After an entire decade’s worth of dunks – “Blue cat people!” “They fuck with their braids!” “Unobtainium hur dur!” “Name me one single character from that movie!” “Nobody even remembers that piece of shit!” – James Cameron’s finally ready to show off what he’s been cooking up all along down under in whatever compound, stacked to the gills with armed guards, scientists, and captive VFX people, that he’s been using as a sort of John McAfee production house, off the grid and eyes firmly focused on the future. Now, let me say that I’ve never entirely bought into the hype or the hate around Avatar. Is it hard for me to give a damn about the struggles of the Na’vi because I find their design generally repellant? Yeah. Are the first two-thirds of the first film pretty boring if you’re not seeing it for the very first time or watching it in 3D? Yeah. Is that last third awesome? Yeah. Are there memorable characters? Totally (Stephen Lang, dude). Is Avatar: The Way of Water going to bellyflop when it hits theaters later this week? That kind of diagnosis isn’t in my job description, but I will offer up one consideration for you.
What propelled the first Avatar to the status of highest-grossing-film-of-all-time was the fact that it was a genuine spectacle: A technological marvel of a film that used an emergent and semi-popular technology (which evaporated from the marketplace, despite having a killer app, because its imitators could not even approximate the same kind of wonder or skill that Cameron utilized it with) to portray something truly fantastic, and I think a lot of the tension that emerged from critics and others came from the fact that it felt both novel and familiar. The things one remembers from Avatar are experiential, not wholly intellectual, and I’d argue that’s by design. Someone who was around to see the first film in theaters who buys a copy of the DVD or Blu-Ray is buying it as a sort of souvenir, like a photo of themselves on a rollercoaster. Of course, other people, who’d only ever seen pictures of it like the one in our metaphor or the construction plans or YouTube videos of the ride would find deeper structural flaws or technical skill to admire, and would be accurate in their assessments while missing the larger point: You did, in fact, have to be there.
What makes Avatar: The Way of Water so much better than the first film in Cameron’s bizarre series is that, despite trying to recapture the wonder of that first journey to Pandora (and succeeding beyond one’s wildest dreams), it’s also focused on trying to bridge that gap between the theatrical viewer, seeing it opening weekend in 3D and HFR, and the person who’ll find it on Blu-Ray a year or so later and decides to give it a watch. It’s Cameron returning to his fundamentals after proving that the tech would work, that audiences would be interested, and after getting all of that exposition out of the way. Way of Water is a longer film, but it’s also, paradoxically, a leaner one in some aspects. Since we’re not being introduced to Pandora, its lifeforms, and their conflict with the invasive species known as “humanity,” Cameron can focus on the things that interest him in a more emphatic way. See, despite his bluster, Cameron’s not immune to criticism: A decade’s worth of “Unobtainium” jokes and comments about how artificial the whole thing feels have caused him to double-down on the pathos, which begins semi-treacly but winds up, by the beginning of its second, being genuinely affecting.
The issues that plagued the first film – of “appropriation” and whatnot – remain and will not convince those inherently repelled by Cameron’s well-intentioned but clumsy handling of such issues, but I’d argue the genuine affection for the communities he’s paying tribute to — specifically Pacific Islanders and the Maori — shines through in a more explicit fashion through his portrayal of the coastline society that Jake (Sam Worthington), Netiyari (Zoe Saldana) and their family are forced to flee to when the humans return to Pandora, this time with a clear goal of Manifest Destiny-style “diplomacy” and resettlement. Humans have finally wrecked the Earth, and they need a new home, pronto. This is a much more compelling conflict than mere resource extraction (though the pointlessness of the cruelty the Marines and that mining company employed in their quest for Unobtanium at any cost is perhaps more despicable in its banality). When that inevitable return to a specific form of ecological devastation does rear its head in Way of Water’s plot, it presents us with a clear, living victim and generates a real sense of uncomfortable empathy, especially in how clear the parallel is to what goes on at sea each day on Earth.
That’s a lot of handwaving to try and avoid spoilers, but it’s also because I genuinely don’t think the plot of Way of Water really matters that much beyond it being a way to serve up whatever image Cameron wishes to present to us at any given moment. And in that regard, he is once again unparalleled at presenting us with an ecological and ethnographic survey of a fictional world that is, like the whole concept, familiar and yet novel. The level of detail put into creating the oceans of Pandora is astonishing in its clarity and accuracy, and achieves something I didn’t even find in the first film: A legitimate suspension of disbelief. The Na’vi, of course, remain sore thumbs in Cameron’s otherwise photorealistic landscapes, but this time around I didn’t see them as a part of the digital environment. Rather, they feel like the only computer-enhanced presence in an ecosystem, perhaps buried at the bottom of a deep trench in our planet’s oceans (perhaps Cameron was doing location scouting when he made his trek to the bottom of the Marianas roughly a decade or so ago). And in these sequences under the water, where we glide along with Jake’s children and some of the locals as they explore the wonders submerged with them, Cameron’s usage of his more rote technological skills – say, the aforementioned 3D and HFR – sings in a way that they often don’t when applied to surface-level action. Some of this can be attributed to camera movement and a relatively slow-pace editing style: It’s easier for us to lose ourselves in the images when we’re underwater because there’s a gentleness to the camera movement (after all, real actors did have to do the motion capture for these scenes, and that one physical constraint limited Cameron), and the smoothness that a 48 FPS frame rate brings to these sequences gives them an enhanced clarity in 3D. It is overwhelmingly gorgeous, with the details preserved from the first film – Pandora’s luminescent biosphere, for one – looking even more vivid and fantastic when applied to these even-more realistic settings.
