In 2010, Brad Paisley released a cheeky country song called "Water." A simple title for an exceedingly simple song designed from the ground up to be played during summertime-themed Bud Light ads. In it, Paisley takes a chronological look at all the times water has played an influential part in his life, from playing in an inflatable pool as a kid to romping around in a river bank with friends as a teenager to a lake serving as a backdrop for a romantic rendezvous with a loved one. Even by the standards of Brad Paisley tunes released between 2000 and 2013, it's nothing outstanding (though it's better than "I'm Still a Guy", at least), but its very existence does suggest the kind of personal connections we all have to water. Somehow or another, water plays a major role in our lives without us even realizing it. "The way of water connects all things," a character in Avatar: The Way of Water intones in a line that could've hailed from a cut verse in Paisley's "Water." Moviegoers everywhere will no doubt agree even before they sit down to watch the latest Na'vi adventure.
Realizing the sheer power of water and the way it can intertwine with our personal lives is one of the many ways this latest James Cameron movie succeeds. Returning to the world of Pandora all these years later should just result in a bunch of stale leftovers. Instead, Avatar: The Way of Water is a dynamic and moving enterprise, with Cameron opting to use staggering visual effects technology on some incredibly quiet sequences.
The incredibly classical storytelling sensibilities of these Avatar movies are established immediately in The Way of Water's screenplay (penned by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver in addition to Cameron) through returning protagonist Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) narrating audiences through various events that have happened since the first Avatar. I've always said that the initial feature felt like a fable you'd tell around a campfire. Having Sully speak in hushed tones about the family he and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) have cultivated (with no in-universe explanation for where the narration is coming from, unlike its predecessor's narration) reinforces that vibe tremendously.
Sully and Neytiri now have a whole gaggle of children, including Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), a daughter derived from the DNA of Dr. Grace Augustine, and Lo'ak (Britain Dalton), the troubled younger son of the family. Their life is tremendously fulfilling, but things get thrown for a loop when humans from Earth return to the glorious world of Pandora. Decimating the forest the Sully's and other Na'vi call home, the humans are also putting together a collection of Avatar specimens that utilize the consciousness of evil dead soldiers, such as the first Avatar's main baddie General Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang). Now super tall and blue, Quaritch has a grudge against Sully that he'll pursue no matter what. With such violence on their tails, Sully and Neytiri pack up their family and look for a new home. Their travels eventually take them to a tribe of Na'vi that live in the Ocean.
There's a lot to digest in Avatar: The Way of Water as it journeys across multiple biomes and straddles so many characters at once. That 191-minute runtime isn't just for show! Shockingly, it's able to juggle most of its character-based elements quite nicely. Inevitably, some figures get stuck on the sidelines in the sprawling ensemble cast (I especially wanted more for Neytiri and Kate Winslet's Ronal) but the character beats that do get put into the foreground work nicely. Kiri is an especially wonderful creation and hands down the best character to emerge from the entire Avatar franchise. The idea of Sigourney Weaver playing a teenager should be a farce, but Weaver does great work making Kiri somebody evocative of Augustine but also discernibly her own character. Her awkwardness and sense of isolation as a "freak" no matter where she goes is also handled very well. I'm always a sucker for larger-than-life characters (in this case, a blue kitty cat alien teenager) grappling with everyday vulnerabilities and Kiri is a great example of why. It's just so emotionally fulfilling to get wrapped up in the humanity of something that doesn't initially look human.
It's also nifty that Cameron's creative trajectory has now shifted onto teenage characters, a great choice to immediately differentiate this Avatar installment from its predecessor. Not only that, but there's something so quietly tragic (though not deafeningly bleak as executed here) about watching these teens existing in a world that can turn into a warzone at the drop of a hat. When you're just watching these adolescent Na'vi chilling and talking under a palm tree together or talking to a space whale about how "I met a boy", you realize these are still kids. They should be concerned with petty squabbles and teenage nonsense, not threats of extermination from greedy humans that function as a physical embodiment of capitalism. These characters are forced to focus on survival, not personal fulfillment. Cameron doesn't rub the noses of viewers in this dark element of The Way of Water's narrative. However, the innate choice to center a plot that often becomes a war movie on teenagers can't help but lend the proceedings an extra bit of tragedy and depth.
The characters are fun, but of course, what anyone going into Avatar: The Way of Water craves is the visuals. Even with the high bar of its predecessor, The Way of Water delivers stunning images that'll make you want to run to the nearest beach. All that crystal blue water is just so gorgeous to watch consume a gigantic movie theater screen while the vidid lighting allows viewers to appreciate all the finer details hiding out on the margins of the frame. It's also interesting how the biggest sign of how far visual effects have come since the first Avatar is how much more of The Way of Water is focused on having CGI characters and live-action figures extensively interact. What served as primarily the emotional crescendo of the original Avatar (for the big emotional scene where Neytiri finally see's Sully's human form) is the norm for many scenes in The Way of Water, especially anything involving human child Spider (Jake Champion). It's staggering to watch this movie and realize how naturally the artificial and discernible human blend together, the Na'vi really do look like they're right there on a ship's deck or in a laboratory.
Of course, all those visual feats would be even easier to appreciate if it weren't for the fatal flaw of Avatar: The Way of Water: high frame rate projection. As presented in my XD 3D showing (which is basically the equivalent to IMAX 3D at Cinemark movie theaters), large swathes of The Way of Water are shown in 48 frames per second, while the rest of the movie is shown in the traditional 24 frames per second. This choice is a tragedy on several fronts, including how it's just so distracting. Key moments of characters soaring through the sky or epic confrontations between good and evil just look like they're being fast-forwarded. Just as bad is how many sequences in this feature alternate between the two frame rates. Going from characters talking in 24 frames per second before they continue their conversation in 48 frames per second is disorienting and just highlights how much better the former format is. High-frame rate camerawork has its place in documentaries and for specific sequences in movies. But it's been clear long before The Way of Water that it doesn't work for the entirety or majority of narrative features. Pandora deserved better than looking like a football game on a display TV at Best Buy.
Other shortcomings in The Way of Water are of the more rudimentary variety. I'm not going to drag Jake Champion's performance as Spider since I feel like everybody's been doing that already (the downside of getting to a movie three weeks late cuz of COVID, I miss out on being a trailblazer in the discourse!), but his work is unquestionably weak. Champion had a difficult role to play here, the one teen who plays things passively in contrast to the other youngsters in the cast who get to rebel, not to mention he's separated from the cool water stuff audiences quickly latch onto. Even considering that, his line deliveries are often terrible and the performance leaves much to be desired. A third-act battle scene, meanwhile, starts off perfectly but does get bogged down in some weird repetition by the end as characters keep going back and forth to and from one location too often.
Those shortcomings and the grating presence of high frame rate weigh The Way of Water down in some respects, but by and large, this is, much like the first Avatar, another rip-roaring classical adventure full of robots, space dragons, and a bunch of cosmic critters you'll wish you could reach out and pet. All of its told with such earnestness that entire sequences of a teenage Na'vi and a whale bonding go by with nary a self-deprecating line in sight. That sincerity, a bunch of enjoyable teen protaganists, and tons of groundbreaking visual effects techniques (I know, a James Cameron movie that pushed the VFX envelope) make this just the kind of sweeping feature that makes for such a great time at the movies. Though it may be difficult for some to believe, Avatar: The Way of Water is a better artistic endeavor involving water than Brad Paisley's 2010 single "Water."
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