Review: With 'Avatar: The Way of Water,' director James Cameron is back delivering the spectacle and visual fireworks
More so than any of his previous films, “Avatar: The Way of Water” — the 13-years-in-the-making sequel to the mega-successful partly computer-generated adventure “Avatar” — is very much a James Cameron movie.
That means — as “Avatar,” “Titanic,” “The Abyss” and “True Lies” have done before — that the visuals are incredible, and the story not so much. And that’s OK.
Cameron starts with a quick refresher for those whose memories don’t recall a movie you saw in 2009: Jake Sully (performed by Sam Worthington), a paralyzed Marine sent to the planet Pandora and plugged into the artificial body of one of the 10-foot-tall Na’vi people who live there, became fully part of the Navi at the end of the last movie.
Now, Jake is a clan leader of the Na’vi in the jungle, and he and his wife, Neytiri (performed by Zoe Saldaña), have four kids — one of them the adopted teen Kiri, who shares some genes with Dr. Grace Augustine, a human who died in the first film. (Kiri, like Grace, is performed by Sigourney Weaver.)
There are those, though, who haven’t forgotten how Jake left the human colony behind to become one with the Na’vi. Some of them have become “recombinants,” lab-grown Na’vi with the embedded memories of humans. Leading this group is a new version of Col. Miles Quaritch, the hard-nosed Marine who got killed at the end of the first movie. The new Quaritch (performed, like his human character, by Stephen Lang) has two goals: Finishing the human colonization of Pandora, and taking revenge on Jake and Neytiri.
Learning that Quaritch and his platoon are out for him, Jake and his family — older brother Neteyam (performed by Jamie Flatters), younger son Lo’ak (performed by Britain Dalton), 8-year-old daughter Tuktirey, or “Tuk” for short (performed by Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), and Kiri — go on the run, aided by a human teen, Miles “Spider” Socorro (Jack Champion), who feels more at home with the Na’vi than with humans.
The family ends up with the Metkayina, the ocean-diving cousins of the Na’vi, who are initially wary but give them shelter. They are led by their chief, Tonowari (performed by Cliff Curtis), and his wife, Ronal (performed by Kate Winslet.) Their teen children befriend Jake’s kids, and teach them about life in the ocean: Swimming, diving, and bonding with the animals who are native to the water.
Kiri, in particular, seems most at home here, developing a spiritual bond with the sea creatures. (Kiri’s old-soul personality makes it slightly less weird to hear the 73-year-old Weaver’s voice coming out of the mouth of a teen-ager.) Meanwhile, Lo’ak befriends a rogue Tulkun, something like a whale — and which are hunted down in much the same way.
These passages are the most thrilling, and visually spectacular, in the movie. Using whatever alchemy of motion-capture performance, computer-generated animated animals, and the occasional flesh-and-blood actor, Cameron conjures a world with such beauty and majesty that it’s impossible not to get drawn into it.
Sometimes, though, the visuals work against Cameron’s intent. There’s an elaborate action sequence, about midway through the movie’s three-hour-plus running time, where a whaling ship (there’s really no other way to describe it) goes after a pod of Tulkun with depth charges, guns and harpoons. Cameron, who spent much of his non-filmmaking time in the last 13 years exploring the seas, eagerly and earnestly uses this movie to present a message of caring for our oceans — but staging an exciting high-tech variation on “Moby Dick” is muddling that message a lot.
Cameron and co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (who all share story credit with Josh Friedman and Shane Salerno), when they can’t think of anything else, recycle Cameron’s greatest hits. Some of the diving sequences are reminiscent of “The Abyss,” and there’s a prolonged sequence on a whaling ship that replays the tilting decks and underwater peril of “Titanic.”
Of course, there will be a thousand film-nerd arguments about Cameron’s use of high-frame rates in some sequences, or his insistence on bringing back 3D (something I didn’t particularly miss when we were avoiding the glasses because of COVID), or the fact that he’s promised two more of these movies, slated for 2024 and 2026 — though when Cameron’s involved, who knows for sure?
Stuff all of those quibbles out of the way for now. The truth is that nobody creates spectacle like Cameron, and he makes plenty of it in “Avatar: The Way of Water.” And isn’t why we go to the movies in the first place?
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‘Avatar: The Way of Water’
★★★
Opens Friday, December 16, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence and intense action, partial nudity and some strong language. Running time: 193 minutes.