That said, those technical choices do have consequential impacts on the rest of the film, and not all of them are good ones. I’ll start with the positive, which is Cameron’s application of 3D. Once again, he’s put every single other artist working in the form (at least in the mainstream, as in the interim between the first and second Avatars, directors like Godard, Herzog, and Bi Gan have used it to fascinating ends at the arthouse) to shame, as the level of clarity in the image on-screen is almost indistinguishable from the normal luminescence of the movie screen. He knows how to make colors pop off the screen and how to stage action for a 3D set-up, and the film is just as functionally immersive as it was a decade ago, with the added bonus that it’s being used in service of some gorgeous visuals. His usage of HFR is less-successful, which, as alluded to earlier, makes the underwater sequences fantastic but sort of kneecaps the potential for many of the other sequences, ones which are more traditionally paced and staged. The action looks too smooth and doesn’t gel well with the level of digital artifice in every frame, and some might thing they can hear the fans on their desktop graphics card beginning to rev up once the film starts. Now, this isn’t an insult, though most use it as such: The only medium where high-frame-rate technology is applied regularly is gaming, and a lot of beautiful cinematic art has been made with similar tech, albeit a lot cheaper (one only needs to play Death Stranding to see how it can be applied), but the language is, in fact, different. Think of something like Cinerama in How The West Was Won — it would be tough to use that kind of technology to make a traditional film, full of inserts and quick cuts, and the same applies here. So some of the action can feel, at times, faker than it would be at an ordinary 24, and normal camera effects/movement, like snap-zooms, don’t really work as intended.
What’s frustrating about that HFR is that Cameron has settled for a worst-of-both-worlds compromise in Way of Water‘s presentation, realizing that more intimate scenes would feel too “real” and therefore fully cross the uncanny valley, while not being able to achieve the look that makes those ocean scenes so devastatingly pretty. So, slower scenes are set at 24 FPS, while most of the money shots and action sequences are set at the higher 48 (though the whole film does play at 48 where it can — shots in a 24 FPS sequence are just duplicated to fool the viewer into thinking it’s slower). This approach might remind you of something like Christopher Nolan’s usage of IMAX film in his movies, but in practice, it’s closer to Michael Bay’s in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, where a random insert in a sequence would fill up the full-frame in the middle of an otherwise normally-projected sequence. It’s just sort of clumsily applied, and I wish Cameron had given the audience the benefit of the doubt that, if they bought a ticket to a HFR screening, they’d go in knowing that the whole thing would look kind of weird. On the other hand, after a decade-plus of trying to get friends and family members to turn off motion smoothing (the TV equivalent of HFR) when they’re watching a movie filmed at 24 at home, it’s been proven to me again and again that most people do not give a shit. I just don’t want folks to get disappointed by the presentation here, because the movie’s actually a lot of fun, and it’d be a damn shame for someone to start railing against the movie because they bought a ticket for a format they didn’t want to (the chains, as well, aren’t making this easy: it’s nearly impossible to find out what kind of frame rate your theater is showing Way of Water in, at least from my experience).
I guess such are the consequences of pursuing a particular vision to its end. However, Cameron’s ambition, paired with his ability to depict alien worlds compellingly are unparalleled (I’d still argue in favor of Dune, but then again, this is a wholly original project), and one shouldn’t be surprised the process of realizing all of that challenges the traditional mode of theatrical exhibition. But what’s more surprising is, given their decades-long development cycles, how reactionary the Avatar films feel in the context of the cinematic landscapes they are birthed into. The first came at the tail end of the “grim ‘n gritty” era, as the capstone to a series of films released in the aftermath of Iron Man that sought a different pathway towards connecting with their audience, either through wit (say, Star Trek) or wonder.
Now, Way of Water is a formally silly movie in a multiplex stacked to the gills with them. Yet, it is unwaveringly serious, like Dune or Top Gun: Maverick, rather than defaulting to the kind of flippancy used by shitty filmmakers to try and assure the crowd that things are “fun” and “not nerdy” or whatever. After all, the assumption of seriousness can open one up to mockery, whereas your average Marvel film can’t be parodied because it knows it’s not serious and will go out of its way to try and tell you so (which is a good lane for that studio to be in but that pervasive tone inherently kneecaps their potential to turn into something more meaningful). But James Cameron doesn’t have a single funny bone in his body, which might fuck with his reflexes in the doctor’s office, but allows Way of Water to find a kind of earnest authenticity in the midst of all of its artifice. And, as such, I was astonished to find myself genuinely moved by this film’s ending, where the blue cat-people ceased to be digital inventions and became something closer to people, characters through and through that I could relate to on a deeper level, directly empathizing with their emotions in the moment without being out-and-out prompted to and without it feeling like it was something that happened to slip through a producer’s grasp.
But, to cap things off, if there’s a single word that sums up the biggest difference between Avatar: The Way of Water and the first film, it’s the first words that popped into my mind after the credits started to roll each time. In 2009, after walking out of a midnight screening, I think they must have been either “need sleep” or “gotta piss,” the latter repeated forty times at a rapid pace as my bladder proverbially started bursting at the seams. But in 2022, it was “more, please.”