It’s been several years since Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) “went native” and abandoned his human body for a Na’vi avatar; he’s started a family with Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and made a home in the forests of Pandora. But when the “sky people” return to the alien world, in search of profit and revenge, they’re accompanied by the impossibly-resurrected Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who wants Sully’s blood for himself. To protect their Omatikaya tribe, Sully and his family flee their home and take refuge with the water-dwelling Metkayina Clan.
Let’s begin right off the bat with an admission that The Way of Water is loaded with some Grade-A nonsense, bordering on sheer balderdash. Even setting aside the bonkers reinclusion of Stephen Lang’s snarly villain, this is a three-hour movie where Sigourney Weaver also returns, but in the body of a blue teenager; where holding your breath is a pivotal plot point; and where crucial exposition is delivered by an immense telepathic whale. If you made it through that sentence without rolling your eyes, this might be the movie for you, but if not, your patience for sci-fi claptrap may wear thin long before the film’s three hours elapse.
And it is long, make no mistake about it. It’s three hours long, and it does feel it; though I’m not sure exactly what I would cut (because James Cameron seems never to have met a Chekhov’s gun he didn’t fire), the last twenty minutes feel like extended set-up for a third film. While things are always happening on screen, there’s a point about two hours in, just before the third act and all its 3D action begin, when one’s hindquarters may be falling asleep. I was never entirely bored, but I was growing restless. Put another way, The Way of Water never quite earns its runtime the way Avengers: Endgame did – which may say more about me than about either movie.
Part of the challenge is that The Way of Water is paper-thin. Its plotting is entirely unsubtle, its characterization never transcends the immediate needs of the plot, and the dialogue is in places ear-scrapingly direct. (“Who’s got the harpoon now?” one character sarcastically asks another after a third quite literally takes possession of a harpoon.) As far as the story goes, Cameron has never really scored points for originality. Indeed, after Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, he’s not even the first movie this winter about a lost civilization of underwater blue people at war with a technologically-advanced military. Like the first one, this Avatar is equal parts Pocahontas and Dances With Wolves, Ferngully and Smurfs in space, though The Way of Water is generously leavened with Free Willy and even a helping of Moby-Dick. We’ve seen all of this before, and most of it in the last Avatar film.
Yet I will give Cameron points for the film paying out like a slot machine in its third act. Nearly everything that’s been set up in the first two acts comes to bear in the grand finale, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I too got swept along with the rest of my theater when the aforementioned giant whale returned to the plot and did its Tulkun thing all over the bad guys. Other plot threads resurface in surprising ways, including one especially gratifying amputation, and you do end up with a very satisfying conclusion – if you have the patience and the tolerance to get there.
I can grumble about the fact that the acting is a little wooden (especially and egregiously, Edie Falco, who seems to be reading her lines cold off a cue card) or that the storytelling is nothing new, but I don’t think anyone comes to a James Cameron film because he’s some sort of poet laureate. Rather, he’s an expert ringmaster in the circus of spectacle; we come to his movies to be entertained, to be dazzled by special effects and ultra-widescreen action. Things blow up in three pristine dimensions, and water has never looked this crystalline. You have to wade through storytelling that is less than inspired to get there, but the Cameron vibe has always been, “Trust me, this will be worth it.” No one came to Titanic for the greatest love story ever; we came to watch a big ship sink. Likewise, no one comes to The Way of Water because we can’t get enough of those Na’vi; we come to see motion-capture evolve, to see a world unlike ours, and if it feels a little like a nature documentary, so be it – The Way of Water has a mellow hang-out aura that verges on overstaying its welcome before hitting a rousing third act.
In terms of its narrative, The Way of Water is only as effective as it needs to be to serve that third act, and on an emotional level I’m not sure that we grow attached enough to the characters to feel the climax. But on the level of visual spectacle, there’s really nothing quite like an Avatar movie, and your ability to derive maximum enjoyment from the film really depends on how much you’re willing and able to silence your critic’s brain and just ride the waves. That’s, after all, the true way of water – go with the flow.
Avatar: The Way of Water is rated PG-13 for “sequences of strong violence and intense action, partial nudity, and some strong language.” Directed by James Cameron. Written by James Cameron, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Josh Friedman, and Shane Salerno. Starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, and Kate Winslet.
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