Avatar: The Way of Water

Avatar: The Way of Water

James Cameron wants you to believe many things. He wants you to believe that aliens are killing machines, humans can beat time-traveling cyborgs, and a movie can take you back to a historical event in living memory. “Avatar,” set on the planet of Pandora, is his most ambitious and successful attempt at selling this belief in the power of cinema as he has ever made. Can you put your life aside for a few hours and watch a movie in a way that’s almost impossible these days certainly right now?

As technology has improved, Cameron has upped the ante on his ability to make us believe with 3D, High Frame Rate and other toys he didn’t have when he started in movies. But one of the things that’s so interesting about “Avatar: The Way of Water” is how much that belief looks like stuff we’ve seen before. This movie isn’t just a retread of “Avatar,” although fans will spot thematic and even visual echoes from “Titanic,” “Aliens,” “The Abyss” and the “Terminator” movies; it’s as if Cameron moved to Pandora forever (and never left).

He invites us into this realized world with so many amazing images and thrillingly rendered action scenes that nothing else matters eventually. Not right away.

“Avatar: The Way of Water” takes its sweet time finding its footing narratively at first, dumping viewers back into the world of Pandora in narrative fits and starts. One senses that what really interested Cameron here was the middle part of his film, which is some of his best work in terms of sheer world-building accomplishment, so he may have been rushing through setups to get to those parts more quickly.

Before then, we catch up with Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who used to be human but now is full-time Na’vi, having mated with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), with whom he has started a family. They have two sons in addition to a daughter of unknown origins, and they’re the guardians of Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), who was the product of Weaver’s character from the first film.

But that family bliss is broken when the “sky people” return, including an avatar Na’vi version of one Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who has come back to finish what he started and take revenge on Jake for killing him as a human.

He returns with a group of former human now Na’vi soldiers who are this movie’s main bad guys, but not its only ones; “Avatar: The Way of Water” again casts these planet-destroying humans as its truest villains, though sometimes their motives can be pretty murky. About halfway through this thing I realized it’s not entirely clear why Quaritch wants to hunt Jake and his family so badly other than that’s what this plot needs but Lang is great at playing angry.

In “Avatar: The Way of Water,” most of the story is about whether or not to fight for family. Fight, or flight? Is it better to try and stay safe by running away and hiding from a powerful enemy, or should one turn around and confront the oppressive evil? At first, Jake chooses the latter; he takes them to another part of Pandora where H2O one of Cameron’s many long-standing obsessions opens up the movie.

Instead of aerial acrobatics we get underwater ones, in a region run by Tonowari (Cliff Curtis), leader of a clan called the Metkayina. A family man himself (his wife is played by Kate Winslet), Tonowari worries about what new visitors could bring but cannot turn them away. Once again Cameron sets up a situation that begs moral questions about responsibility in the face of a powerful evil: this time embodied by a group of commercial poachers from Earth who dare to hunt sacred water animals in sequences so stunning you forget none of it is real.

The film shifts its focus away from Sully/Quaritch and onto Jake’s boys as they learn the ways of the water clan which is where it starts to feel like “Avatar” might be expanding on its world in ways that the first film did not. Where that was more focused on telling one story, here Cameron ties together several stories in much more ambitious and ultimately rewarding fashion. Some ideas or plot developments (like Kiri’s connection to Pandora or Spider’s arc, played by Jack Champion) are mostly table-setting for future films; but everything benefits from having more room to breathe.

There might need to be a stronger protagonist/antagonist line through a film that discards both Jake & Quaritch for long stretches; but I would counter that those terms are intentionally vague here. The protagonist is not just any single character nor even any single family but rather all families, everyone and everything on this planet; while the antagonist is nothing less than every force in existence attempting to destroy natural worlds along with those who inhabit them.

The dialogue is just as bad here as it was in Cameron’s last film and that’s saying something. There are lines that will make you cringe, but there’s also something endearing about the way he does character; his storytelling is old-school Hollywood, married to cutting edge technology. Most blockbusters overcomplicate their worlds with unnecessary mythologies or back stories; Cameron knows that all he needs to do is give this impossible place a heart.

His environmentalism might be skin-deep his colonialism might be too and I wouldn’t want to argue with anyone who finds the film’s relationship to indigenous culture problematic. But if families can use movies like this as a spark for conversations about where we’re at, then they still count for something.

Lately, there has been much talk about what “Avatar” did and didn’t achieve from a cultural standpoint superheroes have dominated popular storytelling so completely over the past 10 years that it feels like people forget about the Na’vi. Watching “Avatar: The Way of Water,” I was struck by how impersonal Hollywood movies have become in my lifetime, and how even most of the genre-transforming blockbusters tend to feel more like products than self-expressions of their creators (seriously: Think about how “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” probably couldn’t have been made by anybody else). If nothing else, this still feels like a James Cameron movie through-and-through. And I am still rooting for him.

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