Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron, 2022).
About an hour into Avatar: The Way of Water—which is to say, not even a full third of the way through it—I was struck slowly by the recognition that I felt almost nothing. I was neither bored nor compelled, not especially annoyed or particularly stirred. Above all, I wasn’t awed, and I wouldn’t ever be for the rest of its sprawling span. For this film far more than most, that’s an acute problem, because it is the feeling that Avatar is so manifestly desperate to produce right from the start, from when it opens with shimmering sonic tones that I jotted in my notes simply as “AWE MUSIC.” It proceeds from there to spend the next three hours deploying the visual equivalent of that sound, making almost everything on screen shimmer, glisten, and glow. And in case this primary tactic for forced wonderment doesn’t do the trick, James Cameron bolsters it by repeating ad nauseam a move wholly familiar from other digitally-intensive, cash-soaked action-ish films of this type. Namely, it offers relentless shot/reverse-shot sequences that cut from those gales of alien planet phosphorescence to a character’s agog face, mouth dangling and eyes anime wide, a ham-fisted aesthetic education that insists, yes, this is how it should feel to see what you see, this is how agape you should be. This is what it is to be struck down by sublimity.
This kind of montage is by now truly common. It’s readily apparent not only across almost every film of this variety over the past two decades but also as part of a broader tendency to center depicted reaction itself as a primary technique, everywhere from The Office—whose laughs depend on cuts or pans to various deadpan faces directly facing the viewer/camera—to the freestanding category of YouTube reaction videos themselves. But in its obsessive use in Avatar, it comes to index with particular clarity a contradiction and a crisis internal to the whole regime of spectacular and extensive digital imaging more generally. That contradiction is, quite simply, the result of how in an attempt to attract and engage audiences, increasingly sophisticated, expensive, and “realistic” digital imaging techniques are deployed, and yet such effects don’t remain ahistorical marvels standing outside of time. Instead, viewers get used to them. They become part of a language of contemporary imaging, something that no longer stands out. In addition, the effects become cheaper to deploy and available at non-professional levels. Consider, for instance, how particle effects that required massive amounts of money, technical expertise, and computing power alike are now available as free plug-ins, or as part of cheaply made free-to-play mobile games. So the films that most heavily make use of digital effects as their primary tool and attraction remain marked by a suspicion about just how quickly audiences will come to be habituated or tired by what is on offer, and in a way that won’t be solved by simply dragging out a final battle scene longer and longer.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Michael Bay, 2011).
In other words, any film that relies on this specific reaction shot—I’m looking at you, every Michael Bay-helmed Transformers—reveals just how little faith it has in its own spectacularity or ability to actually generate wonder without having to Kuleshov back and forth until we are forced to associate those images with the actor’s wowed expression. The Transformers films never actually needed it, given that their sheer disaggregated chaos of polygon scatter and robot gore is so pummeling that it can’t but end somewhere in the transit between migraine and epiphany. In the case of The Way of Water, though, there is a particularly good reason for that doubt, because the only striking thing about this film is how genuinely un-striking its planned splendor and technical marvels turn out to be. It’s an odd, if ultimately logical, endpoint for this current apex of the CGI arms race. Through its sheer saturation of money and time, its Pentagon-scale deployment of technical ingenuity and brute computational force, the digital compositing here turns out to be so “good” that the resulting images are just profoundly normal. There are no seams or jagged edges, no unresolved green screen artifacts. Bodies move with appropriate heft, and each strand of hair oscillates in wind or waves the way it seems it ought to. Nothing stands out enough to hold the eyes, and almost no intervals of not yet or almost remain for an imagination to expand into and invest with want or pain or thought.
