avatar as a phenomenon.  It feels somehow artificial.  It somehow knocked Top Gun: Maverick out of the record holding for 2022 and I know one person who saw it in theaters.  Sure, anecdotal evidence.  But even when this was a film nominated for an Academy Award, I still considered this movie a burden to watch.  I knew that I wouldn't have the opportunity to see this in theaters, so I wrote it off.  But Avatar movies aren't great.  They're kind of pretty, but that's as far as I can give them.