Avatar: The Way of Water hits theaters on December 16, 2022. A spoiler-free review follows.
I think it was right when a Pandora whale lamented, in Papyrus subtitled dialogue, that her past was “too painful” to explain that I realized she’d totally bought into Avatar: The Last Airbender. The success of 2009’s Avatar greatly influenced the direction of digital filmmaking and distribution, and while the world has changed a lot in the 13 years leading up to this sequel, some things never do. .like when James Cameron decides to make a sequel, he expands and embellishes the previous story in surprising and attractive ways. Avatar: The Last Airbender isn’t afraid to be weird as hell as it doubles down on the bare sentimentality of the first film, refocuses the plot on more interesting characters and yes, it has to be said, puts Water. mark the visual effects in the film again.
Waterway bridges the long gap between the films with a dense prologue that tells what happened after the resource-hungry GDR humans retreated from Pandora. Deserted Avatar pilot and now Na’vi Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and full-time Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) form a family as the new leaders of the Omaticaya tribe. This family grows to include three biological and two adopted children, and is the driving force behind Jake and Neytiri’s decision to go into exile after the RDA returns to resume its looting, led by the practically non-existent General Ardmore (Edie Falco). . These early scenes provide a lot of exposition and important details about the status quo and the nature of certain relationships. Clocking in at a blistering 190 minutes, The Way of Water almost always finds time to go back to reinforce the most crucial plot elements, but it does mean there will be times when you’ll be searching for a character’s name or their place in the social hierarchy. Cameron is betting you’ll be blown away by what a decade of technological advances have made to bring Pandora to life on screen, and the results speak for themselves.
Although we spend some time in the forests of the first film, the vast majority of The Way of Water takes place in the territory of the Metkayina seafaring tribe, and the vibrant underwater ecosystem is an even more dreamlike palette for Cameron to work with . Bioluminescent rainbows of flora in the depths refract across the moving surface like the aurora, sunsets on the wide horizon bounce off the waves and cast a purple hue on the shores, life thoughtfully designed marine reinforce the feeling that Pandora is alive. breathe the world more effectively than Avatar. But when it comes time to blow all that composure in favor of blockbuster action, it should come as no surprise that Cameron delivers the goods. Even the most chaotic action sequences are readable, excitingly paced and, above all, impossible to take your eyes off of. An early foray into an RDA cargo shipment features a train derailment that had me grinning all the way through, amazed at how visceral the destruction felt.
Camí de l’Agua has much more room for levity than its serious forerunner.
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Cameron’s environmental interests remain the linchpin of the larger Avatar plot, and his heavy use of familiar character archetypes and story devices feels like a clear message that the military good guys and baddies of Na’ vi are more important as a collective than individually. And if we’re talking archetypal characters, we have to talk about Cameron’s decision to (literally) revive Stephen Lang’s Miles Quaritch as the main villain of The Way of Water. Quaritch’s hypermasculine character felt dated in 2009, little more than a vessel for all the worst aspects of Avatar’s themes of colonialism, but Lang’s scene-chewing enthusiasm always kept the character interesting. Quaritch gets his second chance at revenge thanks to a Na’vi body of his own, and his newfound physical prowess gives him even more swagger than he already had. His personal revenge is not fleshed out in long monologues about the nature of life or the expectations of a military man; it’s highlighted by the simple fact that even with a new lease on life, he’s still looking for the Sullys.
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Lang manages to show off without feeling like a showboat, with all the subtlety of Quaritch holding his own human skull aloft in Hamlet’s grand fashion, though there are some new wrinkles to the character that suggest a little more depth than The Way of Water has time for. – Yes, even with a duration of more than three hours. The Way of Water is in no rush to expand the franchise’s universe, and after another decade of seeing the ins and outs of interconnected storytelling, that serves the experience.
Thanks in no small part to a shift in focus toward next-gen, The Way of Water has much more room for levity than its earnest forerunner. Jake and Neytiri’s children argue and tease each other, have fun with their new tribemates, but most of all they stick together. Cameron invests heavily in the middle children Lo’ak and Kiri as new representatives of the spiritual and warrior tendencies of the Na’vi, each struggling to understand their place. Spider, the Sullys’ adopted human boy, doesn’t spend as much time with his siblings because of how the story progresses, but his mix of wild energy and sane attitude helps him stand out. The older and younger Sully children have little to do and get lost in the shuffle, other than when you need to put someone in danger to keep the plot moving.
With Sully’s children taking center stage, Jake and Neytiri’s role in the story is reduced proportionately, and that’s fine. Jake isn’t a more interesting character than he was last time, but he’s useful here as a tough father figure for his kids to struggle to live up to. Zoe Saldaña’s Neytiri feels like the legacy character with the least to do, especially defending her children from a distracted Jake. The leaders of the Metkayina tribe, played by Cliff Curtis and Kate Winslet, are cut from a very similar cloth to Jake and Neytiri and often end up feeling redundant as a result.
Avatar: The Path of Water is a sumptuous and thoughtful return to Pandora.
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While the vast majority of The Way of Water’s technical gambits pay off, the missteps in this area are more glaring. Specifically, Cameron overplays his hand in how he brings one of Jake and Neytiri’s children to life. Kiri, Sully’s eldest daughter, is voiced and acted in action capture by Sigourney Weaver, and her connection to the late Dr. Grace Augustine (also Weaver) is an important story point, but the choice of having Weaver herself play this younger incarnation frequently. distract It has less to do with the idea of an adult playing with a kid with a mo-cap and more to do with the fact that… well, it’s Sigourney Weaver. Sure, Weaver’s game for trying, but raising his voice and shrinking his Na’vi body isn’t enough to save the uncanny valley of hearing an icon, an icon in Cameron’s own filmography, nothing more, nothing less— a teenager.
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