Before writing reviews, before podcasting, before film school… There was a time in my life, a time called childhood, when I lacked the vocabulary and the sophistication to really elucidate what I loved about any given movie. I could muster little beyond broad descriptors and enthusiasm. I feel transported back to that time now, sitting down to review James Cameron‘s Avatar: The Way of Water because the first thing that comes to mind is a beaming, “It’s so pretty!” And it is! I could go on to write about the use of a high frame rate, the extraordinary color palette and the painstaking rendering of computer generated water. But that wouldn’t be an honest report of what it feels like to watch the movie. Cameron’s movies tap into something primal and beautiful in us. Let’s call it the highest common denominator. I am not moved to wax intellectual by The Way of Water. I am simply–but deeply–moved.
One of the things that make Cameron’s films feel so fundamental and pure is that the people in his stories are more archetypes than characters. The director’s detractors–unimaginative cynics, in my eyes–call these protagonists flat. But what they really are is mythic. Villains like Stephen Lang‘s Quaritch, who spent the first Avatar sipping coffee while growling out orders to kill, need no explanation or nuance to flesh out their evil. They are there because they have always been there in our stories. Killed off at the end of the previous installment, Quaritch nevertheless returns–or, rather, his consciousness returns, uploaded into a Na’vi body. Since that means he can’t sip coffee, Cameron brings in Edie Falco to do that, and in a mech suit, no less.
Cameron’s emotional palette is every bit as primal and archetypal. And the most obvious, most powerful emotion–the one that drives and dominates The Way of Water–is love. The first movie had plenty of that too but this time the range has been widened to include the love between parents and children. A similar amount of time has passed on Pandora as has here in the real world between the release of the two movies, enough time for Sam Worthington‘s Sully and Zoe Saldaña‘s Neytiri to have a brood of tweens and teens to protect by the time the humans finally return.
They want more or less the same things they wanted last time, to mine and plunder Pandora for its resources and leave whatever Na’vi survive behind to choke on the embers. The environmental messaging of The Way of Water also runs even deeper than in the previous movie and goes hand in hand with the parenting motif. Sully and Neytiri aren’t just fighting for their home, they’re fighting for their own children’s future lives. Cameron emphasizes what’s at risk by underlining the terror of environmental pillaging. A scene of humans hunting whales (or, technically, hunting tulkun) unfolds like a horror movie.
Most of The Way of Water, though, unfolds like an action movie because that’s exactly what it is. Cameron maintains his ranking near the all-time top of large scale action directors. Gunshots and punches hit hard, of course, but they’re all the more effective because the primary ingredient in these sequences is grace. It’s the movement before the punch that sells it.
Like so many sequels, The Way of Water contains multiple repetitions of great scenes from its predecessor. Now in Na’vi form, for instance, Quaritch must undergo much of the same flying and combat training that Sully did thirteen years ago. Once again, though, Cameron pulls off a miracle. Instead of diminishing returns, these revisits are expansions. The Way of Water is somehow even better than its already masterful antecedent.
