MOVIES | CULTURE | AVATAR
Did The Visually Brilliant Way Of Water Drown The Magic Of Avatar?
The perplexing jar of Pandora is very wet, but don’t hold your breath.
The first Avatar mesmerised us in 2009; we have been waiting for a sequel like a messiah’s coming since that day. And finally, it arrived. I saw The Way of Water last night and am still trying to dry myself. I was a believer, but my faith has been tested.
James Cameron has been working tirelessly in New Zealand to bring to life a bigger, deeper, wider and wilder cinematic extravaganza than we have ever seen before.
In this article, I give you my first impressions with some concerns and swimming lessons on how to survive this over three hours long deep dive into the myths of Pandora.
“A screenplay is a story told with pictures, in dialogue and description, and placed within the context of dramatic structure.” ― Syd Field, Screenplay.
A wet wall of visuals fills your eyes from the screen brilliantly with the power of a tsunami.
It is impossible not to immerse in this world James Cameron and Weta Digital’s geniuses have created. It sucks you into its depths with such a force that you forget time and to breathe.
So, the visuals are breathtaking. Sorry for the pun.
The beauty of Pandora and its creatures is tangible. In high-framerate 3D, every frame became a wonder. I couldn’t get enough of those masterfully crafted scenes.
It’s not easy to animate water, but watching Way of the Water’s visual waves that come one after another so effortlessly — and endlessly, it becomes clear that Weta Digital’s mastery is second to none.
What the visual brilliance left in the shadows, though, were the storyline and characters. There, the leaks started and left you wondering why all this hype.
“All drama is conflict. Without conflict, you have no action; without action, you have no character; without character, you have no story; and without a story, you have no screenplay.” ― Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting.
What’s the story — and where’s the point?
The central story arc is how the family of Jake Skully, who lives on the planet Pandora as a Navi native, survives the sudden return of humans and their cruel colonisation attempts.
The Way of Water has several plotlines, each having its conflict as an engine that pushes the action forward.
The central conflict that propels everything into an inevitable — and cruel — collision course is between the natives of Pandora and greedy humans.
Also, the Skully family has internal conflicts. They have adopted a human boy, now a teenager, Miles “Spider” Socorro. Skully’s wife, Neytiri, does not believe this human kid belongs there. Skully himself has a troubled relationship with his sons, too.
There is tension also between the native tribes themselves, etc.
These little tensions could become an exciting tapestry for the characters to become more three-dimensional, but from what I saw, only the visuals were in 3D.
The tension between fathers and sons could have been way more interesting than the massive exploitation of the planet and its natural resources. For example, how the Spider was kidnapped by humans (and his now Navi camouflaged re-born father) and treated by them as an alien and a tool, too — would have been interesting to develop more.
If the story had been focused more on the characters’ stories and had fewer effects and chases, the result might have been more touching. The movie is well crafted by the book of Hollywood dramaturgy but lacks the human touch that was so riveting in the first Avatar film.
Now the theme (survival of the family and embracing diversity instead of forced uniformity) sunk into Pandora’s watery depths, and I left the theatre puzzled but in awe.
And, of course, Cameron left a cliffhanger for the next sequel and battle. Good enemies never die.
“To tell a story, you have to set up your characters, introduce the dramatic premise (what the story is about) and the dramatic situation (the circumstances surrounding the action), create obstacles for your characters to confront and overcome, then resolve the story.” ― Syd Field, Screenplay: Foundations of Screenwriting.
Pandora’s jar is open for interpretation and some concerns.
The first film was indeed an unearthly experience. Avatar is an imaginary world with rich visual framing. The premise was so apparent evil versus good that the visuals magnified this conflict to a new level.
The sequel lost the opportunity to bring the characters to the level of this visual splendour.
Cameron has created native cultures and linked them, even to the existing New Zealand Māori traditions. He also borrowed from Greek mythology and Buddhist concepts to build enough meat around the storyline’s skeleton.
These mythical mismatches are cartoonish and lack grounding and depth.
It all starts to feel like an allegory slightly too obvious and leaves not much for the audience to ponder. Good is good, evil is evil, and destruction is inevitable. Unless — yes — unless what?
The missing bits and tits.
Cameron’s Pandora is surprisingly hygienic and clinical. It follows the Hollywood rule that anything below the waistline is an absolute no-no.
Especially in the beginning, during the set-up, when we were introduced to Skully’s family life, we saw scenes that could have been from some Jehova’s Witnesses children’s stories about heaven.
All private parts were covered, and even Navis had long tails — nothing else down there was visible. Lovely blue buttocks had no cracks, and tits were non-existing. Not to mention the penises of the Navi blokes. How do they make love?
It would make a good laugh and some exciting wit to the story if, for example, we could have seen the Navi kids mischievously pooing and peeing from the trees on top of some puzzled humans.
Final verdict with aching lungs
OK, enough of Way of the Water. It is a masterpiece of visual effects, and there is no competition for it during the next Oscars on that frontier. It is worth watching.
Strangely enough, the only character that stole the show was the young Spider, the human boy who didn’t know where he belonged and struggled with his relationship with his cruel father.
Spider was so a tiny, vulnerable, white human boy against the tall and blue Navis and hairy and heavily dressed human colonisers that it was like watching young Tarzan on a strange planet. With a little more of him, it might have been the human touch that was now missing from the movie.
The Way of Water ticked all the Hollywood boxes but nothing outside them — except box offices that made during the first weekend $175 million, but it still has a long way to go to the 2 billion breakeven.
Here are the links to more about Avatar.
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