A high degree of watery grandeur
In the thirteen years since James Cameron's last new feature, Avatar, I have increasingly come to treasure his particular mode of popcorn filmmaking, which I feel didn't used to be rare, but basically has been dead as dead can be for all of those thirteen years. It is a mode of complete, unyielding sincerity, mixed with an absolute disinterest in seeming sophisticated, so that sincerity has a particularly blunt, surface-level availability, expressed through some of the most unadorned (a hater might say "bad") dialogue and easy-to-grasp (a hater might say "undeveloped") character personalities. This is part of what makes Cameron the best working popcorn filmmaker, at least since Steven Spielberg, the only utterly sincere and proudly unsophisticated genius-tier director who could match him, has apparently happily retired away from grandiose spectacle.
None of this is to necessary say that the decade-in-the-making sequel Avatar: The Way of Water is "the most Cameronesque" film, or the most sincere, or the most pure in its meat-and-potatoes storytelling for the broadest possible kind of audience; just that, as long as he keeps taking a half of a generation per movie (Avatar itself came out twelve years after its direct predecessor in his filmography, Titanic), every one of his films will end up feeling as much like a referendum on the surrounding film ecosystem as filtered through his unchanging approach to cinematic maximalism as like, just, a movie you could go to the theater to see. And my own belief is that what Avatar: The Way of Water tells us about the film ecosystem of 2022 is just absolutely goddamn terrible, but at least we have the bright shining beacon of this shamelessly corny and blunt and earnest and wildly fucking exciting 192-minute mountain of a motion picture to stand proudly in the waning days of one of the worst years in the history of the medium and declare, "yes, but movies could be this".
This is many things, but at heart it's basically just Avatar, but more so. There are more alien landscapes, sharper and more immersive 3-D, more expressive CGI faces, and beefier action that's been more minutely choreographed. I cannot bring myself to say that it's a top-to-bottom improvement on the first film, largely because the first sequence is clearly not as good as what follows. The downside of Cameron's blunt clarity is fully on display in the very opening, where we receive just a big ol' sweeping exposition dump from Jake Sully (voiced by Sam Worthington, who also provides motion capture), the human who traveled to the alien moon of Pandora and decided to fully live his live in an "avatar", a lab-created organic body of a Na'vi, the catlike native humanoid species of Pandora. That's one of the bits of information that gets plopped out for the benefit of any viewer who hasn't seen the first movie in a couple or 13 years, and once the basics of the first movie are sketched out (the Na'vi, aided by Jake and a couple of other dissident humans, repelled a mercenary army attempting to destroy the planet's delicate ecology in search for rare metals), we get caught up to speed on new developments in Jake's life with his full-blooded Na'vi wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana).
They have three children now: Neteyam (James Flatters), their eldest son, who would by human standards be around 18; middle son Lo'ak (Britain Dalton), who's in the desperate-to-prove-himself stage of adolescence, and making quite a pest of himself to Jake and Neteyam, so let's say 15; and youngest daughter Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), an adorable chatterbox around 7 or 8. They also have two adopted children: dreamy flower-child adolescent Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), who was born from the insensate avatar of deceased human exobiologist Dr. Grace Augustine (also Weaver), and while it's loosely implied that "who was Kiri's dad?" is an ongoing question amongst the Na'vi and remaining humans, it seems, like, extremely obvious that she was implanted there by the spiritual essence of the planet itself, Eywa, and that Cameron is just biding his time to uncork a full-on Jesus metaphor in one of the film's several mooted sequels. The other adopted child is Spider (Jack Champion), an actual flesh-and-blood human who was orphaned during the war in the first movie; in a simple gesture that absolutely shouldn't impress me as much as it does, it's sort of indicated through editing that he's probably the son of the late villain Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), and later on this is confirmed in a way that makes it clear the movie knew we already knew and doesn't really care to make a big thing about it. And, like, imagine a movie in the 2020s not wanting that to be a twist, and just letting us figure it out without underlining it fie times and devoting an entire scene to it. Quaritch himself is sort of back from the dead, having had his memories transplated to a purpose-built avatar, and while his official mission is just to re-establish a human military presence on Pandora, his actual mission is to get revenge on Jake.
