Review: Avatar: The Way of Water (dir. James Cameron, 2022)
Sigourney Weaver as a teenager is the film's secret weapon.
Avatar: The Way of Water may not be the best James Cameron film, but it’s certainly the most James Cameron film. From beginning to end, it is filled with moments that remind you of his work: not only does it follow the original Avatar—which already resembled Aliens with its depiction of corporate greed, the robotic battle suits, the casting of Sigourney Weaver, and so on—but it also harks back to the crushed skulls and torched landscapes of the Terminator movies, the wondrous first contact with a bioluminescent probe in The Abyss, the capsized vessel in Titanic, the violent defense of family in True Lies, heck even the flying fish in Piranha II: The Spawning.
And, like Aliens and Terminator 2, the new Avatar is a sequel that builds on the original film by adding children to the mix.
The first Avatar ended with Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) transferring his consciousness to his avatar, or hybrid human-alien body, permanently so that he could start a new life on Pandora with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), the daughter of the local tribal leaders. By the time the new film begins, Jake and Neytiri have had three children, and they are also adoptive parents to Kiri, a girl who, it turns out, was mysteriously gestating in Dr Grace Augustine’s avatar before the character died.
Kiri is, in a way, the film’s secret weapon. Thanks to the magic of motion-capture technology, the 73-year-old Sigourney Weaver, who played Dr Augustine in the original film, gets to play her own teenaged daughter, and Weaver gets a lot more time to build her character this time ’round. Kiri has the curiosity, self-doubt, determination, and sense of destiny that one might find in the protagonist of one of those YA stories that were all the rage a few years ago, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the Avatar franchise found a whole new generation of fans just because of her. (This reminds me of how Titanic was initially pitched as a late-1990s disaster movie, but, as a tale of forbidden romance between two young people, it ended up riding the wave of Gen-Y hits that came out around that same time.)1
But it’s not just the heroes who have children: We also learn that Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the cigar-chomping villain of the first film, had a child on Pandora who couldn’t go back to Earth because cryo-sleep is too dangerous for toddlers. And so that child, nicknamed Spider (Jack Champion), has grown up on Pandora, living a wild, feral existence, hanging out with the Na’vi children, and sporting little more than a loincloth and long, unkempt hair like a cross between a young Tarzan and Aliens’ Newt. (There were children on that military base? Who knew? Also: I find the possibility that Quaritch started a family on Pandora far more counterintuitive than the idea that Dr Augustine’s avatar was mysteriously pregnant. It’s not quite “Emperor Palpatine had sex!?” levels of incredulity, but it’s edging in that direction.)
It’s impossible to say for sure after just one viewing, but I think the new film’s multigenerational focus might make it better than the original film. It certainly makes the sequel more interesting. Jake Sully was always kind of a boring blank of a character, someone who passively accepted what others—the marines, the scientists, the Na’vi, the goddess Eywa—projected onto him. So it frankly comes as kind of a relief that the new film sets Sully aside every now and then so that it can focus on his kids, who have to deal with the fact that they represent different species, different cultures, and different lineages. But the film never gives in to what my friend Steve Greydanus calls the ‘Junior Knows Best’ trope, where children are always more enlightened than their parents. Instead, it’s clear that Jake has knowledge and experience that his children don’t have, and can benefit from, even as his children form knowledge and experiences of their own that their father needs to be sensitive to. And part of what makes The Way of Water work is how Jake, Neytiri, and their children all feel like real people in a real family.
Matters are complicated even further when a new, Na’vi-fied version of Quaritch enters the picture and effectively claims custody of Spider. Apparently Quaritch created a back-up of his consciousness at some point during the first film, and that back-up has been given a permanent hybrid body so that it can pursue Jake and his kin with even more zeal than Quaritch did. The new Quaritch isn’t technically Spider’s dad, but he takes the child under his wing, and this leads to some unexpected stand-offs where it’s not entirely clear who is safe with whom.
Along the way, to keep their own children safe, Jake and Neytiri leave their tribe—the Forest People—and take up residence with the Reef People, a race of Na’vi who live by the water and have adapted to their environment by developing thicker tails and arms for swimming. This new setting allows Cameron to indulge in two of his favorite subjects: The mystery and grandeur of life underwater, and the importance of breathing. Just as Jake and the other humans needed avatars to breathe the open air on Pandora, so too his children must learn how to hold their breath like the Reef People do, so that they can keep up with their peers and stay underwater for longer stretches of time.
