Avatar: The Way of Water

He's had twelve years, a team of screenwriters, and all the resources in the world, but James Cameron still can't make the plot of his Avatar sequel worth a damn. Of course, this is one of those "it's not about the story" movies, but could the writer of The Terminator, Aliens,& Rambo, and Strange Days really not care about the quality of his screenplays? I’m sure he would say no, but the evidence of his last two and a half decades of output sure does point to that conclusion.

Avatar: The Way of Water picks up pretty much where the original Avatar (2009) left off. Twelve or thirteen years have gone by, and during that time Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), the dullest protagonist in the history of blockbuster cinema, and his Na'vi mate Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) have had a family and lived a peaceful life hunting, fishing, and coexisting in loving harmony with the natural world on planet Pandora. The family includes an adopted teenage daughter who is the offspring of the lifeless Na'vi avatar formally "driven" by Jake's boss Grace (Sigourney Weaver). The teenage son of the evil evil evil Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the main bad guy of the original movie, is also around because... you know, fathers and sons. That theme is very important to those who make blockbusters, especially sci-fi. Lang’s Colonel Quaritch was such a great villain that Cameron just had to bring him back so that this sequel could feel almost identical to the hugely successful yet utterly forgettable original picture. I can't think of a single contemporary filmmaker or studio that focuses on "world building" or "universe creation" that has populated their worlds and universes with characters I give a shit about. If there's truly a universe being created here, why do all the characters and storylines have to be the same? There may be eight million stories in the naked city, but there are only about three in any cinematic universe.

Still, we don't go to Avatar for the plot and characters; we go for the immersive thrill and state-of-the-art special effects, right? Well yes. And the effects, as with the first film, are impressive, but this second Avatarpicture employs the High Frame Rate (HFR) format that makes everything look like a video game or an episode of General Hospital. Advance word about The Way of Water was that Cameron had finally cracked the HFR conundrum that would make audiences embrace the shitty high frame look instead of rejecting it as they did when Peter Jackson offered it up for his Hobbit trilogy, or Ang Lee for his last couple of pictures, or poor Douglas Trumbull who never could make his Showscan process take off. But all Cameron does here is switch back and forth between the standard 24 frames per second that "looks right" to any regular moviegoer and the 48 frames per second that video gamers, lovers of old soap operas, and folks who don't know how to disable the motion smoothing feature on their new TV sets are used to. This switching isn’t always done with a hard cut, sometimes the frame rate ramps up and down in the same shot. But the result isn't all that different from Christopher Noland's obnoxious tendency in his prestige-release pictures to jump randomly back and forth from full-screen, 15-perf celluloid IMAX shots to standard, 5-perf, 70mm widescreen blown up from a digital intermediate. Cameron's constant transitioning from 24fps to 48fps (and I think there are a few 18frp shots in this movie too) is jarring rather than immersive. Plus, it seems crazy, after all the years of work this guy and his teams put into creating motion-capture technology that can make CGI characters move like real people, to shoot them at a high frame rate that makes their movements, and the movements of the “camera," look as artificial as a video game.

The 3D, as before, looks terrific. This is not the cheesy three-plane look of traditional stereoscopic formats. Avatar 2, like Avatar 1, really does look multi-dimensional; in fact, the depth is even more convincing, at either frame rate, than I remember in the first film. The Way of Water is also a major improvement over its predecessor in other ways. For one thing, Worthington, while still the lead, is far less the center of this picture. We have to suffer through his voiceover introduction, catching us up on all that's transpired since we last left these characters, and occasionally we have to sit through him imparting wisdom to his children and reminding us that protecting the family is a father's first duty. But the picture is far more focused on the Sully children. Also, once we get through the first hour of terribly written exposition and establish that Steven Lang is still the baddy here, we enter the picture's narratively inert but more enjoyably eye-popping middle section.

Jake and his family abandon their tree-based community—under the dubious assumption that Lang's bad guys won't destroy the entire forest civilization to find the Sullys, or maybe just out of simple revenge for the killing of all their fellow soldiers in the last movie—and hide out with a clan of sea-based Na'vi. This shifts the setting from the jungles we saw plenty of in the first film, to new underwater environments. The High Frame Rate looks far less wonky underwater because humans and humanoids already move unnaturally when they manoeuvre through water. There are several fictional characters in this year's crop of ode-to-move-magic movies who will explain how the shudder of a film projector tricks the human eye into seeing 24 still pictures per second as a moving picture. The reason HFR usually looks so uncanny is any more than 24 frames per second smooths out the motion blurs that cue our brains to register things like weight and speed. Water has such an effect on weight and speed already that the fluidity of HFR looks more natural when characters move through...fluid. And while the dialogue in Act Two is still atrocious—especially when exploring on the clichéd relationship dynamics between the parents and kids, brothers and sisters, full-blooded Na'vis and halfbreeds, etc.—the young characters are just more engaging than the sullen older folks. The bad guys in this section, who are basically New Zealand whalers, are also far more entertaining and credible than the stock big bad uncaring military figures the rest of this film relies on for conflict.

The finale is yet another mega-battle sequence like literally every blockbuster of the last thirty years; though this one has a precision of scale that’s easier to engage with because the villains are just out to get the Sullys instead of trying to wipe out an entire race. Always one to rip himself off, much in this climax will remind you of the sinking of Cameron's Titanic. There are also sequences that recall the thrill of seeing Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio without any breathing gear holding her breath as Ed Harris dragged her underwater for what felt like forever in Cameron's 1988 undersea thriller The Abyss. Apparently, Kate Winslet held her breath underwater for so long in one shot in The Way of Water that she broke a record Tom Cruse set for Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation. But I don't actually recall seeing Winslet's impressive feat of breath control, it didn’t even register. Maybe that's because she's a CGI character so it didn't really feel like an accomplishment (even though the actors do all this stuff for real in these movies). Maybe it’s because Winslet's character has, at most, twelve minutes of screen time in this three-hour and twelve-minute movie, so she's barely a presence in the story. Maybe since Cameron establishes that there's a kind of plant life under the sea that can enable Na'vi to breathe underwater, the threat of asphyxiation is severely undermined. I don't know, but I sure wasn't feeling any underwater tension like I do every time I watch The Abyss.

The biggest problem with the climax is that it's the part of the movie where the High Frame Rate looks the most ridiculous, with the giant boat and futuristic air and sea vehicles looking like children's toys as they’re tossed around by waves, explosions, and giant sea creatures. Of course, you don't have to see this film in HFR, or 3D or IMAX for that matter, because supposedly this film will be available in more format options than any other movie ever has. Isn't that exciting? You get to choose your visual adventure (assuming the theater near you can even tell you what format they're running it in). But the only reason to see Avatar: The Way of Water is to see what "King of the World" James Cameron is up to, and you wanna see it in his preferred method of presentation. It's a spectacle for sure. But as a story Avatar just treads water.

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