Thirteen years since Avatar first shuttled us to Pandora, James Cameron returns with the second chapter of his Na’vi saga: Avatar: The Way of Water, a spectacle stupefying enough for its many enthusiasts to paint the helmer in near-messianic terms. Hailed, per Entertainment Weekly’s Leah Greenblatt, as “a man outside of time, an emissary from a future where movies look like something we’ve only imagined them to be,” the director, Justin Chang echoes at the L.A. Times, “remains one of the few Hollywood visionaries who actually merits that much-abused term,” a filmmaker determined “to submerge you in another time and place, to seduce you into a state of pure, unforced astonishment.” But the disbelief Chang alludes to deserves careful spelling. Anyone mildly familiar with the Canadian auteur’s filmography will know that Cameron’s craft has always hinged on a kind of dichotomy: impressive as his world building and showmanship often are, his films are just as often undermined by their formulaic plots and the one-dimensional characters. On my way to the theater, my main question was whether The Way of Water would find a way to resolve that asymmetry, or whether it would only throw it into harsher relief.
Like its predecessor, The Way of Water wears its opulent technical achievements on its sleeve. The main cast consists again of ten-foot-tall, blue-skinned aliens, only these look much more realistic than they did in the first Avatar—to say nothing of the uncanny underwater world the Sully clan ventures into in their attempts to flee from the human soldiers pillaging Pandora. The change of setting, land for water, and the introduction of the Metkayina—a reef-dwelling people the Na’vi will have to side with in their fight against the “Sky People”—are two of the very few ruptures in a diptych that follows the same old Indigenous culture versus invaders narrative. Similarly to Avatar, The Way of Water relies on 3D technology, cutting-edge CGI, and performance capture, but it also toggles freely between different frame rates (the number of images projected per second), making scenes seesaw between the traditional 24 and 48 frames per second. “Only two shots in the entire film contain no visual effects,” Darryn King claims in an illuminating report on The Way of Water’s technical wizardry over at The New York Times, “and nearly all of the water in the film is computer-generated.” Whatever else one may think of Cameron’s latest, the level of CG artifice in every landscape and seascape is staggering. “When watching—or more accurately, experiencing—Avatar: The Way of Water,” Tomris Laffly observes at the A.V. Club,
…the thing that will perhaps feel most awe-inspiring is the dignified beauty of the underwater ecosystems Cameron has created. It doesn’t matter that none of the glow-in-the-dark marine life and vibrantly gorgeous fluorescent fish you will see beneath the blue surfaces of Pandora actually exist. What matters is that you will instantly believe that they do.
“What’s most thrilling about the film’s sweeping immersion,” Richard Lawson helpfully notes at Vanity Fair, “is that it all arrives as discovery.” And that may be the one crucial difference between Cameron’s project and the countless IP franchises that have infested multiplexes ever since that first journey to Pandora.
The Avatar franchise is not based on anything already known. There is no comic book to consult, no video game narrative to refer to. And so, as hokey as it might occasionally be—like, say, watching the Na’vi have in-depth conversations with placid, moaning space whales—Way of Water maintains a giddy spirit of creative birth. It is a total and discrete object, guided only by internal rules. Cameron is certainly influenced by real-world things—Maori culture can be glimpsed in some of the Metkayina’s customs, for example—but for the most part, he is just making this stuff up. How rare that is to see these days, at least in movies as large as this one. The film’s geeky confidence earns our affection, graciously encouraging that cynicism be laid aside in favor of wide-eyed wonder.
To be sure, it’s hard not to marvel at the film’s levels of detail, the creative design and the dynamism of the 3D, 48 fps presentation. “But the human brain has evolved to adapt to its surroundings, so spectacle quickly transforms into gimmick,” David Jenkins contends at Little White Lies; “there’s a tragic irony to the fact that Cameron and his team have created a world so immaculately immersive—a mellifluous trompe-l’œil writ large across the sky in fluoro blue—that the defects in his by-the-motions storytelling are the only thing left to stare at.” As immersive as The Way of Water is, its visual charms can often trigger the opposite effect, yanking you out of Pandora rather than drawing you in. Take the higher frame rate (HFR) again. The approach, Stephanie Zacharek contends at TIME, “is supposed to render those images more vivid and realistic, but it really just gives them that cheap soap-opera look that everything on your TV gets if you fail to turn off the motion-smoothing feature.” If the whole movie were in HFR, Jordan Hoffman echoes at Polygon,
…perhaps one would settle in, but jumping between the two—often from shot to shot in the same action sequence, or even within the same shot, as it is being projected in some cinemas—is simply an aesthetic experiment that fails. This is not just being picky. The changes mean that the tempo of the action on screen looks either sped up or slowed down as the switches occur. Shots in higher frame rate couched between ones that are lower (and there are many) look like a computer game that gets stuck on a render, which then spits something out super fast.
