By Jake Wilson
Avatar: The Way of Water ★★★½
(M) 190 minutes
If they gave out Oscars for ambition alone, James Cameron’s rivals might not bother showing up. His original 2009 Avatar, a 3D action epic about 10-foot blue-skinned aliens, remains by some measures the most successful movie ever made; 13 years on, the first of four planned sequels will need to perform comparably well just to break even.
Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) in Avatar: The Way of Water.Credit: © 2022 20th Century Studios
But this seems entirely achievable, since like its predecessor Avatar: The Way of Water packs in every kind of popular appeal it can. The Avatar franchise, as we may now have to call it, is built on paradoxes all along the line, being family-friendly but violent, pacifist but gung-ho, a plea for the oppressed and a juggernaut designed to conquer the planet.
If Cameron truly believes in anything, it’s the power of big-screen spectacle, and more than ever he’s determined to give us the works: sublimely hazy fantasy-art landscapes, battles on land, sea and air, monsters and cute critters, all realised with the kind of hallucinatory hyperrealism only possible for an honest-to-God obsessive on a budget north of a quarter of a billion USD.
At the same time, Cameron is so steeped in the grammar of Hollywood storytelling there’s hardly a plot move in The Way Of Water that doesn’t feel familiar. Beneath its science fiction trappings, this is basically a romantic adventure story about a coloniser who “goes native”, a tradition that long predates the invention of cinema.
By the end of the first Avatar, the former Marine hero Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) had left his human body behind to begin life anew as a Na’vi – one of the aforesaid blue-skinned aliens living in harmony with nature on Pandora, an idyllic jungle moon a galaxy away from Earth.
Hallucinatory hyperrealism is one of the hallmarks of James Cameron’s Avatar films.Credit: 20th Century Studios
A decade on, Jake leads a band of Na’vi insurgents holding out against the human invaders (or “sky people,” as they’re known to their foes). His onetime commanding officer Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the villain of the first film, has meanwhile been reborn in his own Na’vi body – though his transformation, unlike Jake’s, is strictly an outward one.
After the skirmishes that occupy the film’s first act, Jake, his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and their children are forced to flee, taking refuge with a sea-dwelling clan known as the Metkayina (who resemble the Na’vi but are turquoise and more muscular). Quaritch sets out to hunt them down, but meanwhile there’s time for them to adjust to their new life – and for Cameron to indulge his long-held love of the marine environment.
Whatever the conflict between humans and Na’vi might suggest about comparable struggles on Earth, it mirrors a divide in Cameron’s artistic personality: he has his hippy-dippy side, but also the kind of engineering brain that locks onto problems like how to get the maximum value from an explosion.
The contradiction can be framed in yet another way. The Avatar universe is one where all kinds of transformations are possible for characters and actors alike: thus the 72-year-old Sigourney Weaver, who played a human scientist in the first film, can return as a teenage Na’vi here.
This sense of the flexibility of identity might be linked with Cameron’s past willingness to cast women (including Weaver) in action roles long before this became a Hollywood trend – and with the way that the Na’vi seem almost beyond gender, with their elongated bodies and narrow hips.
Yet the film can equally be taken as an ode to traditional family values: Jake may no longer be human, but he’s still the kind of heavy father who has his kids call him “sir”. The whole storyline about settling into a new home has a weird 1950s vibe, as if the Na’vi equivalent of junior prom wasn’t far away.
Avatar fans (left) Jemima and Maddy at Hoyts Melbourne Central in full Na’vi face paint for a preview screening of Avatar: The Way of Water.Credit: Joe Armao
Personally, there’s only so much I can take of Cameron the cinematic poet and philosopher, especially when Jake is telling us in voiceover that water symbolises everything and its opposite.
Still, the film’s becalmed central hour is worth sitting through to get to the action-packed climax, which puts its Marvel equivalents to shame – all the more so as Cameron seems to get a perverse kick from encouraging us to cheer the demise of almost every human in sight.
Avatar: The Way of Water is in cinemas from December 15.
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