As a technical feat, sure, it is impressive, in the way that most things that cost at least 400 million dollars to produce have the capacity and time to be. What about its signature marvel, that “wet-for-wet” shooting (i.e. actual underwater motion capture that’s digitally composited into virtually assembled aquatic space)? It indeed looks very “real,” which was the explicit intention, at least if we can go by PR talking points and every account given publicly by those involved in the production. (Visual effects supervisor Richie Baneham: “If an actor is genuinely in water, there’s a viscous resistance. It informs the actor’s choices. That’s what we’re chasing. That’s what makes it feel real.”) Moreover, the film’s variable use of high-frame-rate (HFR) shooting amplifies this pursuit of that real feel, although we should be clear that the results of that pursuit are far from settled. HFR makes a lot of sense for televised sports, where the fluidity of motion can help transmit a live physicality, and especially for video games, which hinge on impossibly small intervals of reaction time. But its deployment in cinema has so far been more complicated, and marked largely by a rejection by audiences and critics, from The Hobbit (2012–2014)—where “it reduces everything and everybody to mere props and actors [...] swords lack heft, the castles look like dioramas,” writes Rafer Gúzman—to Ang Lee’s far more nuanced but commercially disastrous experiments in Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2016) and Gemini Man (2019). No matter if the images technically move with a fluidity closer to the unfilmed world. The loss of our now-innate familiarity with cinematic or common digital video frame-rate conventions often ends up keeping viewers unsettled and on edge. So while press around the Avatar film uses “real” and “realistic” interchangeably, one of the things the whole project seems to forget is that realism is not a measure of proximity to the “real world”: it is a style, a bundle of genre-hewn conventions. Avatar, conversely, dreams of a “feels real” that is without style, a transparency that allows absolute absorption, as if the kind of viewers Cameron wants so badly would have been moved by the plight of Ewoks in Return of the Jedi (1983) if only we hadn’t spotted a stray stitch at the scruff of one’s neck.
Cool World (Ralph Bakshi, 1992).
This fetish for something called real—that remains compatible with an imagined world—extends not just to what we do see but also to what we allegedly stop seeing: the immense amount of work, skill, render hours, and capital in motion behind every frame. That’s the explicit goal set for these obscenely costly and complicated visual effects, that they should not merely “feel real” but also cover their own tracks and vanish entirely into their results. I’d suggest that the name for this tension, this friction between labor and its visibility, is animation, the form of making images that hinges on the greatest gap between the time of viewing and the dizzying quantity of time sunk into every frame. Yet while his films—like many others of similar cost and digital scale—increasingly push that gap to historically unprecedented levels, Cameron wants nothing to do with it, other than to finally finish wiping the last smudges of that labor from the screen. And in The Way of Water specifically, we can see an especially amplified version of what is quickly becoming a predominant mode of image making far beyond this one instance. In many earlier films, including those of Cameron, that pushed the proverbial envelope of VFX, a potent spectacle is made of specific moments that fully show the limits of what that expertise and processing power could do when fully given the time and money. Our attention pools around the crystalline mimicking squirm of the pseudopod in The Abyss (1989), around that liquid marvel of the T-1000 squeezing through the helicopter window in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). Here, though, in a film both narratively and technically fixated on just such aqueous effects, we feel much closer to a different relation to liquid: that of total saturation, where the potentially marvelous results of that technical work do not stand out at distinct moments but instead are soaked through evenly, with nearly all images composited and tweaked. The result is something analogous to treading water. A huge amount of effort is continually expended, but with the outcome that we end up going nowhere fast.
It is precisely this quality—of the production of a virtual world where the VFX work is so seamlessly wound into it that we lose sight of such work—that we can see so plainly in Avatar, not as a novelty but as arguably the most extreme instance of a growing tendency. To be clear, I have zero interest in any fantasy of “natural” images, of the promise of an unmediated transmission of reality. Every image we see is the consequence of techniques and technologies, and it’s vital to take seriously just how fully they both shape our possible encounters with a film and are shaped by social and cultural forces and frictions beyond the space of cinema. Moreover, one might fairly ask if the kind of saturated time I’m gesturing to is simply the nature of composite images more generally, and particularly those that involve a hybrid of live-action and animation. Indeed, the divide between the filmed and drawn or rendered, and the effort to integrate them through huge amounts of sophisticated technical work, has been blurry across the history of animation, from the rotoscoping of the Fleischer brothers onward through What's Cookin' Doc? (1944) and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) to Cool World (1992) and more contemporary motion-capture techniques. But as many of those instances themselves indicate, at least part of the pleasure of such hybrid images resides in the strangeness of them, in their uncanny transposition of human corporeal motion into a metamorphosing walrus or in the startling conjunction of three-dimensional bodies sharing the same spatial plane as flat cartoons. In The Way of Water, conversely, that possible strangeness resides only in the possible content itself—of invented species, for instance—while the form taken is one where the animator’s labor is so evenly saturated throughout that it becomes incapable of holding us in thrall.
Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron, 2022).
This is no projection on my part. It is quite explicitly how the VFX of the film were expected to function. As Eric Saindon, one of the effects supervisors at Wētā FX (who worked on 98% of the total shots in the film), put it, “It’s not about crazy moments that yell out ‘visual effects.’ These are just effects that make the film work. We just want people to watch the film and be swept away, and forget that we did anything.” Yet what no one quite seemed to anticipate is what follows from this forgetting, this total erasure of the trace of technician’s activity. Because insofar as this quest to so integrate and sublimate effects that they pass into unnoticeability succeeds more than almost any other film I’ve seen, the result is that it genuinely ceases to be compelling to look at. The film keeps asking us, in its language of dewy toddlers and neon cavorting lizards that may as well burst into The Little Mermaid’s “Under the Sea,” Gosh, isn’t this all just marvelous? And the answer seems to be a resounding meh.
There’s a proper perversity to this state of affairs, because a film like Avatar is not merely an unwieldy monument to visual pleasure. It’s also one whose narrative serves its special effects and not vice versa, no matter what its makers say. Grappling with these kinds of films requires that we invert the familiar order of operations that imagines effects as something supplemental, something in the service of a story to be told. In Shard Cinema, my book on composite images, I detailed how when it came time for the second 300 film—following a first outing so notoriously marked by unfurling banners of speed-ramped gore that it “actually had an entire team devoted to blood”—the visual effects artists who were faced with the task of repeating that signature aesthetic did not simply begin once again rendering arterial spurts from a drifting severed limb. Instead, they started out animating a number of different virtual materials, including “crystals [and] dust,” before then returning to the more expected crimson liquid. In other words, what had priority was the quality of that effect—the effect of the effect, we could say—rather than its use in bolstering a requisite content. Why then did they ultimately stick with that weightless blood? For the simple reason that it is much easier to shape a nominally exciting narrative around blood letting loose into the world than around moving piles of dust. This is no exception in either the film or game industry. It is the fundamental logic we need to understand in order to think about how such films come to be and how they work on us. So in the case of this Avatar, we can ask: why is it set in water? Because effect precedes alleged cause. Because of the tricks you can do in water virtual and material alike, and because it provides an occasion for the development of proprietary software and novel techniques that we may not have seen before, even if the story that gives a retroactive excuse for them is so bog-standard and exhausted.
Avatar (James Cameron, 2009).
Insofar these composite images here reach a threshold of verisimilitude that they cease being very interesting to look at, it has the knock-on effect of driving us away from the pleasures of looking and instead pushing us deeper into the story we are supposed to be “swept away” by. This means we are left with a film in which the lack of noticeability of technical work is literally the only odd thing about it. The Way of Water is a movie that, like its predecessor, desperately wants to become a cultural touchpoint and, like that one, will never be, for the plain fact that it is so utterly straight and un-weird. You can feel how badly Cameron wants a Yoda—Christ, he’d settle for an Ewok—and it just isn’t happening, because like most films of this cost and scale, everything is too workshopped, too clean, too designed to correctly span expected possible viewers or demographics. So we’re offered a true triumph of banality, on all fronts. Its relentless focus on fatherhood. Its fantasy of fleeing whiteness into absurdly romanticized indigeneity and the superpowers it associates with that. The sheer number of times “bro” gets uttered. The fetish for living in peace while we can almost taste how much the film can’t wait to get back into a 45-minute battle scene with a body count to match. And perhaps most of all, a chaste horniness that permeates everything and is seamlessly aligned with the Instagram logic of its years of production. Nearly every body we see is influencer-fit and almost entirely nude, covered only by minute garments that always manage to just barely keep out of view any stray dick or orifice that would technically cross the line into nudity. (Not since peplums like Hercules and the Haunted World have loincloths been asked to heroically do so much with so little.) It’s actually one of the film’s nastiest tendencies, this drooling fixation on those who are “naturally” fit and who, in this case quite literally, glow, while demonizing all those who don’t measure up. So of course the evil hunter of the tulkun (not whales but yes, whales), who has to resort to all kinds of technical prostheses and harpoons to do his slaughter, is also here made a bit chubby and schlubby. Neither redemption nor acrobatic frolic awaits him. But otherwise, it’s a wall-to-wall show of side boob and generically progressive huckster spiritualism, leaving us with a three-hour adaptation of an Abercrombie ad that, yeah, totally heard about Standing Rock.
