Out of any of his contemporaries, filmmaker James Cameron has always found ways to break the invisible glass between his audience and his movies. Immersion is one thing, but Cameron’s films collapse your reality. One moment, you’re a doomed passenger aboard the Titanic. Another, you’re fending for your life from hungry Xenomorphs. The screen is always more a suggestion than a barrier.
Avatar: The Way of Water is his visual zenith. Thirteen years after transporting moviegoers to Pandora, Cameron now dunks them into the planet’s teeming oceans. The most beautiful dreams can’t really capture what it’s like to swim off Cameron’s imagined Metkayina reef. The best movies make imaginary worlds feel real. Avatar: The Way of Water makes the auditorium feel like the dream, and Pandora’s aquatic wonderland feel like home. There really hasn’t ever been something quite like this.
The debate of Avatar’s legacy always forgot that first sight of Pandora’s forests. That film pushed the boundary of computer-generated worldbuilding, but its plot became as hacked up as an axe-throwing board. However, Cameron always knew his foundation was sturdy. No Smurf or Fern Gully jokes could give you back the breath you lost the first time you stepped foot in the most-realized movie world of the century this side of Middle Earth. Cameron always knew that the easiest ways to change the visual game was to root the story in most basic tropes. He was going to have all his fun playing God while familiarity filled in the gaps.
Avatar: The Way of Water finds Cameron challenging himself as a storyteller all while setting the new bar of visual storytelling. Once you dive into Pandora’s oceans, you can’t go back. Filmmakers across the world are going to be pulling their hair out as to how they’re going to make their big-budget studio films feel this natural. While some may nitpick the hyperrealism of high frame rate projection, Pandora’s beaches feel like destinations instead of computer-generated wizardry. You’re going to wonder when these shores will pop up on a leg of The Amazing Race. Kevin Feige is going to have to go into hiding with how good Avatar: The Way of Water looks. It makes the latest Avengers film look like it was released around the time of Young Sherlock Holmes.
On visual splendor alone, there really might not be a more believable impossibility than swimming among the sea creatures of the new Avatar film. If you find the right IMAX 3D screen, you might as well pack a bathing suit and scuba gear. Your theater is about to take water, and your skin is about to turn blue. Cameron and co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver level the film’s worldbuilding with a refreshingly complicated story of families and trust. Right away, the Jake Sully clan (now complete with kids) is sent on the run when the humans head back to Pandora, this time for permanent residence. Sully’s old nemesis, the thought-dead, Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang, stellar in his first mo-cap performance) wants blood for blood, now rebooted in the body of the blue-skinned aliens he once reviled.
The Sully family’s running finds them taking refuge with the Metkayina clan, Na’vi creatures more adept to their waterfaring home. The film’s middle portion almost amounts to a hangout movie, replete with plenty of time to swim around Pandora’s ocean floor and meet all the alien fish, whale-like tulkuns and sentient coral reefs. The Sullys struggle to fully integrate with their costal cousins, which pulls their family unit tighter as their world gets irrevocably smaller.
The film veers into an effort to both protect the Sullys from Quaritch’s revenge tour and the tulkuns from human hunters who want to mine their brain goo for the folks back on a deteriorating Earth. You’d probably guess it all ends in a water battle for the ages, and you’d assume correct. It’s everything Cameron does well as a filmmaker combined with some narrative complexities that make moral grey as tantalizing as all of Pandora’s other colors.
In a year already chocked full of fantastic blockbusters, Avatar: The Way of Water dives in at the last moment and takes the sponge cake. Cameron’s breathtaking sequel will make even the most aquaphobic want to slap on some water wings and jump into Cameron’s big blue world. Years from now, you’re going to be telling your grandkids about the first time you went swimming in Pandora. It’ll probably be lame for them with wherever movies are in their time. For us, it’s a new wave.
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