Some of this is covered in that ungainly exposition dump, some is depicted in real time, and if I am being honest, none of it is overly exciting. The Way of Water takes its sweet time to rev up, and it's a bit too pedestrian and plotty for the first long while - the "worse than the first movie" phase, and maybe the worst large-scale sequence in any Cameron feature excluding, as we must Piranha II: The Spawning. It's very samey, is the thing, with only an indifferent warm-up action sequence and a few moments that remix iconography from the first movie to good, though probably not great effect. Basically, it feels like The Way of Water is taking too much of its own sweet time in getting us to the actual water, which happens when the Sullys need to flee the forest Na'vi to go into hiding, in the hopes of keeping Quaritch and his fellow undead-human-avatar-goons from massacring the entire tribe. So off they go to an archipelago in Pandora's vast seas, and the film enters its "about as good as the first movie" phase. Here, it transforms into what amounts to a tourism brochure for a place that never existed, and we get to see why Cameron cares so much; his ongoing and obvious love of underwater cinematography gets to run up against his equally obvious love of bleeding-edge visual effects.
To be as blunt as the movie itself, the water in The Way of Water is absurdly gorgeous and fully worth whatever admission you might pay. The film pauses for an extremely long time to allow the Sullys to learn the, ahem, way of water, which means minute upon minute upon minute of indescribably beautiful CGI water and CGI light being broken into fragments; it doesn't even really need actual sets and characters to interact with those things, but since it has them, no real harm done. The problem here is not that the film stops its story to bask in the single most lovingly-rendered CGI environment I have ever seen in any medium, maybe barring Pixar's late-'00s run of masterpieces; the problem is that the film isn't 12 hours long and doesn't spend 11 full hours just looking about. There's a lot of video game logic both in the film's plotting and the way it sets Russell Carpenter's virtual camera to poke about the landscape, and it all reminded me of one of the pleasantest things I have ever done in any video game I've ever played, which was when I'd pick a spot on the far side of the map in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and walk to that spot, and then when I got there, I'd turn off the game and go about my day. The film becomes about the pure sensory joy of exploring a space, both in terms of its story, as the Sully children (who are more the film's main characters than the returning Jake and Neytiri) learn about the sea, and of course in terms of the experience it offers to its audience.
Eventually, the meditation on artificial nature shifts into a new phase, a "definitely better than the first film" phase, when the avatar-Quaritch finds the Sullys by slaughtering Pandoran whales, and the film begins a full hour of essentially uninterrupted action, first centered around the kids trying to rescue a whale, and then centered around... well, that would be giving it away. But I do think there's a point where the film hits a fourth phase, "oh, this is actually, literally flawless, almost beyond question the most impeccably-staged sequence of action and disaster movie iconography since Mad Max: Fury Road". So the upshot is that The Way of Water pretty much constantly improves from start to finish, ending on its best material - there are certainly good moments throughout, and the single best scene, I think, is one towards the middle, when Lo'ak befriend an outcast whale. But the trend is that it just keeps getting better and better until it ends right when you think you're going to explode from it, and that is the single best kind of trend for any movie, but especially an action-driven popcorn movie, I think.
Cameron's skills an action director have been sorely missed in particular these last 13 years, and that's where The Way of Water is at its strongest: without giving away any of the delights to be had in how he stages the final action setpiece, suffice it to say that it smoothly shifts between hand-to-hand combat, tense sense of people stalking around each other, and survivalist thriller, multiple times, against sets that feel like they combine the iconography of the director's Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Titanic in ways I didn't know I needed. And this happens while the film telescopes inward, to build itself around one of the smallest-stakes conflicts in a recent popcorn movie. There is no planet-wide crisis to be defused here, no existential threat to the Na'vi. It is very much about two guys who hate each other walloping the shit out of each other because the bad guy threatened the good guy's kids. That's it. That's the sum total of The Way of Water's 192 minutes, and this is why James Cameron is a genius and nobody else working in this area right now is. "We have to stop the doomsday device!", or even, "We have to save the magic world tree!" from the first Avatar are big and cumbersome and abstract; they feel weighty, but they're not real. "You have a knife at my daughter's neck" is real, and it feels even more real because it comes after two hours - hours I was glad to sit through and would never call "slow", but I still don't think you could say they don't feel like two hours - in which The Way of Water has indulged in plotless moments of watching the Sully family dynamic. On top of everything else it's doing, this is the most nakedly emotional Cameron film outside of maybe Titanic, reaching positively Vin Dieselian levels of "it's about family" in its focus on how a messy assemblage of two adults and five children, not all of them related, need each other and enjoy each other and irritate each other and whatnot. It's not subtle nor artful, because again, Cameron isn't trying to be sophisticated. He knows people like warm and cozy movies about family - he, it is obvious from the onscreen films, like movies about family - and he's not above putting unapologetically corny and sweet scenes about kids bouncing off of each other all throughout his massive collection of the world's most beautiful screensavers.
