Movie Reaction: Avatar: The Way of Water

Formula: Avatar + Water

The lead up to this movie has been...odd. It turns out, there's a collective haze about what happened in late 2009 and early 2010. A lot of people can't remember how Avatar became the highest grossing movie of all time. Years of bad 3D movies have obscured how effective the 3D of the first movie was. We still haven't figured out how to contextualize premium ticket costs for 3D when talking about the box office. We all recall how leading up to any long-awaited James Cameron movie comes with doubts about if it will work this time. It doesn't help that Sam Worthington has had very little career in the years since and Zoe Saldana is the quietest star with the most massive blockbusters. And since we can't recapture the moment when Avatar became a sensation, we forget.

 

As a result, there are a few camps that have formed. The first is the "no cultural footprint" crowd. I'm mostly in that group. We're the ones pointing out that there are no iconic moments from the movie (think of Titanic by comparison). The movie didn't make any lasting stars. As cool as Pandora: The Land of Avatar is at Disney World, the response I most hear about it is "That's really cool, but why Avatar?" This group is marked by an almost stubborn insistence that Avatar was an accident of circumstance. Another group are the Avatar truthers. These people feel gaslit. Avatar IS the highest grossing movie of all time. It HAS a land at Disney World. The 3D changed the film industry for years. How can someone say the film had no impact? And there's a final group of people who, like with most franchises, saw the first one because it was a thing to see at the time, liked it, and never thought about it again until now. These are the healthy people. We should aspire to be them.

 

I have no fondness for Avatar. I don't hate it either. I remember liking it in 2009. I rewatched it once years later to see if I could remember why it was so huge. I couldn't. For whatever reason, Pandora is just not a world I'm enraptured by. While Avatar is a fun enough movie, I'm just not invested in it. I couldn't come to Avatar: The Way of Water with unreserved excitement. Still, I did my best to leave myself open to be swept away. I love when a movie can transport me. Why would I stubbornly deprive myself of that experience?

 

So, Avatar: The Way of Water is fine. With 13 years of build-up, that's a little deflating. Maybe this is a movie I need to see twice: once to see what the movie is, once to enjoy it for what it is. While I didn't have preconceived notions of what I thought The Way of Water would be, I didn't think it was going to be a copy of Avatar but in the water and with more advanced effects.

 

The story of The Way of Water is very similar to the first movie. In the years since Avatar, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) have had several kids and adopted/taken in a couple others. Humans have returned to Pandora to exploit the resources again. Sully leads the Na'vi counter-insurgency. Eventually though, he accepts that the threat created by his presence is unfair to his tribe and decides to move his family far away to live with a water-based Na'vi tribe. So, where the first Avatar was Sully learning the way of the forest Na'vi, The Way of Water is Sully's family learning the way of the water Na'vi. The villain? That would be Stephan Lang's Quaritch again. His consciousness was transferred to an Avatar body. Sigourney Weaver returns as the teenage daughter of her Avatar somehow. So, if you really liked the beats of the story in the first Avatar, you'll be thrilled by how this movie plays out. I say that glibly, but I do mean it. For me, the story of Avatar was pretty underwhelming. It relied on the audience being dazzled by the land of Pandora. For whatever reason, I'm just not.

 

That is a major selling point of this movie though. It combines James Cameron's two biggest obsessions: Avatar and water. If you thought he loved the forests of Pandora, just wait. The underwater scenes in this are truly dazzling. Everything about this water tribe is detailed, considered, and pretty. If Pandora is your thing, then the middle hour of the movie when the Sully family are getting to know life in this new place is a dream. Me though? I don't say this because I'm looking to tear the movie down; I'm just saying what really happened. I started to nod off. I just did. Again, Pandora doesn't do it for me. I wasn't captivated enough. I don't know if that puts me in a minority. I just know it was my experience.

 

So, yeah. The movie recycles a lot of things. It's the same basic plot. The human threat is back. It's the same villain. Watching this, I got the feeling that the water tribe stuff is what interested Cameron the most. He considered a lot of scripts and went with the one that worked the first time.

 

Despite my negativity, I did like the movie and there's a lot to recommend. On a technical level, it's striking. The motion capture technology has gotten even better. The world is as vibrant and diverse as ever. I don't question for a second what this massive, massive budget went toward. I didn't see a high frame rate showing of the film - at least I don't think - but I could definitely tell there are some portions of the movie shot in high frame rate. It works well underwater, where I don't have real visual comparisons. I hated it anywhere above water. It always looks bad to me. It always looks like I'm watching people on a film set when it moves to high frame rate and that takes me out of the movie. Maybe it didn't bother other people, but it sure bothered me. I appreciate Cameron and other filmmakers trying to crack the code with high frame rates. Perhaps one day that will unlock a whole new world with filmmaking. For now though, it remains a distraction.

 

Let's also not forget that James Cameron's superpower above everything else is spectacle. There just isn't anyone better at doing a huge set piece. While the first hour of the movie was place-setting and the second hour was water admiration, the final hour is a huge water battle and series of set pieces that won't be matched by anything this year. The last hour made the first two hours’ worth it for me*. I don't know what else to say about it. If I had a checklist for all the things I wanted to see in a big sea battle, Cameron checked them all off then added a few things. He did so while keeping and even gaining momentum. If one of the reasons you go to the movies is to see something on a big screen that you can't reproduce at home, then you absolutely should see The Way of Water.

 

*Let me add a clarification. There are times when films take a lot of time to finally pay things off, so the awesome ending retroactively improves what you watched before. That is not The Way of Water. There are obviously plot points that pay off in the last hour, but the things about the battle that really worked for me worked pretty independently from the rest of the movie. As a result, The Way of Water is a movie where I put up with 2 hours to get to the good stuff, not a movie where I invested 2 hours and got a return on that investment. Think of it like going to a concert with 4 opening acts before the band you actually bought the ticket for.

 

I think that about covers it for me. Like the first Avatar, I'm glad I saw The Way of Water. It's a singular experience at the movies. James Cameron is a master at his craft. The film doesn't transport me to a world I care about though. That happens. I know other people who think I am insane for eating up every last second of the extended Lord of the Rings movies. At some point, franchise filmmaking comes down to if you care about the franchise or not. The Way of Water, for all its visual spectacle, doesn't get me to care about the franchise.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend