AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER

Rating: 2

And so, after a gap of over 13 years, James Cameron returns us to Pandora with an introduction that posits the most dangerous thing about that locale is that you may come to love her too much. Cameron is quite obviously smitten with his mythical planet whose inhabitants, the 8-foot-tall Na’avi, are more in tune with nature that we mere humans can ever hope to be. He’s so swept away that he has returned before sorting out a story that can support its epic running time. Still, he has once again cut the tech edge  with visual effects that blur the line between CGI and live-action. Alas, this visually splendid effort boasts a narrative that is sterile, trite, and painfully predictable. Using it, Cameron is also blurring the lines between over-earnest after-school special and bombastic action flick distinctly unsuited to the former’s target audience. What we are left with is a painfully protracted storyline that doesn’t get to the titular way of water until 45 minutes or so into the proceedings.

Because speculative fiction set in the near future means that villains never really die, they just morph, the baddie is once again Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), a bad ass of a Marine whose demise did nothing to dim his need to kill Jake (Sam Worthington). Or, rather, the recombinant clone of him that contains both all his memories and Na’vi DNA. His mission, along with the other recombinant clones created to assist him, is to track down Jake (Sam Worthington), whose avatar has been enjoying the simple pleasures of life as a Na’vi. In the intervening years, Jake’s been busy raising up four children, one of whom is the inexplicable offspring (inexplicable in the context of the film, that is) of the avatar of  Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), the scientist unafraid of chucking paradigms that don’t work and who perished in the last film, but is still kept around in a tank where her daughter, Kiri (also Weaver), can visit from time to time.  The others are brothers Neteyam (Jake Flatters) and Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), the former a perfect child, the latter one who can’t follow the instructions that will keep him alive, be it when hunting with simple bow and arrows, or defending themselves when the sky people, aka the evil corporation exploiting the planet for its resources and subjugating the Na’vi, return. There’s also a pre-teen daughter who delivers the film’s most self-aware line when noting that she can’t believe she’s being tied up again. This is a film that is not afraid to repeat itself with wild abandon, particularly when using the hoary small-child-in-danger trope.

The sky people, led by a criminally underused Edie Falco, are no longer after Unobtainium, and the new commodity provides the basis for one of the two spectacular action sequences. The one decrying whale-hunting but using one of the many ingenious creatures dreamed up for TWOW. Granted, it’s low-hanging fruit when making a political statement against commercial whale hunting, with few naysayers (I’m looking at you Japan and Norway), but the hunt depicted, even of creatures that never existed, is horrific in the extreme, while also providing the single most interesting character to appear on screen. Played by Brendan Cowell, he’s the hunter of the ersatz whales who evinces a deep understanding of exactly what he’s slaughtering and why, forcing him to undergo an almost continual existential crisis that is almost as heartbreaking as the slaughter. Cameron’s effusive paean to the natural order, and the evil inherent in failing to recognize it in all its majesty and wisdom, is encapsulated here in more potent form that the sophomoric spirituality with which he saturates the rest of the story.

The other action piece involves the inevitable final showdown between Jake and Quaritch during which Cameron gets to sink another large ocean-going vessel. There are flames. There is gunfire. There are arrows. There is sloppy sentiment. There is the sight of many characters holding their breath for very, very long periods of time.

Before that, though, Jake and his family say farewell to their home in the forest in order to save that simple tribe from being the target of the returning sky people. They seek sanctuary among another simple tribe who live among the reefs. They are not the powder blue of the forest clan, but an aqua shade that befits their ecological niche that is also reflected in their strong tails (ruddering aids) and streamlined hands and arms. Naturally, the reef folk are wary of the outsiders. well, mostly it’s the women and kids with the problem, which makes for an ironic comparison with how Jake’s mate Naytiri (Zoe Saldaña), has never quite accepted Spider (Jack Champion), the human child that was too young to to be cryo-ed home when the star people left. He’s grown up among the Na’vi, emulating the in all things and longing to be accepted as one of them. It’s no reflection on Champion, a committed young actor, that circumstances beyond his control make his character bring Cha-Ka from Land of the Lost to mind.

It’s that kind of film.

It’s also a film that takes its visual impact very seriously with exceptional, even enchanting, results. We revisit the phosphorescent ferns that gently glow in the forest and sentient dandelion seeds floating languidly in the air before moving on to the flying fish that the teef people ride, and a plethora of marine life at once familiar and strange as evolution obeys Darwinian laws in an alien environment. If only the characters or the story were an inventive and sophisticated in its planning and execution.

AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER also suffers from being conceived as unquestionably against colonization and exploitation of indigenous resources and peoples but can’t quite shake that rosy idealization of who those people actually are. They are not so much people as symbols with little curiosity about the status quo and little intelligence when it comes to saving themselves from the invaders. True, it’s not the great white father, per se, doing the rescuing, but it’s still a white guy in a blue avatar that takes them by the hand to help them help themselves.  That and believing that an arrow from a primitive bow can pierce the shatterproof windshield of a military flying machine, well, it’s a lot to swallow. Too much.