The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C-
I couldn’t care less about the first Avatar. I don’t want to belabor this point, as it’s a point that’s been made in every critical analysis of it, but it’s just a mega-budget borderline remake of Dances with Wolves, replacing the Native Americans with blue aliens. If you can enjoy the spectacle of it without caring about the tired and cliché story, then more power to you. I just couldn’t get into it. But if you did enjoy the original, then you’re in luck because Avatar: The Way of Water is basically the same movie with a change in setting.
Set a decade or so after the first movie, Jake Sully (the lead character of the first movie) is the chief of the forest-dwelling Na’vi (the aliens) in Pandora. But those pesky humans haven’t given up on taking over Pandora and are sending in a team of villainous avatars loaded with the memories of fallen soldiers, lead by the Na’vi reincarnation of lead villain Quaritch, to kill Sully and prepare Pandora for human colonization. To evade them, Sully packs up his family, leaves the forest aliens and travels to the water aliens to ask them for safe haven.
I will admit it: the visuals in Avatar: The Way of Water are amazing, next-level stuff in terms of computer-generated effects. I did see this in 3D (though, unfortunately, not IMAX) and the 3D effects are the best that I’ve ever seen. The environments have an incredible sense of depth and characters often feel like they a feet away from your face. The particle effects are just as impressive as debris often seems like it has drifted off the screen and you could reach out and grab it. As for the characters, the entire movie looks like a video game, but like a future-generation video game, like if someone had gone into the future and filmed a PlayStation 7 game. If you are going to see this movie, then you need to see it in 3D on the largest screen that you can find because James Cameron has obviously devoted a lot of resources to improving this technology in the last thirteen years.
It’s too bad that Cameron couldn’t have found a little more time to work on a script. Considering that Cameron made Terminator 2 and Aliens, two of the best sequels ever made, it’s rather sad that it took him this long to tell the same goddam story and just shift it from the forest to the water. If the Avatar films are to continue following the normal progression of Zelda temples, then I have to assume that Avatar 3 will take place in either the desert, fire or ice world. Note: I’ve had that Zelda line in my head for a week for this review, but Cameron has since actually confirmed that Avatar 3 will go to the fire world. Presumably, we will have to wait for Avatar 4 & 5 for the desert and ice worlds.
There is nothing in this that isn’t either a retread of the first Avatar or, somewhat unexpectedly, Aliens. But mostly the first Avatar. The plot revolves around Sully again having to gain the trust of a tribe of aliens while humans are again trying to take over their land and take their resources, finally answering the decades-old question: What if Dances with Wolves took place at the beach? The flying monsters that the forest tribe uses are replaced with sea creatures for the water tribe. The film even makes an excuse for Stephen Lang to return as the villain, even though his character died, so that we can get the same face-off as in the first movie. We do get the feral child of the villain in this one and he functionally bears quite a resemblance to Newt from Aliens, as do the mech battle suits that are more than a little reminiscent of Ripley’s mech suit in the final battle in Aliens. I checked my watch at least a dozen times during this movie’s interminable running time and only held onto the hope that Cameron would also throw something from The Terminator or True Lies at me while he was at it. I guess he’s saving that for the next one.
It doesn’t even make any narrative sense to shift the setting to the water world. The humans have two goals: kill Sully and take over Pandora. The first goal could be logically accomplished by focusing on the second goal, but whatever. When our chickenshit hero learns that the humans are coming back for him, he bails on the forest and takes his family to the water. Ultimately, how is that going to help? That would be like if aliens threatened to destroy the Earth and somebody moved from New Jersey to Maryland to avoid them. The entire film hinges on the main character being a shortsighted coward. The ending of the film even indirectly acknowledges this, as it ends with the surviving characters pledging to stand their ground in the water world. Well why the fuck didn’t you just do that in the forest world in the first place? This movie is 3+ hours of filler that does nothing to move the narrative forward in any meaningful way.
The original Avatar has a unique place in movie history because its probably the most successful movie ever made that nobody really talks about. For most folks, the memory of it is something that they marveled at in a theater and then never really thought about again. In the film community, it’s a non-subject. I follow tons of movie podcasts and blogs and Avatar is never mentioned by anyone. It just isn’t very interesting to talk about because, once you get passed the visuals, you are left with a hollow, forgettable film. Avatar: The Way of Water is more of the same and will likely be the second most successful film of all time that nobody talks about. If you want to see it, head to the theater, enjoy the spectacle and then forget about it until Avatar 3 comes out in two years.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar%3A_The_Way_of_Water#/media/File:Avatar_The_Way_of_Water_poster.jpg
