Avatar: The Way of Water

Problematic thematic context begets a little bit of guilt to a spectacular pleasure

Avatar: The Way of Water is a marvelous film that exceeded my every expectation. Like with Top Gun: Maverick, the marketing campaign very successfully took me from “I don’t need to see this” to “I absolutely need to see this.” In a media environment bursting with CGI-laden art products, it stands above and perhaps alone in making its fully fictional world seem real, livable, actual. My greatest unoriginal problem with it is that the people of settler-colonial nation states owe the colonized indigenous of this world better than using them as fodder for environmentalist fables. If Avatar: The Way of Water causes viewers to reflect on the legacy of colonialism and imperialism – as it surely should based on the imagery and language deployed – perhaps that’s a net good, but I’m not an expert on representation and people often fail to ingest even the most blatant themes in art. And we all too infrequently or slowly see reflection and thoughtfulness turn to action. Regardless, Avatar: The Way of Water, is a remarkable and captivating film of an imagined future rooted, like most speculative fiction, in the questions of the present and the historical processes that brought us here.

The Way of Water is the first of four sequels to the highest-grossing film of all time (one is in postproduction for release in 2024, while the two to be released in 2026 and 2028 depend on this one’s surefire success), authored by box office king and film technology pioneer James Cameron, whose career highlights include the two good Terminators, one of the two Alien movies people revere, and Titanic. He’s also a renowned pain in the ass to work with who very nearly has gotten actors killed on his shoots, and made a tone-deaf (at best) remark about the Lakota people when trying to help Xingu people in the Amazon. The film follows the romantic pair from the first film – Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), the former human marine now fully transposed into the Avatar body of a Na’vi, the blue-skinned cat-like people that populate the planet, and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), daughter of her tribe’s late leader – as they try to raise two sons (Jamie Flatters and Britain Dalton), two daughters (Sigourney Weaver and Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), and a human boy (Jack Champion).

Humans, ‘the sky people,’ were largely pushed off the planet, but return en masse in apocalyptic fashion from our dying home of Earth, destroying flora and fauna in mass destructive manner to reestablish a military presence on Pandora. Rather than learn any lessons about our out-of-whack relationship with the world around us, we merely transpose our worst exploitative impulses intergalactically. And of course, the Sully clan are a main object of ire for the earthlings.

This film is an incredible spectacle. It sports the most immersive and meticulously crafted CGI that I have ever seen. unfortunately, I have little reason to believe that either the visual effects artists (Weta FX, Weta Digital, Lightstorm Entertainment, Industrial Light and Magic, FX TD, Pixelworks) or practical effects artists (Weta Workshop, Legacy Effects, Meniscus props) were paid well for their work, based on the history of overworking alleged on the last film, apparently rife through the industry. Exploitation in a film about exploitation – the contradiction at the heart of a profit-making endeavor with a conservationist message. But back to the picture. I mentioned it should inspire people to consider the relationship humans have with the Earth because that is what the film is about. It is an imagined future that feels possible. A militaristic global human government finding new people to kill for new resources to exploit. I found myself, on at least a few occasions, considering the path from this reality to that one, and it seems mostly a matter of time and technological advancement with inadequate political pushback to our current systems. That is to say that, blue cat-people notwithstanding, it doesn’t feel far-fetched.

James Cameron and the massive team of artists and artisans, thinkers and doers, planners and builders, that crafted this film have created marvels. And I do mean massive – a ton of people made this film. There is technology displayed here that feels like but unlike our own, conveying the idea of advancement that’s easy to believe, intricately designed, meticulously tinkered. They’ve thought through deep space travel and marine merchants on other worlds. They’ve imagined the most brutally effective and technically efficient, visually captivating ways of doing to a forest paradise what industrialization hastened by capitalism and militarism have done to the very planet we inhabit. And this is married with the incredible ways they’ve explored how flora and fauna that’s earth-like but not of-earth would function. They make great use of scale – cinematographer Russell Carpenter, a longtime Cameron collaborator, does as great a job conveying size and depth as he does the intimacy of family.

And all this visual world-building (production design by Dylan Cole and Ben Procter, art direction by a big team led by Luke Freeborn, Aashrita Kamath, and Kim Sinclair; set decoration by Vanessa Cole, costume design by Bob Buck and Deborah L. Scott; makeup another big team) combines with effortless exposition in transition between spaces and introductions of characters. It feels breezy for a 190-minute film, but still emotionally engaging and satisfying by investing its audience in its characters, making their lives and the danger they encounter and fears that they have feel real. Even seemingly late additions to the plot add to the story in a way that feels natural without weighing it down. It’s an elegant film that allows for mystery without relying entirely on surprises and twists for its plot. It spells out enough but still trusts its audience. I’m not spoiling things as a courtesy, but I could tell you everything that will transpire and the simple experience of viewing it all would still blow you away. I will say that in the third act there were a few things I thought could have been handled with more deftly – the disappearance of a crowd without fanfare fit within the plot but still left me thinking “where’d they go?” One character’s conflicting loyalties seemed contrived to make the plot work, but the plant paid off and all fiction is contrived.

The music (Simon Franglen), the constructed language (C.J. Jones), everything. Any line you thought sounded dumb in the trailer works here. I thought at one point “they’ve really got me deeply concerned about what happens to these blue people,” after years of being told and feeling like the story didn’t and couldn’t matter.

And let me underscore my conversion here. When I watched the first movie, I didn’t care for it. I was irritated with what felt like pedestrian dialogue early on as the marines made clunky ableist jokes about the wheelchair-using protagonist. And I don’t think complaints or misgivings about the use of indigenous people as metaphorical extraterrestrials is totally unwarranted or meritless as a concern or critique. I hope I’ve made it clear that there are components that I find either ironic or problematic.

But this is a gorgeous, awe-inspiring, moving film that makes me want to revisit that one. It’s immediately in the conversation of best spectacles of the year and favorite film experiences of the year. It’s a film about responsibility up – for adolescents and parents discovering different phases of adulthood and different kinds of responsibility, for people realizing what we owe one another and community around us. It’s, in a meta way, about patience and dedication to craft. And, hell, it’s a big blockbuster motion picture that heavily uses CGI that instead of worshipping the military is openly suspicious and critical of it. I almost hate how much I love this movie and I can’t wait to go see it again.