It works completely: if you define "good on characters" as "this film tells me things about realistic human psychology and the secrets of the human heart", then you won't agree with this part, but if you join me in defining "good on characters" as "they all had distinct personalities such that I immediately understood what I needed to about their dynamics, and I found it easy to root for them, and the actors were good at inhabiting these personality types in an unfussy way", then Avatar: The Way of Water is Cameron's best film on characters ever. And not even just our featured Na'vi; one of the places where I knew that the film was operating at 100% was when a giant multi-eyed, multi-finned space whale crinkled up its eye, and I was so happy that the whale was happy for the first time in many years that I kind of teared up slightly, and I grew very concerned that the space whale was going to have something bad happen to it. From the crinkling of a CGI eye. Which is a way of saying that, on top of everything else, The Way of Water has the most expressive character animation of any American film this year, whale and blue catpeople alike. And even the flesh and blood humans, as few of them as there are, get to emerge as distinct figures: at one point, this film's new tough-as-nails military asshole, played by Edie Falco, takes a drink of coffee in a certain way, and I felt like I learned so much about who she was, and what kind of culture she inhabits, and also that James Cameron and I have very much the same kind of dumb sense of humor, all from that way she drank coffee.
Anyway, it's all very gooey and straightforward and you get the sense that Cameron really didn't want to make the people he created suffer, so the first part of the big action finale feels just shocking lopsided in favor of the heroes, and tough choices were not being made about getting that running time carved down. And it's so good. This is the absolute best-case scenario for populist filmmaking: making something as easy to read for the largest possible audience so they can feel the most basic emotions in the deepest, richest way that immaculately clean and readable images can provide. 13 years ago, I saw a film like this, and at 28 years old, I found it very satisfying and a pretty good version of something I didn't get as often as I'd like. 25 years ago, at 16, I was a shitty snob and thought I was too good for it, and I am unbearably happy not to be that person any more. In the arid cinematic landscape of 2022, at 41, I treasure this like Moses just came down from Sinai with a new set of tablets.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
None of this is to necessary say that the decade-in-the-making sequel Avatar: The Way of Water is "the most Cameronesque" film, or the most sincere, or the most pure in its meat-and-potatoes storytelling for the broadest possible kind of audience; just that, as long as he keeps taking a half of a generation per movie (Avatar itself came out twelve years after its direct predecessor in his filmography, Titanic), every one of his films will end up feeling as much like a referendum on the surrounding film ecosystem as filtered through his unchanging approach to cinematic maximalism as like, just, a movie you could go to the theater to see. And my own belief is that what Avatar: The Way of Water tells us about the film ecosystem of 2022 is just absolutely goddamn terrible, but at least we have the bright shining beacon of this shamelessly corny and blunt and earnest and wildly fucking exciting 192-minute mountain of a motion picture to stand proudly in the waning days of one of the worst years in the history of the medium and declare, "yes, but movies could be this".
This is many things, but at heart it's basically just Avatar, but more so. There are more alien landscapes, sharper and more immersive 3-D, more expressive CGI faces, and beefier action that's been more minutely choreographed. I cannot bring myself to say that it's a top-to-bottom improvement on the first film, largely because the first sequence is clearly not as good as what follows. The downside of Cameron's blunt clarity is fully on display in the very opening, where we receive just a big ol' sweeping exposition dump from Jake Sully (voiced by Sam Worthington, who also provides motion capture), the human who traveled to the alien moon of Pandora and decided to fully live his live in an "avatar", a lab-created organic body of a Na'vi, the catlike native humanoid species of Pandora. That's one of the bits of information that gets plopped out for the benefit of any viewer who hasn't seen the first movie in a couple or 13 years, and once the basics of the first movie are sketched out (the Na'vi, aided by Jake and a couple of other dissident humans, repelled a mercenary army attempting to destroy the planet's delicate ecology in search for rare metals), we get caught up to speed on new developments in Jake's life with his full-blooded Na'vi wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana).