More significant than that, in terms of how the film inherits and accelerates tendencies in blockbuster moving image production of the last decades, is the way it rehashes and doubles down on a tendency we can especially trace from the late-‘00s on. This is, in short, the use of tremendous amounts of technical capacity and money to make a film whose plots fixates on how the deployment of technical capacity, especially of a digital variety, and the quest for money, which films like this are so obviously organized around, is pretty much the devil. We can see this tendency in films spanning from 2008’s WALL-E (entirely digital but fixated on demonizing those who use screens and complete with a bad faith back-to-the-manually-farmed ending) to 2013’s Elysium (putatively solving the class divide itself by crashing a computer system). It’s unmistakable in the way that good ol’ American mechanics plus muscles defeat computationally advanced aliens in Battleship (2012), or how Oblivion (2013) offers us the epochal struggle between something resembling an evil PlayStation 4 versus Tom Cruise getting back to unplugged tactility in a rustic cabin. It’s there in the humanity-doubting/eradicating artificial intelligences of Transcendence (2014) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), and in the defeat of a nanotech-suffused cybernetic terrorist by Samoan physical traps and a good bit of welding and gasoline in Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019).
Fast & Furious 6 (Justin Lin, 2013).
Cameron is a peculiar epitome of this, from Terminator (1981) to Titanic (1997) to this film, making very expensive, technically sophisticated movies about the lethal dangers of very expensive, technically sophisticated things. In terms of how this Avatar manifests this broader tendency, it has learned a couple lessons. The first film had a particularly flat reading of technology and profit, fixating on the laughably-named “unobtanium” as the most valuable material that was destructively mined. Meanwhile, it steadfastly ignored the kind of living biotech that gets Silicon Valley all hot and bothered: the neural network that spans the entire planet, from the bioluminescent Tree of Souls to pretty much every animal and plant, all accessible by a neural tendril hidden in the Na’vi’s braids and without a connection mismatch in sight. In the sequel, conversely, the plot makes some gesture towards profiting off the biochemical, through an old-school extraction fantasy of a single naturally secreted anti-aging chemical, located deep within the tulkun, allowing Cameron to go all Moby Dick whenever he wants. (Would that it had even a whiff of that book’s rangy queerness!) And while similar films of the mid-2010s, like those mentioned above, were obsessively marked by the fetishization of the analog and mechanical versus the digital, while still course being entirely produced by digital means, here even the clunking mechanical itself comes in as a villain, as a constant metonym for logging/mining/whaling, set against that everything-is-illuminated magic of plugging your USB ponytail into an efflorescent seahorse. Nevertheless, the contradiction, or at least the tendency, remains strong as ever: highly technical, and specifically digital, means are deployed to make films that suggest such means lead only to devastation. Snake, meet tail.
So what then does the film suggest that we should cheer for? The answer is quite simply Nature—or, in a slightly more complex version, a way of living “naturally” that celebrates those interconnections between species. At a remove, that can of course be a legitimately vital thing to celebrate. Yet any even glancing reflection about what that might really mean is completely undermined, for the simple reason that the film’s vision of nature has all the naïve romanticized sincerity of a Goop employee puking their ayahuasca out. Because in this world, there is no scarcity, no hunger. Everything is cyclical, with no crises, no turbulence or pestilence. There is no death that is not heroic or honored. No shitty weather, unless it is dramatic. No strife, until the baddies come to do their taking. In addition, while insisting that you must humbly recognize your place in such an ecology, everything happens to be arrayed so as to be a constant marvel to be beheld and at the always-waiting beck and call of those who know how to ask. That happens on at least two fronts. One is a heavily kinetic version, very common to contemporary action-oriented films like this and specific here to its fight scenes and aerial and underwater explorations. It is, in short, a kind of now-generic pinball gymnastics in which the very object you need, while free falling through the air, just happens to swoop beneath you or fall into your hands at just the right moment, with a regularity that actually ruins any possible suspense. (Almost every battle scene in the Marvel films relies on this again and again, as do the action sequences of the later Fast and Furious films, as protagonist bodies are hurled through the air, battered like a de Sade character but always saved at the very last millisecond.) So we watch this paean to an impossibly athletic spontaneity of instantaneous connection, yet which has been produced by the exact opposite process, in which nothing happens in an instant because it will be labored over again and again, blended and composited and data-transferred around the world from studio to studio.
