James Cameron is back to take over what feels like nearly every cinema screen on Earth with the release of Avatar: The Way of Water. No one does this sort of blockbuster action like Cameron, reports Daniel Rutledge.
Avatar: The Way of Water
If you’d told me before I’d seen the Avatar sequel that my favourite thing would be a battlewhale flapping its fins about and laying waste to scores of humans, I probably would’ve laughed. But, yet again, James Cameron is confounding with just how much fun he can deliver us through cinema.
No one does this sort of blockbuster action like Cameron. The third act battle of The Way of Water is, like the first Avatar, doing something like what many Marvel and DC movies do, but it’s just such a vastly superior experience. Sure, it helps that the Avatar movies are somewhere in between movies and theme park rides, due mostly to their 3D presentation now (and now with added HFR). But there is a virtuoso quality to how Cameron layers his large-scale action sequences that makes them captivating and wildly entertaining.
We don’t spend a second on Earth in this sequel, instead fully immersed on planet Pandora. Several new characters are thrown into the mix, most of them children, but a few reincarnated folks who died in the original are back as avatars too. The story is ultra basic, following Jake and Neytiri as they move to live with a coastal Na’vi tribe to hide from nasty humans intent on assassinating them in the hopes of crushing a rebellion. Getting to know the younger characters and their usual unruly, juvenile ways is generally charming, if a bit repetitive.
Much less time is spent with the human baddies in the sequel, aside from a wonderfully methodical, prolonged and intensely cruel whaling sequence. But we again get various glimpses of awesome future industrial tech Cameron is so good at creating. And of course, it all leads up to a full-scale Na’vi vs human battle, this time on and in the ocean rather than Pandora’s jungles, forests and floating mountains.
The battlewhale payoff is superb, but the lead-up to it pushes the boundaries of silliness to some pretty extreme levels. When a guy starts chatting with the whale and they form a lovely relationship it really does slap you in the face with its goofiness. This is about as fantastical as fantasy films get and the whole thing is super silly, of course, but even within the realm of this silly world when Na’vi and space whale start chopping it up and bro’ing down it goes next level. With most animals the Na’vi have to connect their spiritual ponytails to communicate, but not with the whales—a few gestures to aid the subtitled chat and they seem to understand everything, speaking back in Earth whale style moans and grunts.
There are also some bizarre accent choices going on. Sam Worthington has vastly improved his ability to speak since the first Avatar movie, but other alien characters go all over the place with their accents. We get some fake African-sounding, some fake Middle Eastern-sounding, a bit of Polynesian in there with a few others. It’s not like they all represent different Na’vi tribes or something, some of these different accents are siblings in the same family. Other things don’t make sense like why the future humans have got such incredible tech but can’t make arrow-proof glass, but ultimately shit like that doesn’t really matter—if you don’t want it to.
This is as spectacular as cinema gets. It’s designed with universal appeal in mind, so the simplistic earnestness and repetitiveness and ultra basicness means it will resonate with children on a pure level that makes me wish I was a child to experience it that way too. If you want to go in with arms crossed and get caught up with what’s wrong with the movie, you could easily do that, but you’d have to try really hard not to have a good time in the action scenes. While some of the mind-blowing wow factor of the original Avatar hasn’t been recaptured, as this one isn’t as ground-breaking, it still pushes the boundaries of modern visual effects, dazzling with otherworldly beauty at times.
It’s over three hours in length but I never got bored, never felt it dragged, I was engaged for the whole time and when the protracted climactic battle scene takes place, I was as exhilarated as I wanted to be. I clapped and whooped as the battlewhale squished people, I laughed with joy as future gunships were downed by Na’vi. I got on Cameron’s ride and enjoyed the hell out of how masterfully he captained it. Despite the film’s flaws, seeing The Way of Water in the cinema is an experience that’s difficult not to love.
