Avatar: The Way of Water

AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER   ***

James Cameron

2022

IDEA:  After starting a family on Pandora and enjoying years of peace, Jake and Neytiri once again find themselves threatened by colonizing human forces. To escape, they join a seafaring clan that teaches them how to exist in the water.

BLURB:  Whatever their shortcomings, James Cameron’s Avatar films are sui generis in the history of cinema; they’re exorbitantly budgeted, technologically groundbreaking auteurist epics whose primary pleasures, despite the storytelling intentions of their maker, have little to do with narrative concerns. Cinema has been a vehicle for spectacle since its inception, and blockbusters have long privileged the form as one of attractions above all, but Avatar feels somehow different. Perhaps it’s the fact that Cameron, with all the resources at his disposal, has mobilized the true vanguard of moving-image technology in the service of a story and characters that are almost perversely disproportionate in quality and interest. That’s not to say that the story or characters don’t elicit our involvement and emotional identification; the narrative may be trite, but Cameron is enough of a savvy storyteller to make it sing dramatically. Yet one might find themselves (literally) looking past those conventions, entranced by how palpable the blubber of that alien whale appears in 3D, or how it really feels like it’s raining in the theater. The telepresence conjured by Cameron’s use of the technology is so consistently potent that Avatar almost aches to be experienced outside of traditional narrative viewing habits. As in the first film, whose novelty of discovery the new one inevitably lacks, The Way of Water is best when it engages in pure sensory play, particularly in the scenes of marine exploration. These moments are wondrous and enveloping, so hyperreal at times they would mimic lucid dreaming if not for the visible boundaries of the screen. While this sequel offers several elements that spice up the formula of the first - not least among them the Sully children and the reef tribe, who add new layers to the themes of transhumanism and cultural belonging - The Way of Water works mostly because it furnishes a perceptual experience that doesn’t currently have any cinematic analogue.