Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)
dir. James Cameron
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2022 20th Century Studios
Do I even need to write a review for Avatar: The Way of Water, now that you’ve seen the above brutally incisive distillation of what James Cameron is doing in the second outing of his sci-fi/fantasy Avatar franchise? Whether I need to or not, please indulge me while I ploddingly express in a few thousand words what Walter Chaw brilliantly laid out in two sentences.
While The Way of Water is slightly less obnoxious than 2009’s Avatar, numerous Indigenous peoples tribes have blasted the appropriation of their cultures for entertainment, fun, and profit by a white filmmaker. As they did for the first film, these groups called for audiences to boycott the new installment. As you might have guessed, this call for a boycott from some of the most marginalized members of our society did not hinder the movie from making 2+ billion dollars (and counting) at the box office.
In the continuation of James Cameron’s epic tale, set on the alien world of Pandora, our hero, Jake Sully, now exists solely within the avatar body that mimics those of the Na’vi peoples of Pandora. Sully was originally a human soldier who used an advanced avatar body to infiltrate the enemy Na’vi in an effort to defeat them from within.
As with most white savior narratives – the most brutal critique for the first picture came in the form of people referring to it as Dances with Aliens – Sully finds these noble creatures, who hold a mystical (read: non-western) communion with nature, to be more worthy of his affection than are his own people. All they need (in the movie’s eyes) is a strong (white) leader to show them the way to victory.
As seen in the closing seconds of the first Avatar, Sully’s life is saved when his consciousness is permanently transferred into his Na’vi avatar. It’s been sixteen years between that moment and the opening of The Way of Water. Sully has built a life with his Na’vi partner Neytiri, raising two teenage Na’vi/human hybrid sons – Na’vi avatars and their offspring have five fingers, compared to an indigenous Na’vi’s four fingers – named Neteyam and Lo'ak and a daughter, Tuk.
Sully and Neytiri are also raising two adoptive children.
There’s Kiri, the Na’vi/human hybrid daughter of Dr. Grace Augustine’s now-inert Na’vi avatar. Dr. Augustine – played by Sigourney Weaver – was a scientist in the first film who was sympathetic to the Na’vi people and took their side against the human military, which was on a mission to destroy the indigenous Pandorans in order to capture a rare and wildly valuable mineral only available on the alien planet. The 14-year-old Kiri never knew her biological mother, and therefore feels she is missing something that everyone else around her is not.
The exception to that last statement is the other member of the Sully clan. Miles "Spider" Socorro is the only fully human child on Pandora. Spider was an infant – and was conveniently never mentioned – during the events of Avatar. He is the son of the brutal military leader (and the big bad of the first movie) Colonel Miles Quaritch. Since infants can’t survive the cryosleep process for the trip back to Earth, Spider was raised by scientists who stayed behind when the human military pulled out of Pandora after being defeated by the Na’vi, with the help of Sully as their leader.
The Sullys’ lives are turned upside down when humans return to finish what they started. I’m guessing the brutal critiques of Cameron’s MacGuffin for the first film – humans are after the illusive mineral unobtainium – got to the director, because the word unobtainium isn’t uttered once in The Way of Water. (And, yes, I know that Cameron didn’t invent the term, but come on.) Now, humans are after the entire planet of Pandora, because Earth is dying and humanity needs a new home.
After leading a successful counterinsurgency against the human invaders, Sully and his family are forced to flee when the human military resurrects Col. Quaritch by implanting his memories into a Na’vi avatar. In the wake of Quaritch’s brutal campaign, Sully and his family abandon the forest-dwelling Omatikaya tribe for the sea-friendly Metkayina tribe.
And here is where Cameron becomes derivative of himself. It’s now a fight between the humans and Na’vi that mirrors the conflict of the first film, right down to Cameron hitting the reset button on his first paper-thin villain, Col. Quaritch.
Missing from Quaritch this time out is the (perhaps naïve) high-camp performance from Stephen Lang as the ruthless colonel. Lang is still performing the character, but something about his over-the-top black-hat performance is lost due to the fact that we only hear the actor’s voice. Lang joins the motion capture fun exclusively, as his character no longer exists in human form.
The really troubling thing at the heart of Way of Water is how Cameron simultaneously appropriates iconography and stereotyped “noble savage” syntax of indigenous cultures of North America to tell his white savior story while also slowly, almost imperceptibly, setting the table to erase them completely from an allegory of their own story. (And, no, putting these thinly veiled stand-ins for native peoples in blueface doesn’t absolve it from critique.)
Sully’s family is essentially assimilated into a white, Western (read: American) culture. Cameron gives a hand wave to the fact that everyone is speaking the Na'vi language, but because Sully has been immersed in it for so long (and in order for Cameron not to have to bother with subtitles), the Na’vi language now sounds like English to him, which means it sounds like English to us.
So, the kids, Neteyam, Lo'ak, Tuk, Kiri, and Spider all sound like dear old dad. This also gives Cameron the easy lift of connecting to his audience through a kids-these-days generational divide between the Sully parents and their children.
