Avatar: sink or swim?

Avatar: The Way of Water looks good but so would a David Attenborough documentary if someone handed him $US400m, and he’d film real animals not CGI ones.

Avatar looks good but so would a David Attenborough documentary if someone handed him $US400m, and he’d film real animals not CGI ones.

Avatar: The Way of Water (M)
In cinemas
★★★

If the reports about the $US400m ($586m) budget are right, James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water is the most expensive film yet made.

Whether it’s worth the investment will depend on the box office and only a fool would underestimate the Canadian filmmaker on that score.

Is it worth seeing? Yes, with qualifications. It’s bold on the surface but less so underneath. It’s visually spectacular and should be seen in a cinema, where it is showing in 3D and 2D.

It is thinly and predictably plotted – though there is one unexpected death near the end – and less in touch with what made the 2009 original a pioneering film.

The underwater action scenes, which pushed out the production schedule as Cameron worked out how to do them, are worth the wait.

The cinematographer, Russell Carpenter, won an Oscar for Cameron’s Titanic (1997, budget $US200m, box office $US2.2bn), and there is a long nod to that movie in the final act.

Most of the cast had to learn to free dive, which has Kate Winslet, new to Avatar and on the PR trail, boasting she can now outdo Tom “Mission Impossible” Cruise when it comes to holding one’s breath.

This is a direct sequel to Avatar (budget $US237m, box office $US2.92bn) in which humans, or Sky People as they are called, try to colonise an earth-like moon called Pandora.

Back then, the original avatar, soldier Jake Sully (Australia’s Sam Worthington), decided to leave his human form, become one of the Indigenous people, the Na’vi, and fight with them.

Now it’s more than a decade later and Sully and his Na’vi wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) live in peace with their two teen sons and two young daughters. The boys, who want to be warriors like their dad who repelled the invaders, live in his shadow.

Then the Sky People return and this time it’s as conquistadors. “Earth is dying,’’ says their general (Edie Falco). “Pandora is the new home for humanity.”

Standing in their way is Sully, a freedom fighter at home, an insurgent to them. A team of soldiers is sent to Pandora to kill him. To do so they must become avatars themselves.

The subtitle refers to a Na’vi clan, the Reef People, led by Tonowari (Kiwi actor Cliff Curtis) and his wife Ronal (Winslet), who reluctantly shelter the Sullys, who are Forest People. “You bring your war to us,’’ says Ronal, and she is right.

So we have humans disguised as Na’vi fighting real Na’vi and half-breed Na’vi (Sully and his kids). I did at times find it hard to separate the blue goodies from the blue baddies.

It’s here the sequel skips what made the original interesting, and also let Worthington act: the idea that a Na’vi avatar could be controlled by a human brain on another planet.

This time the avatars are just on the ground with guns. This predominance of blue aliens doesn’t leave the actors much to work with emotionally. There’s a lot of hissing.

The best performance is by Worthington’s compatriot Brendan Cowell as a futuristic (and human) Captain Ahab. At one point, under stress, he delivers a vintage “Bloody hell”, which he soon follows with, “Somebody shoot something.”

The script, co-written by the director, has humorous moments. When the troops are briefed on their mission, their colonel says, “I know you are all asking the same question: Why so blue?’’ That colonel, Miles Quatrich (Stephen Lang), died in the first film. He’s resurrected as a “recombinant”. Sigourney Weaver’s character, who also died, returns in an even weirder way.

Asked about this Cameron more or less pleads guilty as charged: “It is a science fiction story, after all.”

There’s an extended mid-film subplot where the Forest kids and the Sea kids hang out together. They befriend each other and the creatures of the sea, particularly a whale-like leviathan. This, too, is spectacular to look at, if a bit schmaltzy in an animals-are-nobler-than-us sense.

Again it looks good but so would a David Attenborough documentary if someone handed him $US400m, and he’d film real animals not CGI ones.

This oceanic teen and animal bonding is, like the whole 193-minute film, far too long. “The way of water,’’ the Reef people say, “has no beginning and no end.” They’re just about right on the latter, and there is more to come.

It took 13 years for this sequel to come up for air but the third, fourth and fifth Avatar films are slated to run in 2024, 2026 and 2028.

There is a feeling, as this long entertainment that looks great but doesn’t have much to say slowly draws to a close, that part of its job is to set the scene for the Avatars to come.

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Resurrection (MA15+)
Available on streaming services including Apple TV, Google Play, YouTube, Fetch TV, Telstra TV, Amazon Prime, Microsoft, Shudder
★★★½

Early in Resurrection, the main character, Margaret (a chilling Rebecca Hall) has a dream. She’s in a kitchen, sees smoke coming from the oven, opens the door and finds a baby inside. The look on her face is not what you would expect.

That dream is the undercurrent of this overwhelmingly intense and disturbing psychological thriller. Is she remembering a baked baby or is it just a nightmare?

Like the actor, Margaret is English. Her 17-year-old daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman) pokes fun at her accent. Her father is unknown. “It was simple. I went to bars and slept with men,’’ her mother explains.

Margaret is 40ish, lives in Albany, New York, and is an executive at a biotech firm. She’s having sex — that’s how she describes the relationship — with married colleague Peter (Michael Esper).

It’s when Margaret, at a biotech conference, spots a man in the audience that this movie moves into dark places where no one wants to go.

David (Tim Roth, also chilling) is someone from deep in Margaret’s past. Or so she says. Her response on seeing him is akin to a panic attack. She can barely breathe.

She runs home. She has that dream. She installs new locks, tells her daughter to stay inside and retrieves a revolver from the safe.

As far as Abbie is concerned, her hyper-vigilant mother has a few screws loose.

She’s turning their home into a prison. Margaret responds that she will do anything to protect her children, plural.

When Margaret and David meet, it is edge-of-the-seat drama, not least because we have no idea who’s telling the truth. One of them? Both of them?

Is he a cruel control-freak sadist, as she says, or is he her former psychologist, as her online search, which we glimpse, suggests? Of course it’s possible he is both or neither.

When Margaret sees him sitting on a park bench, goes over and tells him to stay away from her and her daughter, he replies, “You approached me, madam. I don’t know who you are.”

Hall and Roth deliver gripping performances. David’s smile is one that flickers somewhere between impatient counsellor and patient cannibal. Margaret is near-expressionless when she says, “I did something bad. When I was young. Unforgivable.”

Eventually, Margaret tells her side of the story to a young colleague. It’s an incredible seven-minute scene, superbly shot by cinematographer Wyatt Garfield.

If what Margaret says is true then her relationship with David was deeply weird. She was 19 at the time. He was older.

Now, two decades later, she starts reliving the life she says he forced on her. If so, this is about sexual grooming and emotional and physical sadism.

And yet. What about that baby?

This 103-minute movie is the second feature from American filmmaker Andrew Semans, following the revenge thriller Nancy, Please (2012). It’s a full-on movie that is not for the faint-of-heart.

Margaret (a chilling Rebecca Hall) has a dream about smoke coming from the oven. She opens the door and finds a baby inside