‘Avatar: The Way of Water’: James Cameron Does It Again

In 2009, James Cameron’s Avatar became the preeminent big-screen experience, between its imaginative, bioluminescent world, its expressive use of performance-capture technology, and its functional yet highly effective spectacle. The long-awaited sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, not only checks those aforementioned boxes, but one-ups its predecessor in numerous ways, proving to be a quintessential crowd experience, too. It demands to be watched with other people, extending the first film’s idea of “immersion” beyond just hyper-realistic 3D vistas, to include feeling the mood of the room shift noticeably around you, from breathless investment in the melodrama, to sheer delight at the riotous, knee-slapping fun.

The Way of Water earns each second of its runtime, in a story that bears structural similarities to Avatar, but expands on its emotional and thematic aims in wondrous ways.

Clocking in at a mammoth 192 minutes—a full half hour longer than the first film—The Way of Water earns each second of its runtime, in a story that bears structural similarities to Avatar, but expands on its emotional and thematic aims in wondrous ways. It picks up well over a decade later, getting us up to speed via montage on what Pandora natives, the Na’vi, have been up to since exiling the Sky People, i.e. Earth’s ruthless, distinctly American military. Former human Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Na’vi princess Neytiri (Zoe Sandaña) have become the leaders of their tribe of blue feline humanoids. They’ve also started a family, who happen to be the movie’s heart and soul.

The Sully clan, rendered through performance-capture like their parents, consists of their two playful teenage boys, warriors-in-the-making Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) and Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), adorable youngest daughter Tuktirey, or “Tuk” (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), and, in an off-beat decision that pays dividends, 73-year-old Sigourney Weaver as adopted teen Kiri, a kind girl with a deep curiosity about nature. She’s the biological daughter of botanist Grace Augustine, Weaver’s deceased human character from the first film, but she was born to Grace’s remote Avatar body under mysterious circumstances—a unique cross-cultural blend of Biblical immaculate conception and, given Weaver’s unmistakable presence, Hindu reincarnation. Completing the crop of newcomers is the fun and feisty Spider (Jack Champion), a teenage human left behind on Pandora when he was just a baby. Since the planet has a human-unfriendly atmosphere, he’s seen with an oxygen mask more often than not, since he practically grew up with the siblings—who consider him their cousin—though Neytiri still sees him as an outsider, paving the way for familial tensions.

Peace prevails for a while, but the family’s mettle is tested when human ships and tanks return to Pandora once more, which Cameron depicts with the kind of hellish framing usually reserved for apocalyptic disasters. However, the movie’s focus soon shifts away from the humans’ relentless resource-mining, so as not to retread familiar ground. The specter of colonialism remains, but the story is much more intimate this time. The first film’s fearsome, mustache-twirling antagonist, the human colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who was killed by Jake and Neytiri, has found his way back to life in a cloned Avatar body. This being a sci-fi story makes his return unsurprising, but some of the ensuing specifics (including Quaritch’s own perspective on his Na’vi rebirth) are a delightful discovery. The story this time is a revenge mission, turning Jake, Neytiri, and their children into specific targets of the human military’s second occupation, thus sending the family on the run, far away from their own people. So, they seek refuge with a far-flung Na’vi water tribe, the coast-dwelling Metkayina, led by Ronal (Kate Winslett) and her chieftain husband Tonwari (Cliff Curtis), as Quaritch embarks on his lengthy search to find them.

With these chess pieces spread far across the board, The Way of Water spends a significant chunk of its runtime in anticipation of Quaritch catching up to the Sullys (as he speed-runs his way through a cultural learning curve similar to Jake’s from the first film). But this protracted second act is where the story lives and breathes. Jake and Neytiri take something of a backseat, allowing an unexpected coming-of-age movie to emerge, as their sons learn the ways of the Metkayina from a trio of boisterous peers, from the tribe’s philosophies about the circle of life and its intrinsic connection to water, to their relationships to the gorgeously rendered sea animals they ride.

Masculine egos fly, as the brothers get into boyish tiffs with the chieftain’s son, Aonung (Filip Geljo). But luckily for them, Aonung’s tough-but-pretty sister, Tsireya (Bailey Bass), is more than willing to help them out, leading to sparks of adolescent romance between her and Lo’ak. What makes all this worth watching is how realistic the characters feel, not just in appearance, but in subtle facial expression—in mood and attitude—even though their dialogue delivery falls in line with the film’s broad, all-ages tone (good luck to all parents whose 4-year-old’s new favorite insult is about to be “butthole”). Few major Hollywood productions have so deftly captured the tug-of-war between teenage bravado and insecurity—the depiction of which is surprisingly humorous here—and not a single film has ever allowed a septuagenarian to perfectly embody a moody teen. The legendary Weaver is granted the opportunity to ground Kiri’s teenage listlessness in pressing questions about her place in the natural world, and by proxy, our place as human beings in a world of water.

