Say what you will about James Cameron.
There’s no “but” coming at the end of that sentence. Just say what you will. The man is apparently bulletproof. You can point out that his first “Avatar” film is a tired collection of outdated and offensive colonialist nonsense, thinly disguised by (then-) state-of-the-art visual effects, and he’d probably just sit there fanning himself with his million-dollar bills (which he probably has).
So perhaps the funniest thing about “Avatar: The Way of Water” is that his new film doesn’t double down on the flaws of the original and instead makes some attempt to address them. Jake Sully (voiced and motion-captured by Sam Worthington) may be a leader, but in some respects he’s a bigger screw-up than ever, making lots of mistakes that, this time, he can’t fix. “The Way of Water” is not about Jake Sully’s journey anymore: it’s about his kids growing up immersed in multiple cultures, struggling to find their own identities. This makes the movie feel relatively genuine, even though it’s still built on an uncomfortable foundation.
And while Cameron’s screenplay — co-written by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (“Mulan”), with story credits for Josh Friedman and Shane Salerno — is often unwieldy and digressive, and very much padded, it boasts new ideas and cleverly refreshes familiar elements from his earlier films. In many ways, “Avatar: The Way of Water” feels like the movie James Cameron has been working towards his entire career, dating all the way back to “Piranha II: The Spawning.”
It’s been quite a few years since the Na’vi kicked almost all the humans off of Pandora, and that’s been long enough for Jake and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) to have two teenage sons, Neteyam (Jamie Flatters, “The School for Good and Evil”) and Lo’ak (Britain Dalton, “Goliath”) and a young daughter named Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss, “The Garcias”). They’ve also adopted Kiri, who was mysteriously born from the comatose avatar of now-deceased scientist Dr. Augustine (Sigourney Weaver, who also plays Kiri via motion-capture). Early in the film the identity of Kiri’s father is briefly speculated upon, and the theories are so creepy that you’ll probably wish nobody had brought it up.
Of course, the thing about kicking humans off of your planet is that, no matter how politely (or forcefully) you ask, they’re going to return someday. And now they have, with a vengeance. Led by General Frances Ardmore (Edie Falco), the plan is now to ditch Earth and colonize Pandora. After all, if the aliens from “Signs” can attack a planet where the water kills them, why shouldn’t humans colonize a planet where the air is poison to them?
Instead of bringing massive armies with them, Ardmore relies on a small squad of Marine Corps soldiers, but now they’re avatars, inhabiting the bodies of scientifically grown Na’vi. And because Cameron was getting the whole gang back together anyway, they’re led by Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who died in the first movie but shortly beforehand uploaded his brain onto a flash drive just in case. Not many actors get to do an “Alas, poor Yorick” moment with their own skull, and Lang sure as hell makes the most of it.
And since Jake and Neytiri have kids, Cameron gives his villain a parallel: Quaritch spends most of the film with Spider (Jack Champion), a human teen who was too young to survive cryosleep when humanity lost the war, so he had to grow up on Pandora with the Na’vi. The strained father-son relationship between Quaritch and Spider seems winkingly reminiscent of Ripley and Newt in “Aliens,” if in “Aliens” the xenomorphs were the good guys and the Marines were even bigger a-holes.
It takes an exceptionally long time for the main plot to kick in, but suffice it to say that eventually — and that’s a pretty big “eventually” — Jake is forced to flee with his family to an island populated by Na’vi who have evolved to spend lengthy amounts of time underwater and who commune with a menagerie of fantastical fish creatures.
While Jake and Neytiri make some effort to adapt to their new surroundings, their children do most of the hard work of fitting in. They quickly find themselves in a series of coming-of-age subplots pulled from teen movie history, including but not limited to first crushes, intolerant bullies, and that one part from “Beach Blanket Bingo” where Bonehead befriends a mermaid and nobody believes him, except in “Avatar: The Way of Water” it’s a rogue super-whale.
This is not to say that these scenes don’t work. James Cameron has leaned into storytelling clichés many times in the past, and he often gets away with it. It’s just amusing to watch him reverently revisit teen beach-movie plot points the way “Star Wars” updated scenes from old samurai movies.
There’s more to the plot in “Avatar: The Way of Water,” but for a film that’s over three hours long, there’s not as much as you might think. Some characters have a lot to do while others, like Neytiri, have surprisingly little. Some mysteries are resolved, others are saved for future films. Hopefully, they’ll one day address what makes the coffee so damned good on Pandora; in this film and the original, the human villains always carry steaming mugs with them into battle in their giant flying warships, even though spillage seems inevitable. Must be something in the water.
You see, the problem with a three-hour movie like this is that, while James Cameron may want us to reset our internal clocks and take a sightseeing tour with him, our mind is given a lot of extra time to wander, and to wonder. And this sometimes makes the oddest little details of Cameron’s “Avatar” movies come into sharper focus than they probably should, especially on first viewing.
About those sights: “Avatar: The Way of Water” is CGI-ed within an inch of its life, rendering in painstaking detail elaborate locations and gorgeous extraterrestrial animals. The film is bright enough to compensate for all the light lost through the audience’s 3-D lenses, so the colors always pop. It is, in no uncertain terms, the prettiest animated film of the year.
But the film’s unilateral crispness, combined with its high frame-rate, creates problems too. The action sometimes appears unnaturally sped up whenever people dart quickly across the screen, which can be a lot of the time. And the extreme attention to detail in every single frame, and the tendency to depict those scenes in deep focus, can make the film’s visual language unnecessarily difficult to interpret. We’re often scouring through visually complicated images, searching for where we’re supposed to focus in order to follow the characters and the story, instead of having our attention carefully drawn to that information.
At times, in the busiest of moments, “Avatar: The Way of Water” can be frustratingly disorienting. And although the film was clearly intended to viewed on the big screen, and often plays a lot like a theme-park ride, one eventually finds oneself fantasizing about watching it at home, on a much smaller scale, where all the details can be appreciated instead of just overwhelming.
Still, when Cameron’s film calms down, and the stunning imagery that cinematographer Russell Carpenter (“Titanic”) has created with the film’s enormous visual-effects team can linger for a while, the imagination and scope of “Avatar: The Way of Water” can occasionally feel quite magical.
After some pacing issues in the first act and some odd story decisions in the second, the film’s breathtaking climax completely sneaks up on you. You might think the film has a lot more twists and turns to go, since there’s lot of running time left, but Cameron stages the finale of “Avatar: The Way of Water” like an incredible, ever-evolving action sequence where locations, dangers and imminent threats shift dramatically, sometimes on a dime. It’s like watching a tidal wave start miles in the distance as a tiny bump in the ocean. By the time it crests, whatever the film’s many other flaws may be, we are invested, and we are ultimately rewarded with a truly spectacular, awe-inspiring finale.
All’s well that ends well, I guess. Even if all was a pretty mixed bag beforehand.
“Avatar: The Way of Water” opens in US theaters Dec. 16 via 20th Century Studios.