AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER

"A Marine can't be defeated. You can kill us, but we'll just regroup in Hell." - Quaritch

2022 was the year for sequels. Wakanda Forever, Top Gun: Maverick, Pearl, all outshined their predecessors and established themselves as cinematic powerhouses individually from their first installments. This pattern of secondary success could not be applied to every 2022 sequel with the likes of Hocus Pocus 2 and Disenchanted making sure that streak wasn’t universally accepted. The most egregious and intolerable sequel to see the light of day belongs to none other than the blockbuster king himself, James Cameron. Avatar: The Way of Water is a byproduct of sloppy writing, creative autonomy, and box office pompousness. All the beauty and technologically advanced visuals couldn’t distract from the cookie cutter hack-job of recycled tropes and dead-end story arcs the writers seemed chained to.

Avatar travels back to the magical technicolor world of Pandora where we meet up with our favorite white savior Jake Sully. With his mate Neytiri by his side, the addition to their family includes their three biological children, Neteyam, Lo’ak, and Tuk, their adopted daughter, Kiri, and the quasi-included fifth child, Spider; a young human boy left behind with no real familial upbringing. As the nefarious Resources Development Administration (RDA) returns to domesticate the Na’vi land, Jake and his family become basic enemy number 1 as his treasonous vigilantism causes major setbacks in the human’s development and progression. When Jake and his family have to relocate to the water regions of Pandora, they harness the power of the water with their new oceanic tribe and band together to protect their new home. Exhausting, loquacious, and definitely seen before, Avatar: The Way of Water teaches a lesson in patience… patience to sit through such a dreadful offering of filmography; patience to digest the fact that they had thirteen years to fine tune such a disastrous script; patience to sit through Tuk getting captured three times in the span of twenty minutes and never having the wherewithal to swim the fuck away.

James Cameron pioneered a new technological frontier for CGI and 3D fusion technology in his development of Avatar, a process that essentially no one else has mastered. Both Avatars have changed cinematic achievements in the realms of visual effects and post film editing. A combination of action and visual stimulation cemented Pandora and its world building agents as the preeminent ocular Mount Olympus of cinema. The downfall to such emphasis on the technical and cinematographic facets, however, leaves the narrative elements neglected. And while bright colors pool across the wide screen and Pandora’s enchantment oozes from the open skies into the iridescent oceans, nothing could save the Sully family from the trenches of Hollywood blockbuster mediocrity.

Nothing quite screams unimaginative as injecting the memories and personality of the villain from the original film into a surrogate body after his physical form has already died. Whether desperation because of time constraints, or a genuine belief that it would have the same effect, it’s tough to decide which is worse. Accepting the mirrored story arc is depressing–the white colonizers from the Resources Development Administration (RDA) once again destroying the livelihood of the Na’vi people. Except this time the purpose isn’t even for a precious harvested mineral, a cause overused but at least logical in the realm of genocidal government policy. No, this time the destruction of Na’vi communities is solely to find Jake Sully and… colonize the planet for human integration? Even though the atmosphere and air conditions don’t support human life and the Na’vi are considered dangerous, uncivilized native peoples? The frenzied desire to replicate the successful nuances of a blockbuster smash hit (like the first installment) devalues the innovative cinema incorporated to produce this plagiarized, unpolished garble of a film.

If you like loose ends and wasted character potential, then this is the film for you. The writers seemingly made a bet to see how many story lines they could create that amounted to absolutely nothing. It’s increasingly frustrating when each Sully offspring seems to have their own development, however monotonous, to then provide no resolution or sensical effect on the story itself. Spider and Kiri’s arcs in particular stay fruitless and in some ways contradict the narrative progression two hours of film just established. With the knowledge of Avatar 3 & 4 in production, an argument could be made that these storylines commenced for further evolution in the next installments, but at the expense of The Way of Water. The emotional elements of a world at war were lost in the fold due to the dumpster fire of a script that clearly no one decided to revise.

Interestingly enough, what made the first Avatar so successful with its ethereal Na’vi people and their introduction to cinema, seemed to be The Way of Water’s downfall. Perhaps the sheer amount of 3D work in the second film, essentially the entire film, was its undoing. Wrought with awkward interactions and movements that seemed to glitch, some of the fight sequences, flying, and swimming scenes felt like a computer that hadn’t had enough time to buffer and was a quarter of a second off. Couple that with some of the worst dialogue of the year, and the whole run time is filled with cheesy one-liners, perplexing facial expressions, and eternally slow wifi. The amateurism of the whole project was bountiful, displayed in every narrative facet and in some technical ones. This technology continues to revolutionize the film industry, Cameron’s tenacity to connoisseur its technique is commendable and worthy of praise, successful or not. However, that is exactly what Avatar: Way of Water is… unsuccessful.

Sequels are a double edged sword. Expectation mixed with monetary trajectories can crumble a sequel’s chance at prosperity. In the case of Avatar: The Way of Water, Cameron’s brashness to release each installment by self-inflicted deadlines shows his Achilles heel. The daunting task of making each Avatar film does not go unnoticed, and we ought to reiterate that these films change the course of cinematic history, but at what cost? This film deserves better; every hand and brain a part of this Goliath of a project deserves better results. Pointing fingers at which aspect was its ruin– one vote for the script– is a disheartening task because almost every prospect was subpar and underdeveloped. Avatar: The Way of Water is what happens when Hollywood gets greedy; little things get ignored and the smaller cogs in the machine remain unpolished, leaving a mixture of sound, visuals, and dialogue that look like the intended film, but is just a shell of what could have been.