“Now listen up, because here’s a story, about a little guy who lives in a blue world…”
It’s been thirteen years since James Cameron gave us a big epic film that broke box office records…for the second time. Sequels were of course promised, but, well, you can’t say he didn’t take his time working on them. And that brings once again to Cameron’s obsession with all things wet, as we go all in with Avatar: The Way of Water.
What did I think of the first Avatar? Eh, it was fine, though not Cameron’s best overall. Unoriginal in plot? Oh sure, but as many a superhero film has shown since, that’s not much of a dealbreaker for most audiences. In terms of visuals, it still holds up very well—where other films even now have their CGI suffer through overworked and overtaxed studios scrambling it together, here the planet Pandora remains a striking kaleidoscope of colors and creatures, with gnarly grounded scifi hardware. Lead Sam Worthingon was overshadowed by pretty much everyone else, but that’s something seemingly addressed here.
Right off the bat we get Cameron’s technical mastery shown off in this one—the visual effects have been cranked up to yet another level, although for some reason in some screenings there’s a variance in the framerate that some might find a little jarring. There’s one very striking sequence in the first few minutes where arriving starships use their thrusters to burn away a swathe of jungle from orbit, in a scene reminiscent of one certain moment in Terminator 2. The fight scenes are shot very intensely, there’s a great sense of scale, and what’s most impressive is the many, many underwater scenes—anyone who knows anything about animation can tell you how hard that’s to pull off, but here we have alien reefs created pretty much scratch, which is nothing to sneeze at.
In fact part of me wishes that Cameron would dispense with the whole interplanetary strife plot and make a movie that’s nothing but vibes—simply exploring Pandora and indulging sheer atmosphere. Oh sure it probably wouldn’t sell as much, but there’s more than enough to prove here that it can easily be done.
As to the story? Well thankfully in terms of emotional weight, it blows the original out of the water (yuk yuk). The focus is away from a tussle over mineral rights for space rocks and focuses directly on the family of human-turned-avatar-turned-catperson Jake Sully, with his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), and their litter of kids. Most interesting is their tagalong human-born wild child Spider (Jack Champion), who has a link to our returning bad guy Quaritch (Stephen Lang). Our story has them relocate to an island chain where the usual tribulations of fitting in occur—and while once again it may not be a hotbed of originality, there’s enough relatability to make it way more of an interesting struggle at the end once things inevitably go to hell.
Of course, as we’ve mentioned before, subtlety isn’t Cameron’s strong point, and if you were hoping for a more nuanced struggle here between Na’vi natives and the colonizing corporation…well, there’s even less effort at that than in the first. We have an environmental message with a bit of a Free Willy bent, which seems a little odd—especially when the initial scenes of rainforest defoliation in the name of overzealous development isn’t exactly non-pertinent. Quaritch here is at least also more of an interesting figure, but that’s about it from anyone on the corporate side.
This was shot back to back with the next sequel, and the ending reflects that—which does make me feel a little more could’ve been trimmed. Still, if you liked the first one, this instalment improves in all the ways that matter—and if you felt the first was way too on the nose, well, not much has changed there. Even so, for all the very impressive immersion on the environments of Pandora, it does make me ponder just how sensual virtual environs can get in our digital world where such things can be conjured with increasing ease. Cameron proves that you still need the panache to make it memorable as opposed to just flurrying stuff at the camera—fitting given he helped usher in the CG revolution thirty years ago, but where it all stops, I guess we’ll find out…
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