While it’s initially hard to tell the two Sully sons apart, the elder Neteyam soon begins living up to his father’s stern expectations (they refer to him as “sir”), while his younger brother Lo’ak struggles to prove himself. A surprising amount of the film is underscored by Jake’s attempts to balance tough love and genuine affection, especially when coddling his sons might mean endangering their lives. This, in turn, leads to Lo’ak’s unexpected kinship with a gentle sea giant, the whale-like Tulkun, a species that slowly enters the story’s foreground, and whose lore becomes an enormous part of Cameron’s conservationist mission statement. The Metkayina tribe, who have evolved tails and fin-like limbs to help them swim, have a deep connection to the water and all its lifeforms; they even refer to the whale creatures as “the Tulkun people.” Given their tribal tattoos and other traditions—including, at one point, hints of a haka—they’re also distinctly drawn from Māori and other Pasifika cultures which have an oceanic-centricity. This certainly poses its own issue of uncomfortable racial optics, akin to the first film’s cultural mishmash of Native American and African tribal imagery (to say nothing of having a white actress like Winslet inhabit such a role). However, Cameron’s environmentalist pronouncements here feel much more immediate and tangible.

If Avatar was Cameron’s “save the forest” movie, The Way of Water is his manifesto on the importance of marine life, and the evils wrought upon it by the whaling industry (for which the humans on Pandora also have a vicious equivalent). However, where buying into the first film’s hippie spirit required accepting spiritual abstractions—like interconnected holy trees, which are still present here, but in the background—the sequel circumvents any need for such intellectualization, by imbuing its marine creatures with human traits and personalities. The result is not only visually stunning, between Cameron’s dazzling underwater musicality and his use of POV shots (yes, even from the whales’ perspectives), it’s deeply moving, too. Even the music by Simon Franglen re-arranges James Horner’s score from the original in thoughtful ways, including and especially “The Destruction of Home Tree” during a scene where a whale is hunted.

What also separates The Way of Water from the first film is its use of High Frame Rate (HFR) technology, the kind that was a major eyesore on the first Hobbit movie 10 years ago since it exposed all cinematic artifice. Cameron and co. have found ways to use it in precise, even transformative fashion once your eyes adjust to the changing formats—once Cameron trains you to see in a new way, yet again. Depending on where you watch the movie, you may be treated to your first “variable frame rate” experience, wherein more still shots with traditional drama (close ups especially) are presented at the standard 24-frames-per-second, but some of the swift action and lateral movements may appear at 48 fps. Normally, this would result in too smooth an image, and one that feels played on fast forward (think fancy TVs on display at Best Buy), but given the use of novel motion grading technology, these shots all retain their cinematic quality while making comprehensible even the most chaotic moments.

It yields one of the most fist-pumping, ludicrously enjoyable action climaxes in recent Hollywood, as each intense beat builds with operatic rhythm.

Of course, Cameron and cinematographer Russell Carpenter have little trouble when it comes to staging legible action. This time around, the fireworks are also one of the movie’s major highlights. If its second act is the slow creation of meaning, its third involves placing all that meaning in direct (and highly unexpected) conflict with military colonialism, in ways that are so explosively over-the-top you’ll seldom believe your eyes and ears. The result is a tonal high-wire act that, when described on paper, would sound utterly ridiculous, but since it’s imbued with both tangible heft and righteous sentimentality, it yields one of the most fist-pumping, ludicrously enjoyable action climaxes in recent Hollywood, as each intense beat builds with operatic rhythm.

This is all before Cameron twists his knife and shifts into the kind of specific dramatic territory the first movie treated mostly as symbolic. All of it is enhanced by the way light interacts with each digital surface, piercing through layers of surrounding environment to create living, breathing portraits of characters, rife with emotional intrigue. And while a couple of story threads do feel left incomplete (as do the film’s fleeting musings on rebirth, and the connection between mind, body, and spirit), it is perhaps understandable that some trimming may have been needed to bring the film down to its already gargantuan three hours and change.

Thoughtful, funny, and bombastic in equal measure, Avatar: The Way of Water is both surprising in its sincerity, and completely predictable in the fact that Cameron has, once again, knocked it so far out of the park that it’s going to take years to retrieve the ball. It is, quite simply, one the best-looking, most deeply felt Hollywood blockbusters we’re likely to experience for some time.