I’m prognosticating that by the fifth Avatar film – and yes, we will now be getting at least five of these movies, as Cameron made it clear that Way of Water’s financial success would guarantee his continued interest – the Na’vi will barely be recognizable as stand-ins for Indigenous peoples at all.
He’ll likely keep the fake, white-people’s-idea-of-native-speak woo-woo mystical connection to mother Earth (er, Pandora) stuff, but I’m willing to bet that eventually almost every character we hear in an Avatar movie will be firmly using WAVE – White American Vernacular English.
In The Way of Water, Cameron lays the groundwork for erasing from his story the (admittedly dubious) ties to North American Indigenous peoples and their own experiences of oppression and genocide. The water-friendly tribe that the Sullys turn to for help, the Metkayina clan, exist solely to teach the white man and his family their mystical connection to the ocean, so that he can eventually lead them to victory.
The children of the Metkayina chief, Tonowari, are basically written as snotty American teenagers. Cameron gets an egregious amount of milage out of the kids-can-be-mean-bullies trope. The whole of the Metkayina tribe are periphery characters at best. Their job is to teach the white man their ways before astutely realizing he is the one to lead them in battle. It further illustrates the colonial mindset, both in colonial times and in the art people like Cameron are producing still today, of destroying Indigenous peoples’ language and culture in order to "redeem them" in the eyes of Christian, white, heteronormative Western culture.
We also get a look into Cameron’s outdated ideas about traditional masculinity with Jake Sully’s voiceover observation that, “A father protects. That’s what gives him meaning.” This outmoded worldview is reinforced in how Cameron essentially sidelines Sully’s Na’vi wife, Neytiri, giving her a scrap of agency only when her children are in danger. (In all fairness, Cameron didn’t write Way of Water on his own, as he did with the first Avatar. He shares a story credit here with Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Josh Friedman, and Shane Salerno; he shares the screenplay credit with Jaffa and Silver.)
The Sully children are in danger for the entire last third of the movie. In yet another example of the Indigenous experience that white people have no business telling, Quaritch takes the Sully children hostage in an echo of white colonial settlers stealing the children of Indigenous families in order to commit cultural genocide. Cameron invokes this sickening history for his fantastical fantasy dreamscape, all the while plotting to silence this community completely by slowly transitioning the Na’vi into what will surely be their eventual transformation into blue-skinned Americans.
It's impossible, though, to give a fair assessment of The Way of Water without mentioning the utterly stunning visual effects that Cameron, with the help of hundreds, if not thousands, of computer animation artists, has put on the screen.
Within the first five minutes of the movie, I was convinced that we’re less than a decade away from replacing flesh-and-blood actors with the CGI equivalent, a la The Congress. The texture of the Na’vi characters’ skin looks eerily life-like. There is no sense of what is called the “uncanny valley” effect in Way of Water. If I hadn’t known any better, I would have sworn that what I was seeing – from the Na’vi characters to every bit of the land- and seascapes of Pandora – were completely real and not a vast collection of pixels, all created in a computer.
It's exactly this kind of stunning movie magic that Cameron has excelled at ever since spearheading revolutionary new digital effects for Terminator 2: Judgment Day over three decades ago. My wish is that the director gets so obsessed with the nuts and bolts of advancing the power of CGI for visual storytelling that he offloads the writing and making of these movies to someone who will be a little more thoughtful about the representation within them.
Please, James Cameron, for the love of the gods, hire an Indigenous person to write and direct Avatar 3: The Wind in the Willows (or whatever it will be called). That’s assuming, of course, that you can find any takers. If you do, I have no doubt that you’ll help them make it look absolutely breathtaking.
Why it got 2.5 stars:
- Avatar: The Way of Water is visually stunning. Cameron and his team have revolutionized CGI effects yet again. Unfortunately, the storytelling is as backwards and regressive as the special effects are forward-looking and revolutionary.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- For a lot of the movie, all I could think about was Christopher Walken’s legendary line reading in Joe Dirt, “It’s the wrong tone.” I love what Cameron’s saying about environmentalism and warmongering, but he is not the person to adapt Indigenous experiences into a fantasy movie.
- And while we’re on the subject of warmongering, Cameron is clearly anti-war and anti-military, but, at the same time, he also clearly gets off on the iconography of both. This has to be because he’s a director, right? Outside of being the actual dictator of a country, film director is probably second only to that profession in the number of authoritarian personality types that it draws. Cameron has an (in)famous reputation for being a my-way-or-the-highway style director. I have to imagine he still walks onto every film set like he’s King Dick of Fuck Mountain. But maybe I’m wrong.
- It might also be time to get Cameron into rehab for his obsession with humans in giant mech suits.
- Why is Jemaine Clement in this movie? Besides one cathartic moment, he is absolutely wasted here.
- I would like to take this opportunity to give a shoutout to the futuristic handcuffs that seem to have been inspired by slap bracelets.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I saw this at the Cedars Alamo Drafthouse on a mid-morning Saturday. It was a decent-sized audience, and there was applause at the end. Way of Water is currently playing exclusively in cinemas, but will eventually wind up on Disney+, where you can also find the first installment in the franchise.