Avatar: The Way of Water

Out­sider art comes in many forms. Often we think of it as prim­i­tive doo­dles for which the ​“artist” has employed found mate­ri­als and is usu­al­ly divorced from the fray of the art-man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­tri­al com­plex. Despite the fact that its pur­port­ed price tag amounts to many hun­dreds of mil­lions, there’s some­thing about James Cameron’s stub­born­ly impos­ing Avatar: The Way of Water that embod­ies the basic pre­cepts of out­sider art – for bet­ter and for worse.

There’s a naivety to this sequel sto­ry which makes it feel as if Cameron has been squir­relled away at the bot­tom of an ocean­ic trench with­in a glass-domed sub­mersible for the last 13 years (and prob­a­bly the 13 before that too). With his charm­ing­ly inflat­ed ego and stag­ger­ing arti­san intel­lect, he has not mere­ly ignored but bat­ted back the glob­al tides of art, fash­ion, polit­i­cal thought, refined taste, and – most impor­tant­ly – nar­ra­tive cin­e­ma. In fact, the only thing he appears to have had down there is a worn DVD of the film Free Willy (1993).

But we all know the sto­ry. Against all odds, 2009’s orig­i­nal Avatar became a world-con­quer­ing box office behe­moth, trump­ing his own record-set­ting love boat dis­as­ter­piece, Titan­ic, from 1999. Yet unlike Titan­ic, it’s hard to find some­one who’ll admit to actu­al­ly lik­ing Avatar or, if not that, feel­ing as if a sequel would hold any antic­i­pa­to­ry val­ue what­so­ev­er. Do kids have Na’vi action fig­ures? Has there been any spin-off fic­tion about the hab­it­able plan­et of Pan­do­ra in the inter­ven­ing years? Per­haps it’s this blan­ket cul­tur­al absence that makes the prospect of a new Avatar film so weird­ly tantalising?

As with the first one, The Way of Water is a film that wears its over­bear­ing, gaudy tech­ni­cal achieve­ments on its sleeve, and Cameron him­self makes for an effec­tive car­ni­val bark­er when it comes to hyp­ing up the expe­ri­en­tial aspects of Going To The Cin­e­ma To See A Movie. He knows that the the­atri­cal space is still where the big mon­ey is, and the cur­rent mix of post-pan­dem­ic malaise and indus­try doom­say­ing might just make for the per­fect con­di­tions for him to front a rev­o­lu­tion and cash in on what must be one of cinema’s most eccen­tric and pre­car­i­ous fran­chise spread bets.

With this sec­ond run-out for the lanky blue hip­py hunter-gath­ers, once again a lazy homogeni­sa­tion of nativist tropes, Cameron cleaves tight­ly to the same win­ning for­mu­la as the orig­i­nal. The film not only rejects any crit­i­cisms – and there are many! – of the first film, but dou­bles down on them, deliv­er­ing an even more hok­i­ly dis­joint­ed nar­ra­tive, ramp­ing up the sen­ti­men­tal cut-aways of human/​animal cama­raderie, and ram­ming unearned, broad-brush emo­tion down the viewer’s throat like so much salty popcorn.

The epony­mous con­cept of the avatar gave the first film its spec­u­la­tive sci-fi USP, and also served to imbue its wide-eyed army puke pro­tag­o­nist – Sam Worthington’s Jake Sul­ly – with a work­able if hard­ly earth-shat­ter­ing dra­mat­ic dilem­ma. This aspect is swept aside as ground already cov­ered in the new one, which instead goes for a straight-up Na’vi-vs-“Sky Peo­ple” (humans) bat­tle for the future. Sul­ly him­self is less of a cen­tral pres­ence, as is his sul­try wife Neytiri as played by Zoe Sal­dana. The baton has been passed along to their teenage brood, which com­pris­es a quar­tet of oik­ish, hot-head­ed boys and sen­si­tive, mater­nal girls.

In terms of writ­ing and char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion, Cameron nev­er met a cliché which he didn’t embrace with open arms and a wet smooch. This is a film which, across its 192 minute run­time, offers noth­ing but ret­ro­grade, dumb-for-show boil­er­plate. Is this a crit­i­cism? Maybe… But this has always been the way with Cameron, as he is not some­one who grav­i­tates towards nar­ra­tive trick­ery or a desire to add any lev­el of ambi­gu­i­ty or sophis­ti­ca­tion to his char­ac­ters. There’s no nice way of putting this, but in The Way of Water, we are served up the director’s most basic dra­mat­ic struc­ture and across-the-board bland set of play­ers he’s ever manufactured.

Mean­while, the humans are now even more pan­tomime in their colo­nial vil­lainy, hav­ing done with strip­ping Pan­do­ra of vital min­er­al assets (Unob­taini­um!), and now shift­ing focus to the gold­en, age-stymy­ing brain cheese of the Tulkun, a race of hyper-intel­li­gent whale/​turtle hybrids who have also adopt­ed a strict code of paci­fism. The detail of non-vio­lence leaves the door wide open for Cameron to indulge in many shows of sim­plis­tic envi­ron­men­tal­ist hec­tor­ing, and one of the film’s big and most brazen­ly manip­u­la­tive action set pieces involves a mech­a­nised hunt­ing par­ty met­ing out pain and humil­i­a­tion on a defence­less Tulkun and her brood.

As the main antag­o­nist, we have Stephen Lang’s heinous, claw-marked Marine, Quar­itch, now back in the body of a Na’vi (some­thing about extract­ing his mem­o­ries before he was killed in the first film?), and with a han­ker­ing for some afters with his killers, Jake and Neytiri. With a vague­ly jus­ti­fied go-ahead from the brass, the stage is set for his long-game and logis­ti­cal­ly incom­pre­hen­si­ble revenge mis­sion, with an estranged, fer­al son, Spi­der (Jack Cham­pi­on), hap­haz­ard­ly tossed into the mix to test his emo­tion­al mettle.

All of which is to say, that awk­ward dichoto­my between crass­ly super­fi­cial sto­ry and pathfind­ing visu­als is still very much in play, and The Way of Water can still be enjoyed and laud­ed as a pure­ly cos­met­ic spec­ta­cle. It’s hard not to be awe-struck by the lev­els of detail, the cre­ative in-world design and the svelte dynamism of the 3D, 48fps pre­sen­ta­tion, but the human brain has evolved to adapt to its sur­round­ings, so spec­ta­cle quick­ly trans­forms into gim­mick. The effects become wall­pa­per. There’s a trag­ic irony to the fact that Cameron and his team have cre­at­ed a world so immac­u­late­ly immer­sive – a mel­liflu­ous trompe‑l’œil writ large across the sky in flu­o­ro blue – that the defects in his by-the-motions sto­ry­telling are the only thing left to stare at.

And yet, a James Cameron Avatar sequel – more for what it stands for than what it is – remains prefer­able to the vast major­i­ty of main­stream, effects-dri­ven genre cin­e­ma. His release strat­e­gy is akin to that of the con­cep­tu­al video artist, as the set­tings and the strict view­ing con­di­tions have become part and par­cel of the art­work itself. It’s why he may be onto anoth­er win­ner, with more-of-the-same can­ni­ly repack­aged and mar­ket­ed as pop­ulist sub­ver­sion. The third episode is already in the can, and I for one have lit­tle inter­est to see how things on Pan­do­ra inevitably pan out, espe­cial­ly now Cameron – with­out a 13-year gap to test the waters – has now well-and-tru­ly played every card in his aes­thet­ic hand.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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