And, once again, Cameron touches on religious and spiritual themes. The first Avatar gave us Eywa, the mother-nature goddess whose name sounds like an anagram of Yahweh—and, through the Grace Augustine character (that name!), the first film took the viewer beyond scientific observation of Eywa to some sort of mystical experience of Eywa. Likewise, the new film finds mystical significance in the sea—it is all around us (cf Acts 17:28), it gives and it takes (cf Job 1:21, Isaiah 45:7), etc.—and the new film straddles the line between science and mysticism, just like the first film did, by asking just how much of our morality and spirituality can be explained by studying the brain. The new film also puts a striking visual spin on the Jonah story.
I wish I could say that the script—which is credited to five writers, whereas Cameron wrote the first film on his own—was more than serviceable. The way it sneaks Quaritch back into the story is a retcon on par with, well, the introduction of the T-1000 in Terminator 2. (Why did Skynet send clunky old Arnold Schwarzenegger to kill Sarah Connor in the first film when they had a liquid-metal shape-shifter at their disposal the whole time?) I think I was about two hours into the new movie before I began to wonder what had happened to the unobtainium mining operation that was the bad guys’ reason for invading Pandora in the first place; just a few minutes later—as if Cameron himself realized that he needed to explain what the bad guys were doing—the film revealed that an entirely different type of resource extraction was now in play. And, once again, a James Cameron film adds ending to ending to ending. (I’ve been grumbling about this aspect of his films since Terminator 2.)
But no matter. No one really goes to Avatar movies for the plot anyway. We go for the spectacle and the experience, we go for the adventure, we go to marvel at what technology can do even in service of a story where the high-tech superpower is the bad guy. And on that front, Avatar: The Way of Water delivers. The underwater effects put the murky likes of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever to shame, the use of 3D is brilliant, and the detail on the computer-generated faces is so convincing you’d swear the Na’vi were real live actors wearing really good make-up. There were times, in the original film, when the effects felt like mere animation, the live-action footage felt like mere video recordings, and I thought the humans and the Na’vi were occupying completely different movies. I did not have that feeling during The Way of Water. This is about as seamless as filmmaking gets. And the hints of deeper meaning—even if they are never much more than hints—are more than welcome, too.
A few extra notes:
From 1981’s Piranha II: The Spawning to 1994’s True Lies, the films of James Cameron were largely about family: surrogate families, broken families, restored families, etc. Cameron’s last two films, 1997’s Titanic and 2009’s Avatar, were outliers in a sense, because they were both about illicit romances that were pitted against the establishment and played some part in taking it down. But with Avatar: The Way of Water, Cameron goes back to the family themes that dominated his earlier films.
More religious motifs: the Na’vi use “song-beads” as they remember their stories, and they celebrate their children’s “first communion with Eywa”.
Kiri calls Spider “monkey-boy”, and suddenly I’m wondering what the word “monkey” even means on Pandora. Do they have any primates on that planet? It seems like most of the creatures there resemble dinosaurs, rhinos, whales, that sort of thing. And then I start wondering: if there aren’t any other primate species, where did the humanoid Na’vi come from? How did they evolve?
Thanks to Grace Augustine’s unexplained pregnancy—or, rather, the unexplained pregnancy of her avatar—this film joins Lightyear and Jurassic World: Dominion on the list of 2022 films in which a woman becomes pregnant without the aid of a father (or at least any father that we know of). In Jurassic World: Dominion, the woman simply impregnates herself with her own clone; and in Lightyear, we’re just not supposed to ask how a woman in a same-sex relationship became pregnant after her spaceship crashed on another planet. In Avatar: The Way of Water, characters do ask how Augustine’s avatar became pregnant, but no one knows the answer; presumably the sequels will get into that.
If the humans have the technology to back up the memories and personality of a person like Quaritch, do they also have the technology to alter a person’s personality? There is some talk in this film about morality and spirituality being shaped by certain parts of the brain; what if you could bypass the brain’s hardware altogether and shape those things in the software?
Things I wrote about the original Avatar:
My review for BC Christian News (January 2010).
How Avatar reverses the tropes of Aliens, Terminator 2, and True Lies by getting us to root for the monster, the non-human, and the terrorist (January 2010).
The importance of breathing in Cameron’s science-fiction films (February 2010).
My review for The Anglican Planet (April 2010).
The importance of breathing in Cameron’s Titanic (April 2012).
Things I wrote about Avatar: The Way of Water:
My thoughts after a second viewing here at Thoughts & Spoilers (December 2022).
Things I wrote about other James Cameron films:
My review of Terminator 2: Judgment Day for my zine (September 1991).
My article on the Terminator franchise—the first four movies and the TV show The Sarah Connor Chronicles—for Christianity Today Movies (May 2009).
I can’t help noting that Cameron seems to love giving Weaver children and casting them in counterintuitive ways; fans might recall that Weaver’s real-life mother appeared as her daughter in a deleted scene from Aliens.