The second version of this, and maybe the knot that ties it all together, is the way that while denouncing the desire to master “nature” and insisting on that nature’s great and very-awe-inspiring-isn’t-it mysteriousness, the film relentlessly suggests that everything is knowable. How? Simple, by literally plugging into it, through linking the tendril at the end of a braid into the reciprocal frills of whatever species you feel like turning into a steed or backpack. In Cameron’s procreation-fixated worldview, no one jacks off, yet everything can be jacked into, without even a dongle, and the result is that everything can be tamed. Everything can be made into a technology, put to the use you need. Nothing cannot be known. Even aside from its mainframe vision of those various Tree of Souls, the dream of absolute knowledge suffuses this world. Staring eye to eye with the tulkun, one can know exactly what it thinks, for the simple reason that it actually gets subtitled.
Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr, 2000).
In what I truly doubt is an unintended reference, I can’t help but note the uncanny parallel between that instance and the various moments of staring into the eye of the taxidermied whale in Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). And it is with this accidental parallel that I think we can finally clarify what is so lacking in what Avatar is and wants of us. I don’t expect it to do what Tarr’s film does, and criticizing it for not doing so would be an exercise in misrecognizing the immense gulf between what each film set out to do in the first place. But what those scenes in Werckmeister Harmonies understand so intimately is a different kind of gulf, that of true otherness that cannot be bridged, of the profound and mournful limits of the edge of understanding. The dead whale doesn’t speak back, and there’s no way to access its memories. But crucially, that impossibility of total understanding and explanation, or of filling in every gap, is something that for Werckmeister never remains a dead end. Rather, it is the interval that actually drives forward a process of thought—and, God forbid, those flickers of awe that Avatar will never manage. Consider, for instance, the scene in Werckmeister where the almost unfathomable inhuman elegance of the solar system is conjured by setting a few drunkards spinning round and round the bar in orbits. It belongs in something like a counter-history of speculation in film, these rare instances that refuse to align the fantastic with total verisimilitude and instead make fierce use of the limits of their own technical capacities and financial limits. This is no single lineage or chain of influence, but in terms of the films that have most shown this to me, I think of Václav Vorlíček’s Who Wants to Kill Jessie? (1966), of how it drags into uncertain physicality not only cartoon characters but also their speech bubbles too, hanging impossibly flat and unwieldy in filmed space. Or how the “unrealistic” near-theatricality of the sets in Ngozi Onwurah’s Welcome II the Terrordome (1995) renders its vision of racialized violence and Black insurgence all the more edgeless and potent, decoupled from any one point in time. Or of Jorge Jácome’s Flores (2017), how it thwarts apocalyptic grandeur in favor of the queer intimacy of lives joined by work, loss, and the apparatus of war, all in the space of an archipelago disastrously overrun by nothing but hydrangeas. Or how the utter cheapness of little tin can rockets and painted astronomical backdrops of Alexander Kluge’s The Big Mess (1971) in fact tips over into a true cosmic sublime, in that it knows it cannot depict it “really” and so leaves it sketchy and porous.
I could go on, but my point is simply that the indeed masterful achievement of Avatar’s imaging techniques, and its total saturation of any possible gap or fault line, fully clarifies the depth of its misunderstanding, and of so many films like it. Awe has never been held back by some final missing degree of “realness.” Absorption doesn’t require that we seal every crack. Those seams and gulfs are vital, because it is in them alone that the granular process of noticing cuts its teeth, that something that might still deserve to be called imagination gets to breathe.
Flores (Jorge Jácome, 2017).