'Avatar: The Way of Water' is All Shock and No Substance
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There's this TV. It's perched high on the back wall of my favorite bagel shop. Depending on the day and the time, it'll be playing anything from a cartoon like The Amazing World of Gumball to a Netflix deep cut. This TV bothers the living shit out of me. Someone—the TV's manufacturer, the bagel shop owner, who knows!—has the frame rate jacked up so high that poor Gumball seems to blur through his cartoon neighborhood. This has a name, by the way: the "soap opera effect." Our dumb human brains are so used to watching TV and movies at lower frame rates that anything considered high looks bizarrely unreal.
Avatar: The Way of Water, in theaters today, feels like watching The Amazing World of Gumball, in 3-D, on the TV of my local bagel shop. Certain scenes run at a whopping 48 frames per second—double the average—which director James Cameron has said creates a "heightened sense of presence." For me, it creates a heightened sense of not being able to see what the hell is going on. Here's a game for your Way of Water screening: is it a Na'vi or is it Sonic the Hedgehog?
I'll move on, because this is, otherwise, a review of The Way of Water, Cameron's long-delayed sequel to 2009's box-office-record-breaking Avatar. But if the immersive visuals of Way of Water are, like the original, the film's selling point you should know why some scenes quite literally reach photorealism of an alien world and others make your brain feel like it's three shots deep.
So what is Mr. Jake Sully up to when we meet him again? He's a dad! Congrats. Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri, his Na'vi love interest played by Zoë Saldaña—their relationship infamously consummated by hair sex, of course—have five children now. Three are their own, one is adopted (Kiri, played by Sigourney Weaver), and the other is a human that's just kinda there to hang. The legwork Way of Water does to set up a family dynamic that will, if Cameron has his way, play out over the next decade mostly works. It's the pesky human who gets in the way. Played by Jack Champion (Avengers: Endgame, The Night Sitter) and going by the name of...Spider, he's a feral teenager who acts not unlike Justin Bieber circa 2013. But instead of pissing into mop buckets screaming "Fuck Bill Clinton," this kid runs around on all fours, growls when confronted, and addresses his foster siblings as "bro" and "cuz."
Bro, cuz, Bill Clinton, know this: the Sky People are tooling with the poor Na'vi again. Much like its predecessor, Way of the Water sees Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) out for blood, in the name of saving a dying Earth—only he's an Avatar this time around, reborn in a Na'vi body. Despite growing four feet, Quaritch is still the one-note villain he always was, barking threats like, "I OWE YOU A DEATH!" The too-familiar attack gives ol' Jakey the idea to self-exile, flying his family away to meet the island-dwelling Metkayina clan. There, Disney+ antics ensue. Meaning: children fighting, parents lecturing children, the learning of the titular way of the water.
Way of the Water, then, feels destined for the same fate of the 2009 film, where it'll make a bazillion dollars and fuel best-visuals-ever chatter throughout awards season before we forget about it entirely. I write this as someone who was wowed enough by Cameron's breakthrough, ultra-real photography in 2009 to forgive its lack of narrative. 13 years later, I can't overlook the cracks in the story, which often devolves into Marvel-on-a-bad-day shenanigans. Jake and Neytiri's should be-sprawling love story is reduced to a few domestic squabbles scattered throughout the film. There's not too much depth to the new kiddos, save for Weaver's heartwarming portrayal of Kiri's coming-of-age and Britain Dalton's promising turn as the second-born Sully child, Lo'ak.
When Way of Water leaves the Sky People in the sky is when we reach moments of true wonder—and full immersion in this beautiful, breathing planet. Plus, Lo'ak's friendship with, I'm being genuine here, a space whale is awe-inspiring. Kiri's subplot, which follows a lost child searching for the origins of her parentage, while simultaneously discovering godlike powers, shows that Avatar does have a story to tell. The culturally rich Metkayina clan, led by a determined Ronal (Kate Winslet), implies the possibilities of discovering more fun folks in the vast world of Pandora. Should Avatar 3, filmed simultaneously with Way of Water, pick up on these threads, there is a promising future for the franchise.
One last note, before I jet from Pandora back to our burning, resource-needy world. If you're blissfully unaware of what has felt like Way of Water's decade-long press tour, then know that Cameron has been hyping Avatar's many sequels damn near any chance he can get. (The director has plans for at least three more Avatar films, all in various stages of development.) But there's one interview I keep coming back to. Early in December, Cameron, in speaking with Collider, detailed the feedback he received from Disney on each Avatar script:
I can’t tell you the details, but all I can say is that when I turned in the script for 2, the studio gave me three pages of notes. And when I turned in the script for 3, they gave me a page of notes, so I was getting better. When I turned in the script for 4, the studio executive, creative executive over the films wrote me an email that said, ‘Holy fuck.’ And I said, ‘Well, where are the notes?’ And she said, ‘Those are the notes.’ Because it kind of goes nuts in a good way, right?”
I have to ask: why wasn't The Way of Water the holy-fuck movie? Was anything stopping our first trip to Pandora in 13 years from being the showstopper that goes nuts in a good way? How is Cameron openly speaking about the slow-burning improvement of his creative process? Why is he pulling punches?
Avatar 4 may very well mark the moment when Cameron reaches true nirvana in the big, blue globe of his own creation—when the storytelling finally reaches the heights of the visuals, and the Sully family's story becomes the generational sci-fi epic we were promised. The Way of Water still needs the level of workshopping Cameron described. Here's hoping that I won't be repeating myself in another 13 years.
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