I'm not the target audience for the Avatar franchise. I'm not a sci-fi fantasy guy, or a superhero movie guy. I've seen four Star Wars movies (the original three plus Episode Two), a handful of Marvel movies - none in theaters - and the first Lord of the Rings. I basically liked all of these just fine, but I didn't feel the need to crawl down any of their well-traveled rabbit holes. (Curiously, I did get really into Game of Thrones for a while. Haven't seen House of Dragon yet, and I may not. But from about 2011 to 2016, I was one of the biggest fans I knew. Not sure why, except that it always felt the most adult of the major fantasy franchises - not just because of the sex and violence, but because of its political themes and its subversion of fantasy tropes.)
So why did I make a point of going to the Cinemark last night to see Avatar, the Way of Water? A few reasons:
1 - I'm an Oscar "collector," meaning I like to see as many nominated films as I can in advance of the ceremony in March.
2 - Avatar is part of the cultural zeitgeist. The first one was the highest grossing film of all time, but more importantly, it was just a film you had to see in order to take part in any pop culture conversation in 2009. The second one may not be quite as culturally important, but I'm getting some of the same vibes. So basically, FOMO was a driving factor here.
3 - The sheer spectacle. Almost in spite of myself, I really enjoyed the first Avatar. The concept was sort of silly, the plot was cliched, the dialogue was clunky. But the movie was such a sight to behold that none of that other stuff really mattered.
Plus, I have fond memories of actually seeing the first movie, memories that are now pretty much inextricable from my thoughts about the movie itself. In February of 2010, a massive snowstorm hit the mid-Atlantic. And a few days later, before we had barely begun to dig ourselves out, another one followed. Everyone in the region remembers the twins blizzards as "Snowmageddon." I saw Avatar hours after the first storm, an evening on which an eerily quiet DC felt almost as otherworldly as the planet Pandora. It was a perfect night to give myself over to James Cameron's lengthy epic vision. Of course, the circumstances under which I saw the sequel weren't nearly so notable, but that's alright. Sequels usually aren't as good.
I haven't actually said anything about the substance of the movie yet. That's often how the conversation surrounding Avatar tends to go. There's a running joke about how little people actually remember about it. "Name one character from Avatar," the critics say, "I bet you can't do it." That was actually true for me about the first one, and almost the second one, too. There's Jake Sully, whose name I now confidently remember after almost six hours of content. There's his Na'vi (had to Google the spelling) wife, whose name starts with an N. There's the bad guy, Colonel Quidditch. (That's not actually his name, but it's something like that.) There are a bunch of kids, too. You know, Big Brother, Middle Brother, Girl, Little Girl. The only other character I can confidently name is Spider, the human kid who is adopted by the Na'vi. Probably because he isn't a blue alien, and because he has a little bit of personality.
Almost no one has seen the first Avatar movie within the last decade, I'm fairly certain. And I'd imagine that many viewers of the second movie took to Wikipedia to refresh their memories. Because no one had a spare two hours and forty minutes to watch the first one. And even if they did, it doesn't look that good on your home tv. I really wish I had spent a little more time on Wikipedia, because Way of Water hits the ground running. No time to catch you up on movie you saw thirteen years ago. Once the house lights dim, you're back in Pandora and you better keep up.
But honestly, who cares about story when you're watching spectacle like this? At its best, Avatar turns you into a kid, staring wide-eyed at at the screen. Way of Water had plenty of those moments - not as many as the first, but still plenty. The underwater sequences, especiallything with that whale (a Tulkun - I just looked it up) are worth the price of admission. Same goes for the naval battle in the last hour of the movie. The whale flops onto the boat and smushes the bad guys? Count me in. The evil poacher sea captain guy gets his arms severed? Hell yes.
And then there are quieter moments that fill you with wonder - like one late in the movie in which a body is enveloped by strands of a flourescent plant.
All that said, I can't really say I enjoyed the movie. It is, in the end, a three-hour saga about blue space aliens. I'm only ever going to care so much. Frequently, I found myself checking my watch. Frequently, I wanted to return to Earth. Still, I find I can only be so cynical about a movie like this. For all of its failings, it's pretty incredible. And perhaps most incredible is its ability to bring crowds of people back to the movie theater, in an age when ticket prices are outrageously high, COVID is still a concern, and most movies are still viewed on laptops and phones. If that's Avatar's legacy, who cares about such trifling matters as characters' names?
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| The Tulkun is the absolute MVP of this movie. |
