Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)
Movie rating: 9/10
If a movie that’s 3 hours and 12 minutes long manages to not only hold your attention, but leave you staring at the screen in awe for most of its running time, I’d have to recommend that movie. So it is with Avatar: The Way of Water, the long-awaited sequel that proves once again the old Hollywood adage: Never bet against James Cameron.
Like many, I was skeptical about Cameron’s choice to devote the latter part of his career to making multiple Avatar sequels. Everyone saw the 2009 original, still the highest-grossing movie of all time as of this writing. But popular consensus was that while the first Avatar was a visual and technological marvel that offered jaw-dropping spectacle, the story was fairly standard, a riff on Dances with Wolves or FernGully with giant blue alien cat people. As the years passed, we were told, Avatar had left no lasting cultural impact. Even I, a diehard Cameron fan—the original Terminator is one of my all-time favourite films—wondered if these Avatar sequels might mark the moment when the director’s hubris finally got the better of him. Then the rave reviews and boffo box office returns started coming in, and I knew Jimmy Cameron had pulled it off yet again.
The Way of Water, I’m pleased to say, improves in every way upon the original. The story and characters are more engaging. The visual effects are better. The world-building is more diverse, as we shift from the forests of Pandora to the ocean. The deep sea, of course, is a realm the director of Titanic and The Abyss is more than comfortable with. Let’s not forget that Cameron is an explorer as well as a filmmaker—being the first person to make a solo dive to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, the deepest point in Earth’s oceans. It’s clear Cameron feels a deep connection to the ocean, one I share. There’s something deeply moving about the vastness of the sea, similar to what one feels looking up at the stars in the night sky. It’s fitting then that the second Avatar manages to combine both, with an oceanbound story set on an alien planet whose inhabitants once more find themselves fighting off invasion by the “sky people”, aka humans.
The plot is fairly straightforward. With Earth dying, humans are intent on colonizing Pandora. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), now fully Na’vi and chief of the Omaticaya clan, is raising a family with partner Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and leading an insurgency. When the first film’s villain Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) is revived as a “recombinant”—his memories implanted in a Na’vi avatar—he seeks revenge against Sully, whose family finds refuge with the ocean-dwelling Metkayina clan.
Family is one of the main themes of The Way of Water. This isn’t limited to Jake and Neytiri and their children, who include oldest son Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), second son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), youngest child “Tuk” (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), and adopted daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver, playing a 14-year-old through movie magic). The Sully children are close to Spider (Jack Champion), a human boy who turns out to be Quaritch’s son. The film focuses a great deal on fatherhood and protecting loved ones. But much of the screentime is devoted not to Jake and Neytiri, but to their children—Lo’ak’s attempts to fit in with the Metkayina and his burgeoning friendship with Payakan, part of a species of intelligent whale-like creatures called the Tulkun; and Kiri, whose parentage and abilities pose questions that will no doubt be answered in future instalments.
In case it wasn’t clear already, Cameron fully dives into the world-building. By introducing us to the Metkayina and showing how they differ from the forest-bound Omaticaya, he gives us a sense of variety among the Na’vi which makes this film feel more multi-layered than the first Avatar. For all his fearsome reputation, Cameron is a hippie New Age type at heart, and I mean that in the best possible sense. In The Way of Water, he expands upon the first film’s concerns for environmentalism, Indigenous rights, and critiques of colonialism and imperialism.
Cameron goes all-in conveying his reverence for nature and the ocean. “The way of water has no beginning and no end,” Tsireya (Bailey Bass) explains to Lo’ak in some representative dialogue. “Our hearts beat in the womb of the world. The sea is your home, before your birth and after your death. The sea gives and the sea takes. Water connects all things: life to death, darkness to light.” Cameron has spoken about how a Fox exec asked him to tone down the “tree-hugging hippie bullshit”, which he refused. As Cameron recounted to GQ, he told this executive in no uncertain terms: “I’m at a point now in my career and in my life where I can pretty much make any movie I want. And I chose to make this story because of the tree-hugging hippie bullshit.”
I’m glad he did, because that content is exactly what the Avatar films are about and what makes them stand out from the superhero films that dominate Hollywood and venerate defence of the status quo. I’m happy that Cameron, who can do whatever he wants, is using that power to offer social commentary on protecting the environment and Indigenous rights, while also showing that when it comes to dazzling spectacle and simple but crowd-pleasing stories with universal themes, he has no peer. If Cameron borrows freely from his favourite tropes—the space marines and exosuits of Aliens, the underwater action of The Abyss, a sinking ship straight out of Titanic—there’s more than enough in The Way of Water that’s unlike anything we’ve seen before.
My favourite character in the sequel was Colonel Quaritch, who is given more layers here than in the first film. Though Lang was entertaining before, in the sequel he’s given more complexity not only through his relationship with his son, but by the unique trick of taking a genocidal imperialist villain and putting him in the body of those he oppressed. “For our sins in our past life we have been brought back in the form of our enemy,” Quaritch says. The other standout is Kiri, whose origins and powers make for an intriguing mystery. It’s impressive how well Weaver plays a teenager; I quickly forgot this character was being portrayed by a senior citizen and fully bought into the illusion.
If there’s a weak link in the Avatar series, it continues to be Sam Worthington, who unfortunately does not quite have the charisma this role requires. Jake is a more interesting character here than he was in the first film, grappling with the responsibilities of fatherhood. But Worthington still struggles to mask his Australian accent, and the best word to describe his performance remains “adequate”. Luckily he doesn’t have to carry the film solely on his shoulders, as this film focuses more on the next generation of Sullys, as well as Quaritch. Zoe Saldaña also seems to get the short end of the stick as Neytiri, spending a lot of the film crying. The third act makes up for it a bit as we get to see Neytiri take charge as the avenging mother.
The film has a great musical score by Simon Franglen, expanding upon work in the previous movie by the late James Horner. The Weeknd serves up a very enjoyable end-credits theme song with “Nothing is Lost (You Give Me Strength)”. But the chief attraction, you will not be surprised to learn, are the visuals.
Cameron fills every frame with wondrous sights, the work of a true visionary who has the time, budget, and technology—much of it invented by Cameron himself—to bring whatever he can imagine to life. The VFX are some of the best you’ll ever see. When you see the Na’vi, they look real. No one has pushed the bounds of cinematic technology like Cameron, who in the twilight of his career continues to astound. There are also fascinating concepts like the brain enzymes of the Tulkuns being the source of a remedy that stops human aging, a true fountain of youth. That’s a much more interesting idea than the last movie’s MacGuffin element “unobtanium”, which is barely mentioned here if at all.
Film is a visual medium and Avatar: The Way of Water reminds us how true that is. Make sure you see this movie in 3D on the biggest screen possible. I watched it in 3D IMAX with a high-frame rate, and it was incredible. While any in-person activity these days always has to be measured against the risk of COVID, I already want to see it again. Particularly in the bleak and cold winter months, escaping to Pandora for a few hours offers the best possible value you can get for the price of a movie ticket.
Against all expectations, Cameron has made me invested in the world of Avatar and eager to see where the story goes from here. This is the work of a master filmmaker, who knows exactly how to create the spellbinding sense of wonder that represents what movies at their best are capable of.