They have three children now: Neteyam (James Flatters), their eldest son, who would by human standards be around 18; middle son Lo'ak (Britain Dalton), who's in the desperate-to-prove-himself stage of adolescence, and making quite a pest of himself to Jake and Neteyam, so let's say 15; and youngest daughter Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), an adorable chatterbox around 7 or 8. They also have two adopted children: dreamy flower-child adolescent Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), who was born from the insensate avatar of deceased human exobiologist Dr. Grace Augustine (also Weaver), and while it's loosely implied that "who was Kiri's dad?" is an ongoing question amongst the Na'vi and remaining humans, it seems, like, extremely obvious that she was implanted there by the spiritual essence of the planet itself, Eywa, and that Cameron is just biding his time to uncork a full-on Jesus metaphor in one of the film's several mooted sequels. The other adopted child is Spider (Jack Champion), an actual flesh-and-blood human who was orphaned during the war in the first movie; in a simple gesture that absolutely shouldn't impress me as much as it does, it's sort of indicated through editing that he's probably the son of the late villain Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), and later on this is confirmed in a way that makes it clear the movie knew we already knew and doesn't really care to make a big thing about it. And, like, imagine a movie in the 2020s not wanting that to be a twist, and just letting us figure it out without underlining it fie times and devoting an entire scene to it. Quaritch himself is sort of back from the dead, having had his memories transplated to a purpose-built avatar, and while his official mission is just to re-establish a human military presence on Pandora, his actual mission is to get revenge on Jake.
Some of this is covered in that ungainly exposition dump, some is depicted in real time, and if I am being honest, none of it is overly exciting. The Way of Water takes its sweet time to rev up, and it's a bit too pedestrian and plotty for the first long while - the "worse than the first movie" phase, and maybe the worst large-scale sequence in any Cameron feature excluding, as we must Piranha II: The Spawning. It's very samey, is the thing, with only an indifferent warm-up action sequence and a few moments that remix iconography from the first movie to good, though probably not great effect. Basically, it feels like The Way of Water is taking too much of its own sweet time in getting us to the actual water, which happens when the Sullys need to flee the forest Na'vi to go into hiding, in the hopes of keeping Quaritch and his fellow undead-human-avatar-goons from massacring the entire tribe. So off they go to an archipelago in Pandora's vast seas, and the film enters its "about as good as the first movie" phase. Here, it transforms into what amounts to a tourism brochure for a place that never existed, and we get to see why Cameron cares so much; his ongoing and obvious love of underwater cinematography gets to run up against his equally obvious love of bleeding-edge visual effects.
To be as blunt as the movie itself, the water in The Way of Water is absurdly gorgeous and fully worth whatever admission you might pay. The film pauses for an extremely long time to allow the Sullys to learn the, ahem, way of water, which means minute upon minute upon minute of indescribably beautiful CGI water and CGI light being broken into fragments; it doesn't even really need actual sets and characters to interact with those things, but since it has them, no real harm done. The problem here is not that the film stops its story to bask in the single most lovingly-rendered CGI environment I have ever seen in any medium, maybe barring Pixar's late-'00s run of masterpieces; the problem is that the film isn't 12 hours long and doesn't spend 11 full hours just looking about. There's a lot of video game logic both in the film's plotting and the way it sets Russell Carpenter's virtual camera to poke about the landscape, and it all reminded me of one of the pleasantest things I have ever done in any video game I've ever played, which was when I'd pick a spot on the far side of the map in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and walk to that spot, and then when I got there, I'd turn off the game and go about my day. The film becomes about the pure sensory joy of exploring a space, both in terms of its story, as the Sully children (who are more the film's main characters than the returning Jake and Neytiri) learn about the sea, and of course in terms of the experience it offers to its audience.
