Mark Reviews Movies: AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 14, 2022

We return to Pandora in Avatar: The Way of Water, and co-writer/director James Cameron returns to essentially tell the same story he told in the previous movie. Since that story was already repetitive, this one feels doubly so. Because there are more characters—somehow less developed in this installment than in the previous one—in this sequel, the repetition gains yet another level.

Little of this should matter, of course, because Cameron is once again counting on the spectacle of this alien world, which has now become a home to the human or previously human characters, to so overwhelm us that matters of plot and character don't seem to matter as much. They do, simply because, well, they do, especially in a narrative revolving around so many characters doing so many things. They also seem to matter more—and, hence, detract from the attempted spectacle—this time around for a couple of reasons.

The first is that this world and the technology that made it possible are no longer new. Avatar might have been revolutionary in its use of motion-capture to create convincing digital characters, and the visual effects that generated almost the entirety of the locations of the moon of some distant planet were undeniably astonishing at the time. We may not have seen all that Pandora had to offer. The eventual shift to a new locale and environment in this installment—not to mention the clunky way this haphazard screenplay works to establish yet another sequel—proves Cameron certainly has even more locales and environments in mind for however many sequels he can convince a studio to financially back.

The place doesn't feel as special anymore, and the cosmetic change from a vast forest to the beaches and seas of Pandora doesn't cover up how much of this narrative has been recycled from its predecessor, which already did a lot of recycling from other stories itself. There are a few marvels here, to be sure, especially during a lengthy climactic battle that incorporates all of the elements the screenplay by Cameron, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver takes far too long to introduce. The movie just doesn't astonish in the same way that the first movie did upon first entering this world.

Unfortunately, that does mostly leave us with the plot. It starts with the revolutionary tone of the predecessor's climax, brings back the previous threat to keep thigs going (literally resurrecting an old villain in the process), and proceeds to watch Jake (Sam Worthington), now fully in the body of an indigenous Na'vi, and his family learn the ways of a foreign tribe—in the same way Jake spent the majority of the first movie learning the ways of the forest one. If it's broken but makes more money than any other movie in history, why fix it?

After starting a family of four with Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), Jake has become the leader of the forest tribe, and when humans return to Pandora to mine its resources, Jake leads the tribe into battle against the invaders. Some of them include Na'vi avatars, led by Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who apparently left behind his consciousness and had a now-teenage son (played by Jack Champion) in between all of his villainous sneering in the first movie.

With his family (including a Na'vi-human hybrid played by Sigourney Weaver, whose character is vaguely resurrected from before, too) a target of the humans generally and Quaritch specifically, Jake takes his clan to one of the sea tribes. They hesitantly give them sanctuary and then teach them how to ride assorted sea creatures, adapt to their customs, and learn harmony with this new environment. Yes, it's basically the same story, just with more characters learning through montages and explanatory dialogue.

Technically, the effects are impressive (One probably can't fail in this regard with whatever ludicrous budget the movie had), although a lot of the designs of new creatures feel like minor variations of established ones. The Na'vi still look convincing, thanks to some upgrades to textures.

As convincing characters with minds and hearts and any kind of personality, though, they're overshadowed by a hyper-intelligent whale-like creature, who's befriended by one of Jake's kids and introduces some horror of the human practice of slaughtering these creatures for a single vial of fluid. A sequence that details the hunt is effective in how genuinely unsettling the grounded nature and depiction of that process are. It feels different in a movie that seems content on finding as much sameness as possible.

The other key difference, as well as the other detraction from the impact of the effects, is Cameron's filming process, which again incorporates 3-D and apparently, if the screening this critic attended is any indication, the standard of a high frame rate for the presentation. The latter looks unnatural at its best (when characters are still) and its worst (when the camera moves, which is often, or scenes choppily play as if the projector's hardware is having trouble loading the image). Would Avatar: The Way of Water play better without such an unnecessary distraction? It might, but regardless, the core of this overly familiar and dull narrative would remain.

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