I have to be upfront with you: I am a huge fan of the original Avatar film. So even these 13 years of excruciating wait and several release reschedules couldn't separate The Way of Water from its predecessor for me. This will undoubtedly create a bias, and people who saw TWoW without seeing the original film might view it differently. Still, it is a sequel, and I am evaluating it as one.
First, the good stuff. The film is absolutely gorgeous! Moving from land to sea gave Cameron the opportunity to put his imagination to work and use his obvious love for the marine world to create a vibrant and mesmerising underwater universe. The original Avatar made many of us shed tears of pure joy and fall deeply in love with the living and breathing world of Pandora, and I couldn't deny TWoW a few deserved tears of bliss from just letting myself be immersed.
And this is where the problems begin. If The Way of Water was a BBC documentary, I'd give it a solid 10 for showing the beauty of this dream planet. But the first film was so much more than that. Its plot might be predictable, but it had genuine characters, believable drama of their interaction, ups and downs that took us through the whole gamut of emotions, from absolute happiness of a childhood dream coming true to anger and rage of witnessing cruelty and atrocities beyond redemption and forgiveness.
And this is exactly where TWoW feels surprisingly detached. At first, it's not even clear why, as the film clearly tries to play a very similar tune to its predecessor's. If you watch the sequel when your memory of the original Avatar is still fresh, you'll notice those reflections immediately, from iconic moments like freestyle flight sequences or merry interactions with harmless but whimsical wildlife, to the soundtrack fragments and even catchphrases like "You're not in Kansas anymore".
But something's still missing. And, in my opinion, it's the characters' relatability. The first Avatar showed us an alien world full of alien creatures, but we saw it from humans' perspective, even if those humans were acting through their Pandora-verse counterparts. Jake Sully, Dr Augustine and others, they were still embedded in the reality that we recognise as ours, and this created a much deeper sense of compassion, empathy and even tragedy when you could see a person twisted and pulled apart by his physical nature and emotions and feelings stuck somewhere between the two worlds.
In TWoW though, (almost) all characters are alien. Not just because they are tall and blue, but because they belong to Pandora now. The tie is severed, and no amount of adopted human weapons and gadgetry can change that. They frolic underwater or partake in the communal drama, but it's no longer an "us and them" type of story, it's mostly just "them". The filmmakers try to bypass this alienation by legitimising English as the default language, but instead of making things better it just blurs away the contrast between humans and Na'vi even more, akin to that old movie tradition of making the characters speak the same language regardless of their origin, something that modern filmmaking tries to stay away from to make the diversity more pronounced.
Moving from the forest environment to the water one doesn't help either. We humans are mostly land species. Polynesian fishermen tribes might disagree, but I'm not sure if there's an IMAX theatre anywhere near their villages. And those who can appreciate Cameron's new work probably found sounds of a rainforest more soothing and whale songs in a distance. Which makes TWoW even more of a "peculiar customs of a far-away land's dwellers", that is, even less relatable. The final battle scene does attempt to bring back our engagement, borrowing from other cult stories such as Moby Dick or even self-citing Titanic or Aliens, but this feels so artificial and contrived that I couldn't help but cringe a little.
I am sure that Cameron was aware of this obvious distance between the story and the viewer, so several characters were introduced in attempt to bridge it. Kiri, a female nod to the immaculate conception story, will probably play a more central role in the upcoming sequels, but at the moment is hardly more than a confused ugly duckling picked at by its tribe. And a reincarnation of Quaritch, a bit of a soot and tar caricature of a villain whom the story tries to imbue with an inner complexity but so far uses as a mere tool to create something that resembles a conflict to propel the story forward. Maybe the investment will pay off in the future, but so far these characters are seriously inconsistent, underdeveloped and, to be honest, quite flat.
And finally there's Spider. The only human that makes sense and makes a difference this time. A boy who's almost like a wayward tree spirit that just hangs around for some reason, he's the only link connecting "us" to "them" that seems to work. His actions are erratic, motivations unclear, but most of us can relate to this semi-feral boisterous and fiercely loyal kid. Spider is the kind of sidekick that enables the protagonist and makes him or her believable, and, if not for him, I'm afraid we'd be completely lost in the world of TWoW without a reliable interpreter.
There's more to be said about certain story inconsistencies that are too apparent in this film, regardless of your willingness to suspend disbelief. But that's mostly nitpicking compared to the main issue I have with TWoW. Which is that, unlike its predecessor, the film didn't take me on a magical ride that would be worth waiting loyally for more than a decade to see the next chapter. Luckily, we don't have to do this kind of waiting anymore. So, while I'm not astonished in awe of what I've seen, there is still hope that there will be more in stock for Cameron than pretty luminescent imagery and self-repetition.