Eventually, the meditation on artificial nature shifts into a new phase, a "definitely better than the first film" phase, when the avatar-Quaritch finds the Sullys by slaughtering Pandoran whales, and the film begins a full hour of essentially uninterrupted action, first centered around the kids trying to rescue a whale, and then centered around... well, that would be giving it away. But I do think there's a point where the film hits a fourth phase, "oh, this is actually, literally flawless, almost beyond question the most impeccably-staged sequence of action and disaster movie iconography since Mad Max: Fury Road". So the upshot is that The Way of Water pretty much constantly improves from start to finish, ending on its best material - there are certainly good moments throughout, and the single best scene, I think, is one towards the middle, when Lo'ak befriend an outcast whale. But the trend is that it just keeps getting better and better until it ends right when you think you're going to explode from it, and that is the single best kind of trend for any movie, but especially an action-driven popcorn movie, I think.
Cameron's skills an action director have been sorely missed in particular these last 13 years, and that's where The Way of Water is at its strongest: without giving away any of the delights to be had in how he stages the final action setpiece, suffice it to say that it smoothly shifts between hand-to-hand combat, tense sense of people stalking around each other, and survivalist thriller, multiple times, against sets that feel like they combine the iconography of the director's Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Titanic in ways I didn't know I needed. And this happens while the film telescopes inward, to build itself around one of the smallest-stakes conflicts in a recent popcorn movie. There is no planet-wide crisis to be defused here, no existential threat to the Na'vi. It is very much about two guys who hate each other walloping the shit out of each other because the bad guy threatened the good guy's kids. That's it. That's the sum total of The Way of Water's 192 minutes, and this is why James Cameron is a genius and nobody else working in this area right now is. "We have to stop the doomsday device!", or even, "We have to save the magic world tree!" from the first Avatar are big and cumbersome and abstract; they feel weighty, but they're not real. "You have a knife at my daughter's neck" is real, and it feels even more real because it comes after two hours - hours I was glad to sit through and would never call "slow", but I still don't think you could say they don't feel like two hours - in which The Way of Water has indulged in plotless moments of watching the Sully family dynamic. On top of everything else it's doing, this is the most nakedly emotional Cameron film outside of maybe Titanic, reaching positively Vin Dieselian levels of "it's about family" in its focus on how a messy assemblage of two adults and five children, not all of them related, need each other and enjoy each other and irritate each other and whatnot. It's not subtle nor artful, because again, Cameron isn't trying to be sophisticated. He knows people like warm and cozy movies about family - he, it is obvious from the onscreen films, like movies about family - and he's not above putting unapologetically corny and sweet scenes about kids bouncing off of each other all throughout his massive collection of the world's most beautiful screensavers.
It works completely: if you define "good on characters" as "this film tells me things about realistic human psychology and the secrets of the human heart", then you won't agree with this part, but if you join me in defining "good on characters" as "they all had distinct personalities such that I immediately understood what I needed to about their dynamics, and I found it easy to root for them, and the actors were good at inhabiting these personality types in an unfussy way", then Avatar: The Way of Water is Cameron's best film on characters ever. And not even just our featured Na'vi; one of the places where I knew that the film was operating at 100% was when a giant multi-eyed, multi-finned space whale crinkled up its eye, and I was so happy that the whale was happy for the first time in many years that I kind of teared up slightly, and I grew very concerned that the space whale was going to have something bad happen to it. From the crinkling of a CGI eye. Which is a way of saying that, on top of everything else, The Way of Water has the most expressive character animation of any American film this year, whale and blue catpeople alike. And even the flesh and blood humans, as few of them as there are, get to emerge as distinct figures: at one point, this film's new tough-as-nails military asshole, played by Edie Falco, takes a drink of coffee in a certain way, and I felt like I learned so much about who she was, and what kind of culture she inhabits, and also that James Cameron and I have very much the same kind of dumb sense of humor, all from that way she drank coffee.
Anyway, it's all very gooey and straightforward and you get the sense that Cameron really didn't want to make the people he created suffer, so the first part of the big action finale feels just shocking lopsided in favor of the heroes, and tough choices were not being made about getting that running time carved down. And it's so good. This is the absolute best-case scenario for populist filmmaking: making something as easy to read for the largest possible audience so they can feel the most basic emotions in the deepest, richest way that immaculately clean and readable images can provide. 13 years ago, I saw a film like this, and at 28 years old, I found it very satisfying and a pretty good version of something I didn't get as often as I'd like. 25 years ago, at 16, I was a shitty snob and thought I was too good for it, and I am unbearably happy not to be that person any more. In the arid cinematic landscape of 2022, at 41, I treasure this like Moses just came down from Sinai with a new set of tablets.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
