Avatar: The Way of Water

It's All About...Family

or 

Fleeing Na'vi Dad
 

I was one of the few inhabitants of this planet that was unimpressed with James Cameron's Avatar—the most popular movie of all time (based on inflated movie receipts, truth be told). I felt it was Cameron at his worst—recycling shop-worn ideas under a veneer of technology and engineering—while also being a fun watch (if you didn't take it too damned seriously).

 

The sequel (first sequel) Avatar: The Way of Water was released at Christmas, and I was in no hurry to see it. I wanted to avoid big crowds, I wasn't "enthused" because I was underwhelmed (while being simultaneously over-stimulated) by the first and expected "more of the same." I also knew that it would be around in theaters for awhile, maybe even held in 3-D (where most movie-chains drop the refinements down to "Standard version" after a week). But, mostly I waited because James Cameron was in no hurry to release it, so why should I be in a hurry to see it. I mean, what's the rush? It wasn't going anywhere.

I did go see it, finally, in XD and 3-D. You might as well go the full yard. And, I found that to be a wise decision, as it brought up many aspects to the film, which I wouldn't even have noticed had I seen it "flat" and "standard." In fact, what is a tad revolutionary in the film and—to me, anyway—makes it worth seeing are the technical aspects of the film, which have achieved a new threshold in presentation of-screen.

 

It's certainly not the story, which can be Cameron's Achilles Heel. Concept, sure. But, what he does with it, not so much. His movies look good on paper, like an architect's sketch, but the blue-prints fleshing it out may reveal some flaws where hard reality conflicts with imagination.

A:TWOW begins with Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), now permanently on his surrogate-planet, Pandora, living with his mate Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña, who clearly knows how to eke out a subtle, effective performance from motion capture) and their kids, Notoyam (Jamie Flatters), Lo'ak (Britain Dalton), and Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), as well as adopted kids Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), the child of Dr. Grace Augustine's avatar, produced by immaculate conception of something, and "Spider" (Jack Champion), the son of Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), both of whom died in the original film.

Well, they're baaa-ack. Dr. Grace as a hologramatic image and spiritual Obi-Wan, and Quaritch as a hologramatic image and his own avatar (something, as I recall, that the original Col. Miles was dead-set against...oh, well...blue-prints). Quaritch's avatar is given one of those too-lame-to-be-inspirational Quaritch pep-talks about how he needs to man-up and take down Jake Sully because...well, he has to. Jake beat him last time fair and square, by having his wife shoot him, but...ya know...there was a conspiracy and rigged voting machines and Quaritch has no life but a huge ego and...blue-prints. There IS no reason for him to revenge himself against Sully, even if one doesn't include the fact the original character is dead and his avatar is only vengeful-by-proxy...and he's told to do it.

As specious as all this seems, it's enough to send Jake and family packing to another part of Pandora as refugees and depend on the kindness of the Metkayina tribe who live on Pandora's eastern seaboard and have a society based mostly on water and the denizens therein.* They must fight discrimination from the Metkayina ("they'll take our jobs!" and, more legitimately, "they'll lead the Earthers right to us!"). Along the way, Jake's kids want to sit at the BIG kid's table, and complicate matters. 

Not that there's much to contemplate. Earthers are bad. Pandorans are good. Earthers-gone-Native are good. Sometimes, parents just don't understand. At some point, Belle from The Little Mermaid should show up and do an "I know, right?"

"Jake! This is where we first met!"

 

But, as simple as it is, it's a three hour movie and Cameron fills the spaces with a lot of his Greatest Hits: two equally matched fighters slugging it out in an industrial setting (pick a Terminator, any Terminator), learning how to manage your breathing underwater (The Abyss) and finally, having to get out from under-deck of a sinking boat (Titanic). Things look different in Metkayina—the folks are greenish around their gills—but it doesn't matter where Cameron goes, there he is. It's very familiar.

Except when it's not. Kudos to the design team to make the Metkayina look like a different culture (I think, by now, movie-goers are hep to accepting and even embracing that concept). But, the real eye-opener is how good the CGI (mostly from New Zealand's WETA) has gotten. Performances are sharper and subtle (as I said, Saldana shines at this), and they even manage to make a Sigourney Weaver character look "right"—I remember there were audible grunts of disappointment at the appearance of her avatar in the last one as the CGI looked "uncanny-valleyish."

Look at the subtlety of expression in Saldana's character.

She is clearly giving Sully the "Dad's being a little heavy-handed" look

 

The CGI characters are so good and so realized that when a real-life human being shares the screen with them, they look flat and slightly less real (the human actors do have the disadvantage of being subject to gravity) than their pixelated counterparts. Maybe it's the effects of 3-D capture, or the differences between reflected lighting and computerized grading, but this is particularly true in the character of Spider, who often gets lost in the wash of images and is bound by the limits of movement bound by the laws of physics. Now, that will be an interesting challenge for Cameron and other film-makers in the future.

There are still issues with close objects "fritzing" as they move across the screen, so maybe objects should be less enfolded in the scenery.** Where the 3-D really, really works are in shots of floating screens and in the underwater shots that dominate the second hour of the film. Cameron went to the trouble of filming his motion-captured actors in a studio water-tank swimming about and there's something about the heavy influence of water and the languid way things move in it that feels particularly realistic with CGI rendering and 3-D projection, far more effectively than with the open-air scenes. It's a particularly effect feat of magical image-making that is incredibly credible and remarkable.

Now, if they could apply the same ingenuity to the scripting as they apply to the technology, that would be something. Maybe like losing the Quaritch character and its lunatic revenge story-line, would allow Cameron to concentrate on something worth the effort, both on his and our parts.

 

* Jake never once thinks that his leaving may not deter Quadritch from laying waste to the Omaticaya, anyway. Because he was so subtle and nuanced in his approach LAST time?

** There is a caveat to this: some of the "Ridley-Scott-fluff" that Cameron inserts into the frame doesn't always "work" but his insects were good enough to provoke the kid in the seat in front of me to reach out to try and grab them. That's a good (if amusing) testament.