Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

Yes, it’s been thirteen years since Avatar, and I can say that not a day has gone by when I’ve wanted more from the franchise. I’ve strolled around the theme park in Orlando, and I’ve listened to the soundtrack off and on, and I even attended the IMAX rerelease three months ago once it seemed that James Cameron was finally going to deliver on his decade-plus of promises to revisit the world of Pandora. I did all these things out of no particular affection for the movie, its creators, or even its specific world; any attachment I have to Avatar is purely on the level of an appreciation for spectacle. Avatar: The Way of Water is no better than its predecessor, but it is certainly more, and your take on the movie will probably tell us more about you than it will about the film itself. It is, in a sense, a pure cinematic Rorschach test.

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. 

Hacksaw Ridge (2016)

I’m not sure how much cache a ten-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival has to the world at large, but to me it says that a film is worth a look. And while a ten-minute standing ovation is difficult to fathom for most anything (I put more stock in rewatches and DVD sales), Hacksaw Ridge is a compelling war film that seems primed for a place of prominence when the Oscar calendar closes in a few weeks.

Andrew Garfield stars in the true story of Desmond Doss, a conscientious objector who nevertheless enlists in World War II as a combat medic, refusing to carry a rifle and earning the ire of his commanding officers (Vince Vaughn and Sam Worthington). Throughout, Doss refuses to compromise his values, even amid the challenges of his Great War veteran father (Hugo Weaving) and new bride (Teresa Palmer).

What surprised me most about Hacksaw Ridge was the way that director Mel Gibson unites two very disparate tones in a way that’s surprisingly compelling and which makes the second half all the more effective. The film begins feelings very much at home in the 1940s, reminiscent of something like Sergeant York or The Best Years of Our Lives, with a very simple romantic plot arc that’s almost syrupy sweet. This nearly naïve worldview is thrown into stark contrast to the horrific fog of war in the film’s second half, in which Doss’s wide-eyed beliefs are tested in the most intense crucible imaginable. That the film doesn’t feel like two disparate halves is perhaps Gibson’s greatest achievement here.

When it comes to directing combat footage, Gibson’s no slouch, either. In this respect, the film has been compared to Saving Private Ryan (which, full confession, I still haven’t seen), and there’s a certain brutality to the war scenes that succeeds all the more because of the false sense of security into which the film’s first half lulls us. But even taken in isolation, Hacksaw Ridge has a grisly intensity in its war sequences that is both disconcerting for its gore and frightening in the number of jump moments Gibson manages to navigate. We truly feel, as Doss must have, that we are out of our element.

Garfield’s earnest portrayal of the peaceable country boy goes a long way toward selling the central conceit of the film, and I have to wonder if we’ll be looking at a Best Actor contender when the next Academy Awards roll around. (I also wonder if Gibson’s cactus-hugging days are behind him and if he’ll be up for Best Director, as well.) Garfield plays Doss as a man of conviction, a man for whom his decisions don’t come easily. When his father chastises him for wrestling with his conscience, it’s not a revelation for the character; we’ve already seen these conflicts play out on Garfield’s face and in the quaver of his voice. Even if he’ll always be a Spider-Man to me, Garfield proves himself capable of a range wider than my typecasting gives him credit.

It’s really a Gibson/Garfield show through and through, although the film wisely cedes the floor to the real Desmond Doss just before the credits roll, letting us see the real soldier on his own terms and revealing that the film doesn’t exaggerate much about his humility and his religious devotion. It’s these real-life clips which confirm the truth of the story that the film tells us, and in so doing it solidifies my belief that Hacksaw Ridge is one of the most powerful war films in recent memory. Uncompromising in both its wartime gore and its dedication to the true story of a remarkable hero, Hacksaw Ridge is a strong contender for early award buzz, and it’s entirely well-deserved.

Hacksaw Ridge is rated R for “intense prolonged realistically graphic sequences of war violence including grisly bloody images.” Directed by Mel Gibson. Written by Robert Schenkkan and Andrew Knight. Based on a true story. Starring Andrew Garfield, Vince Vaughn, Sam Worthington, Teresa Palmer, and Hugo Weaving.

Monday at the Movies - December 31, 2012

Welcome to Week Forty-Five of “Monday at the Movies,” the final installment for 2012 (and, I think, also the final numbered installment).  We close the year with another arbitrary theme, movies that start with the word “The.”

The Debt (2011) – The Debt barely got any play when it came out under the radar last year, which is both a surprise and a shame, because there’s enough A-list material here – done successfully, to boot – to entertain most audiences.  Parallel narratives reveal what really happened when three Mossad agents (Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington, and Marton Csokas) pursued a fugitive Nazi official (Jesper Christensen) and how the experience affected them later in life.  The older agents are portrayed by “big names” – Helen Mirren, Ciarán Hinds, and Tom Wilkinson – all of whom turn in their usual exceptional work; Mirren and Wilkinson find themselves at moral odds over the truth of their experience, with Wilkinson’s determination matching Mirren’s internal and external scars.  But it’s Chastain who gives the best performance; granted, she gets the lion’s share of the film as the younger Rachel, but her work in The Debt proves why she’s a rising star in Hollywood.  She is tough and vulnerable, holding her own against Christensen’s Dr. Vogel (who’s the smarmiest Nazi this side of Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List) as a proper action heroine while also allowing the audience to see just how traumatic her encounter is.  It’s an interesting companion piece to Munich, but director John Madden wisely avoids the preachy moralizing Spielberg deployed in his 2005 Mossad movie (which, coincidentally, also co-starred Hinds).  It’s hard to believe this is the same director behind Shakespeare in Love and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, since The Debt is more intense and more severely compelling than those two (not to denigrate either, of course), smartly playing on the relationship of past to present while brilliantly leading the audience to several premature conclusions.  In short, The Debt is overwhelmingly underrated.

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) – After 12 Angry Men, I’ll follow Henry Fonda into any movie, particularly with the expectation that he’ll be playing a character of similar moral fiber (Juror #8 is, after all, one of cinema’s best good guys) – even if I’m not the world’s biggest devotee of westerns.  The Ox-Bow Incident, regarded as a classic, stars Fonda as a drifter suspected of rustling before he gets enfolded into a lynch mob in pursuit of a trio of suspected murderers.  The “plausible doubt” element (familiar to us 12 Angry Men fans) is of course the central conceit of the film, as is an interrogation of the validity of vigilante justice (familiar to us Batman fans).  My father rightly pointed out that the film feels a bit like a Twilight Zone episode, and I think he’s onto something; the film is sans the supernatural, but it includes the morality play aspect and the simplistic cinematography, as well as the cast of character actors in smaller roles.  What’s disappointing is that the film feels a bit like a 22-minute story stretched into 75 minutes, repetitive at times and unfulfilling in others (as in a hasty subplot involving Fonda’s sweetheart).  Perhaps worse, Fonda is criminally underused, likely due to the size of the large supporting cast.  It’s not that the movie is bad – it just isn’t great.  And it suffers by the unfair comparison to 12 Angry Men (which I contend is a perfect film) that I held in my head the whole time I was watching The Ox-Bow Incident.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.”  Happy New Year, loyal readers!