Avatar 2 has been in the making for the past decade at least, and it comes out 13 years after Avatar—the film that taught our eyes a thing or two. It made for abiding politics in the man-versus-nature, technology-versus-indigenous knowledge debate.
The politics in Avatar: The Way of Water is a feeble rehash of the first. Civilisation is blazing guns and trillions of dollars worth science labs. Pandora, or Nature at its most primitive and incandescent, is the soul of Earth and humanity’s chance at a peaceful future.
Family before community, the protagonist Na’vi family repeats over and over again. “The Sullys stick together”; “The father protects”; “Family is our fortress”—it doesn’t get more staidly American and insular than that.
The screenplay has gaping holes; we hardly get to know the new characters inside out, their souls forever immersed in visual dazzle. But this is the kind of 3D visual dazzle you haven’t ever watched on a big screen. The bigger the screen, the better the sensory experience.
Director James Cameron reportedly made it with $350 million, which means that for the movie to even break even, it has to be one of the top-grossing films of all time. It’s safe to predict it will break even—its margin of profit should be way beyond the breaking even mark. Nobody should miss Avatar: The Way of Water. The world will say, yes we got to experience that thrill.
It is set largely on At’wa Attu, a tropical island reef where Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), the Na’vi insurrection leader who started off as a disabled US Marine and became a Pandora forest dweller through his Avatar identity, his wife, Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), and their four children take refuge from the “Sky People”—the futuristic technology-enabled American militia who are on a mission to colonize Pandora to make Earth a better place for future generations.
On the island, Jake and his family take refuge with the Metkayina clan, or the Reef People. Like the Na’vis, they are azure-y but with teal-coloured skin instead of a shimmery blue. They Reef People live in harmony with the ocean’s ways, and their wisdom is Cameron’s moral compass: “The way of water connects all things. Before your birth and after your death.” Water gives, and water takes, water has no end or beginning. So, the message is cute and simple, although it’s so much more than a “message film”: Don’t mess with the sea, don’t hunt down its creatures for your petty pescatarian and vain pursuits.
The teenagers of both tribes are initiated into the sea’s ways, which includes raising the island’s long-necked reptilian creatures to go into its depths and its incandescent magic.
No other word sums up the underwater panoramas better than ‘trippy’. The Pandora ocean is full of effulgent, psychedelic plants that have extremely clear visages and movements—every detail of sea creatures and plants, and their movements, in magnified sharpness. Lumpy whales and their leaps are a marvel. This is as experiential as it can get.
At a running time of three hours and ten minutes, even with a screenplay that makes no sense at certain points, you can’t take your eyes away from the big screen. Going to the theatre has new meaning. I never thought I’d ever say this about a film with a bad script.
With Avatar: The Way of Water, Cameron has raised the bar for visual effects artistry so much that most Marvel films seem like blown-up gaming screens by comparison. It is like a mammoth eye-popping, heart-racing videogame. Even for himself, the next films, if at all there are any, it would be difficult to match up to The Ways of Water.
If he misses the Best Picture at Oscar’s this year, it’ll only be because the Academy couldn’t care less about an imagination as audacious and as reverentially technology driven as this ultimate wet dream.
Avatar: The Way of Water releases in theatres on 16 December.
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