First, the good stuff. The film is absolutely gorgeous! Moving from land to sea gave Cameron the opportunity to put his imagination to work and use his obvious love for the marine world to create a vibrant and mesmerising underwater universe. The original Avatar made many of us shed tears of pure joy and fall deeply in love with the living and breathing world of Pandora, and I couldn't deny TWoW a few deserved tears of bliss from just letting myself be immersed.
And this is where the problems begin. If The Way of Water was a BBC documentary, I'd give it a solid 10 for showing the beauty of this dream planet. But the first film was so much more than that. Its plot might be predictable, but it had genuine characters, believable drama of their interaction, ups and downs that took us through the whole gamut of emotions, from absolute happiness of a childhood dream coming true to anger and rage of witnessing cruelty and atrocities beyond redemption and forgiveness.
And this is exactly where TWoW feels surprisingly detached. At first, it's not even clear why, as the film clearly tries to play a very similar tune to its predecessor's. If you watch the sequel when your memory of the original Avatar is still fresh, you'll notice those reflections immediately, from iconic moments like freestyle flight sequences or merry interactions with harmless but whimsical wildlife, to the soundtrack fragments and even catchphrases like "You're not in Kansas anymore".
But something's still missing. And, in my opinion, it's the characters' relatability. The first Avatar showed us an alien world full of alien creatures, but we saw it from humans' perspective, even if those humans were acting through their Pandora-verse counterparts. Jake Sully, Dr Augustine and others, they were still embedded in the reality that we recognise as ours, and this created a much deeper sense of compassion, empathy and even tragedy when you could see a person twisted and pulled apart by his physical nature and emotions and feelings stuck somewhere between the two worlds.
In TWoW though, (almost) all characters are alien. Not just because they are tall and blue, but because they belong to Pandora now. The tie is severed, and no amount of adopted human weapons and gadgetry can change that. They frolic underwater or partake in the communal drama, but it's no longer an "us and them" type of story, it's mostly just "them". The filmmakers try to bypass this alienation by legitimising English as the default language, but instead of making things better it just blurs away the contrast between humans and Na'vi even more, akin to that old movie tradition of making the characters speak the same language regardless of their origin, something that modern filmmaking tries to stay away from to make the diversity more pronounced.
Moving from the forest environment to the water one doesn't help either. We humans are mostly land species. Polynesian fishermen tribes might disagree, but I'm not sure if there's an IMAX theatre anywhere near their villages. And those who can appreciate Cameron's new work probably found sounds of a rainforest more soothing and whale songs in a distance. Which makes TWoW even more of a "peculiar customs of a far-away land's dwellers", that is, even less relatable. The final battle scene does attempt to bring back our engagement, borrowing from other cult stories such as Moby Dick or even self-citing Titanic or Aliens, but this feels so artificial and contrived that I couldn't help but cringe a little.
I am sure that Cameron was aware of this obvious distance between the story and the viewer, so several characters were introduced in attempt to bridge it. Kiri, a female nod to the immaculate conception story, will probably play a more central role in the upcoming sequels, but at the moment is hardly more than a confused ugly duckling picked at by its tribe. And a reincarnation of Quaritch, a bit of a soot and tar caricature of a villain whom the story tries to imbue with an inner complexity but so far uses as a mere tool to create something that resembles a conflict to propel the story forward. Maybe the investment will pay off in the future, but so far these characters are seriously inconsistent, underdeveloped and, to be honest, quite flat.
And finally there's Spider. The only human that makes sense and makes a difference this time. A boy who's almost like a wayward tree spirit that just hangs around for some reason, he's the only link connecting "us" to "them" that seems to work. His actions are erratic, motivations unclear, but most of us can relate to this semi-feral boisterous and fiercely loyal kid. Spider is the kind of sidekick that enables the protagonist and makes him or her believable, and, if not for him, I'm afraid we'd be completely lost in the world of TWoW without a reliable interpreter.
There's more to be said about certain story inconsistencies that are too apparent in this film, regardless of your willingness to suspend disbelief. But that's mostly nitpicking compared to the main issue I have with TWoW. Which is that, unlike its predecessor, the film didn't take me on a magical ride that would be worth waiting loyally for more than a decade to see the next chapter. Luckily, we don't have to do this kind of waiting anymore. So, while I'm not astonished in awe of what I've seen, there is still hope that there will be more in stock for Cameron than pretty luminescent imagery and self-repetition.