Whatever your mileage with the film’s hi-tech experiments, Lawson’s praise over at Vanity Fair suggests another, more troubling point: the idea that Cameron’s “geeky confidence” and unfeigned love for his own extraterrestrial creations should be instantly relatable and contagious. “There isn’t an ounce of cynicism or detached irony to [The Way of Water], the kind of qualities that undermine so many superhero movies,” Miles Surrey agrees at The Ringer: Cameron “is expressing a genuine and unapologetic love for the Na’vi family he’s created, and invites the audience to do the same.” The issue here isn’t whether or not viewers will heed the call, but whether the director’s cornball sincerity ultimately works against him. Spellbinding as Pandora’s digital world might look, Cameron and co-scribes Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver have made it impermeable to ambiguities, contrasts, ideologies, and self-criticism. In short, as Richard Brody eloquently writes over at The New Yorker, the script’s many digressions “don’t develop characters or evoke psychology but, rather, emphasize what the movie is selling as its strong point—its visual enticements and the technical innovations that make them possible.”
The near-absence of characters’ substance and inner lives isn’t a bug but a feature of both “Avatar” films, and, with the expanded array of characters in “The Way of Water,” that psychological uniformity is pushed into the foreground, along with the visual styles. […] Cameron’s new island realm is a land without creativity, without personalized ideas, inspirations, imaginings, desires. His aesthetic of such unbroken unanimity is the apotheosis of throwaway commercialism, in which mystery and wonder are replaced by an infinitely reproducible formula, with visual pleasures microdosed. Cameron fetishizes this hermetic world without culture because, with his cast and crew under his command, he can create it with no extra knowledge, experience, or curiosity needed—no ideas or ideologies to puncture or pressure the bubble of sheer technical prowess or criticize his own self-satisfied and self-sufficient sensibility from within. He has crafted his own perfect cinematic permanent vacation, a world apart, from which, undisturbed by thoughts of the world at large, he can sell an exclusive trip to an island paradise where he’s the king.
The film’s technical prowess serves as its dramatic center. “One gets the sense,” Slant’s Keith Uhlich writes of The Way of Water’s most sophisticated segments, “that Cameron is so enamored of the heavy lifting required to realize scenes like these […] that he’s willing to bring narrative momentum to a halt in the process.” So while one can’t knock the director’s gifts for crafting a whole imaginary world from scratch, “the cavernous disconnect between the innovative technology on display and the rudimentary storytelling occasionally makes it feel like we’re watching video game cut scenes seemingly designed to make Kojima Hideo blush.” After all, Owen Gleiberman notes at Variety, the plot, such as it is, amounts to “a string of serviceable clichés that give the film the domestic adventure-thriller spine it needs, but not anything more than that,” a story that, “with its bare-bones dialogue, could easily have served an ambitious Netflix thriller, and could have been told in two hours rather than three.”
But that’s nothing really new for Cameron. The first Avatar too was built on a very thin plot, perched somewhere between an anti-imperialist fable à la Dances With Wolves and the eco-friendly animation FernGully: The Last Rainforest. And the director’s “cutting-edge technophilia,” to borrow again from the L.A. Times’s Justin Chang, “has always been married to, and complemented by, an unapologetic cornball classicism.” Archetypes and clichés and shopworn storylines have long been Cameron’s game—long, long before Avatar. So why do we let him get away with it? Perhaps because, as Rolling Stone’s K. Austin Collins suggests in one of the most astute pieces on the film yet, Cameron “is a romantic.”
His largesse heightens the schematic, basic-bitch psychology; his dramatic gravitas makes it all suitably larger than life, worthy of a movie, and worthy of a James Cameron movie, specifically, with all the professional polish that implies. Cameron’s all-encompassing style has a way of making other blockbusters feel small, vague. The Way of Water, in line with his best work, is more affecting for knowing its audience, for digging into primal feelings about being misunderstood, being black sheep, being orphaned, falling in love. […] If it were less corny, it’d somehow be less mesmerizing. And if it were any less primal, or any less willing to tap into a basic, bone-deep sense of injustice—on behalf of the environment and the natural world, of all things—then its overwhelming climax, full of hero-saves-the-day timing and selfless deeds and chickens very much coming home to roost, wouldn’t be as rousing.
The Current Debate is a column that connects the dots between great writing about topics in the wider film conversation.