Avatar: The Way of Water - Return to Pandora Boasts Visual Magic that Mostly Overcomes a Water-Logged Story

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B

Seeing the stunningly beautiful and numbingly long Avatar: The Way of Water – a sequel that took 13 years to happen – put me in mind of Dan Hicks’ classic country song How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away?

The original Avatar was a box office monster, released a year after Marvel made its big move with Iron Man. In the intervening years, Marvel has fed the theatres like a French goose. Their movies bring in fans, but it’s hard to consider them “events” at this point.

Meanwhile, Avatar practically went silent on a pop cultural level, marked by a Disney World theme park attraction, and Toruk, an ill-conceived Avatar-themed Cirque du Soleil arena show.

What has Avatar creator James Cameron been doing all this time (besides constantly promising that multiple sequels were just around the corner)?

Fulfilling his fascination with the ocean, for one – including a trip to the seven-mile deep Mariana Trench in a bathyscaph. The images he retained from such adventures clearly influence Avatar: The Way of Water, and form the basis for an entirely new world on the militarily colonized moon Pandora.

The movie is indeed an event. When it’s in the water, which is most of the time, there is a haunting beauty to Cameron’s second effort. The effects in the original – while “wow” producing in 2009 – were largely of the big bam boom variety, as we watched colonizing humans go to war with the Na’vi inhabitants. While The Way of Water could have easily lost an hour from its three-hour-plus running time, it would have been a shame to lose its most magic moments, the stuff that makes it different.

Continuing his analogy of rapacious conquest of Indigenous people, The Way of Water finds us years after the Na’vi first repelled the “Sky People” of Earth. They inevitably returned, and within a few years have managed to construct smoke-belching cities. The science of placing human consciousness in genetically created Na’vi “avatars” has improved, and the marines themselves are now faux Na’vi – taller, stronger and able to breathe on the alien world.

One of their missions is to retrieve Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), an avatar marine who “went Native” and went on to sire an entire family of wise-cracking offspring with his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). In narration, Sully explains that years living among the Na’vi have made their language sound like English to him. Which is why we hear his sons Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), and Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) call each other “Bro!” and generally sound like teens hanging around the mall.

Also along for the ride are Spider (Jack Champion), a breathing-apparatus assisted human who was left behind as a child, and eye-rolling teen Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), who, for unclear reasons, was reborn Na’vi after Weaver’s original character was killed.

Certainly, we have questions. Like, can anybody really die in this franchise (a certain presumed-dead bad guy also returns)? But Cameron has always been much better with visuals than stories. Nobody ever went to Avatar to hear the dialogue. The title comes from the repeated line, “the way of water has no beginning and no end.” By the third hour that starts to sound literally true.

The profound change of scenery occurs when Sully realizes that his entire tribe is doomed if he stays in the trees, since he’s the Sky People’s prime target. So off goes the family on their flying mountain-banshees toward the ocean and the island home of the Metkayina (who are green, with fluke-like tails, and who fly over and under the water on what look like ichthyosaurs with wings). There, Sully’s family seeks asylum.

Well, we know where this is headed – toward a last-act battle I like to call The Whale War (the Metkayina have a sacred bond with whale-like creatures called Tulkuns).

This is actually a pretty thrilling battle scene, though the thrill wears off, as it does in most tent-pole movies these days, because of the rule that the final fist-fight (fish-fight?) must last at least 25 minutes.

Overall, the 13-year wait was worth it, even with the almost forgotten inconvenience of having to wear 3-D glasses over my glasses. It reminded me what I loved about the original, and what I didn’t. Let’s just say I love it conditionally.

Avatar: The Way of Water. Directed by James Cameron. Starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang. Opens in theatres Friday, December 16.