Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: James Cameron
Starring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Kate Winslet, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Cliff Curtis, Joel David Moore, CCH
Pounder, Edie Falco, Jemaine Clement
Alfred Hitchcock maintained that a film's running time should never
exceed what he called "the bladder barrier," the length of time an
audience member could last before having to run to the bathroom. He set
this duration at a little over two hours. At three hours and 10 minutes,
Avatar: The Way of Water, James Cameron's first sequel to his ground-and-record-breaking
2009 sci-fi adventure, will stretch viewers' bladders to the limit. And
just to be even more sadistic, Cameron has only gone and filled his
movie with liquid. Lots and lots of liquid. When his Space Smurf heroes
the Na'vi aren't swimming underwater they're being rained on, and
whenever their human antagonists are on screen they're constantly
guzzling cups of coffee. I see you Mister Cameron, you cruel
bastard.
The reason there's so much water in
Avatar: The Way of Water is because it's set mostly on an
alien archipelago. But it's mostly because water has long proven
extremely difficult to recreate digitally. Cameron has always liked to
push both himself and the limits of the cinematic form, and by
committing himself to this franchise for the remainder of his career he
appears to have doubled down on breaking new ground in the realm of
digital visual effects. Nobody can deny that Cameron and his crack team
have done an outstanding job here, heralding a new era of VFX. The
digital water is impossible to distinguish from the real thing, and the
way it flows naturally off animated characters and creatures is
ridiculously impressive.
High Frame Rate, the experimental technique that has broken filmmakers
like Ang Lee and Peter Jackson in recent years, has also finally been
conquered by the self-proclaimed King of the World. Previous attempts to
employ the technique - which involves filming at 48 frames per second
rather than the customary 24 and is believed in theory to provide an
image closer to that seen by the human eye – have resulted in an image
that looks like an Australian soap opera played at double speed. This
isn't an issue with The Way of Water, with smooth-flowing movement throughout. Even the 3D isn't irritating
here, though I still maintain it adds nothing to the experience.
Whether or not it repeats the box office success of its predecessor,
The Way of Water has guaranteed itself a chapter in the
history of visual effects. Take a bow, Mister Cameron, you've done it
again. But just as the morally objectionable
Birth of a Nation is an undeniably important and
ground-breaking piece of cinema, you'll likely wish the techniques
developed here had been used for something more palatable. Next level
visual effects are all well and good - and for the first 30 minutes of
The Way of Water you'll be so hypnotised by what you're
seeing that you won’t care what the images are in service of - but at a
certain point you'll find yourself pining for those old-fashioned
elements of an involving story and interesting characters, both of which
are in short supply here.
The first movie told the story of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington),
a paraplegic space marine who returns to service by becoming an "Avatar"
of the Na'vi, the alien race who stand between the military forces of
Earth and the lush, resource filled planet of Pandora. Befriending the
Na'vi and falling for Neytiri (Zoe Saldana, providing a bit of
blue for the Dads in the audience), Sully fought alongside the Na'vi and
repelled the human invaders. Where the first movie was a reworking of
Dances with Wolves, this one is more Dances with Whales, with Sully seeking refuge for
his family with a Maori-esque island dwelling people when the humans
return to Pandora.
Set 13 years after the first film, this sequel sees Sully now married
to Neytiri with a brood of kids, including the adopted Kiri, the
"half-breed" daughter of Sigourney Weaver's character from the
first one (Weaver plays Kiri). This sees Cameron do his best to evoke
John Ford, with themes of sons desperate to impress their gruff fathers
and half-breeds seeking their true identity clunkily shoehorned into
what is largely just a dumb shoot 'em up with a few Esther Williams
swimming routines thrown in. Also seeking his true identity is Spider
(Jack Champion), a dreadlocked feral human kid who is so annoying
he's like the unwanted love child of Wesley Crusher and Jar Jar Binks.
The movie's silliest subplot borrows from Star Trek IV and
sees characters conversing with whale-like creatures. Elsewhere there's
a half-baked creatures from the blue lagoon romantic narrative between a
couple of horny teens.
We're supposed to care about all this hippy-dippy stuff but none of
it's very convincing because Cameron has never seemed like a natural fit
for this sort of stuff. His best films are dark and tough movies like
The Terminator and Aliens, with tough-talking heroes who don’t have time to express any
sentiments, at least not verbally. It's no coincidence that
The Way of Water feels most like a James Cameron movie
when we're in the company of the team of Marines hunting Sully. Led by a
returning Stephen Lang, whose deceased human general has had his
memories implanted in a hulking Na'vi avatar (a Navatar?), they recall
the badass grunts of Aliens and will have you wishing
Cameron could take his new toys and deliver a regular sci-fi actioner
once again. If there's a surrogate for Cameron among his characters, you
imagine it's Lang's villain rather than Worthington's hero. When Lang
issues a threat of "I'll be nice once, then I won’t," it sounds like
something you might imagine Cameron saying to a crew member forced to
cancel an anniversary dinner with his wife because he needs to spend the
weekend perfecting the design of a space lobster.
The Way of Water shares more than a few similarities with
Steven Seagal's infamous vanity project On Deadly Ground, including a script so bad it could have been written by the
ball-breaking Buddhist himself. The dialogue is truly atrocious, with
lines a six-year-old kid would be embarrassed to have come out of the
mouths of toy soldiers in his back yard. Cameron finds a way to quickly
dispense with subtitles by having Sully tell us the Na'vi language
sounds like English to him now, but it's very much 21st century
American-English, and much of the visual world building is undone when
you have to listen to aliens calling each other "bro" and exclaiming
"shit!"
Those visuals are also undone whenever the movie takes us away from the
jungles and deep seas of Pandora and puts us in relatably real world
environs. The HFR soap opera flatness rears its ugly head, with
cinematographer Russell Carpenter unable to light sets with the
same depth created by his digital counterparts. In some scenes the
camera goes underwater to treat us to a magical fantasy world, only to
surface to what has all the visual sheen of an episode of
Baywatch.
Cameron has threatened two more instalments of this franchise. I have
no doubt that he'll break some more new ground in future films, but I
just wish he could break that ground with the sort of action movies he's
more suited to. Regardless of what I might want from Cameron, he's
getting to make the movies he wants to make, and he may well be one of
the last blockbuster filmmakers allowed to do so.
