Avatar: The Way of Water: Entertaining; but Disappointing
To start off this movie review, it must be said that I am a huge fan of the first Avatar movie. To say that I find joy in criticizing the second Avatar movie would be a fat-faced lie. You can see other blog posts here about how I appreciate the first Avatar movie. However, after spending big bucks on buying the premiere tickets in China, I was thoroughly, royally, irretrievably disappointed. 13 years of yearning for Cameron’s sequel to his first masterpiece was not a total waste, but it certainly was not the same epic movie that I was expecting.
That is not to say that The Way of Water is a bad movie. Even though I did not like what I saw, does not mean it is a bad movie in any way. So, let’s start with what I liked about this movie, and then to my disappointments.
13 years of CG technology advancement was not a joke. This movie is absolutely an eye-candy. It is so beautiful, in fact, that every frame of this movie is a wall paper. It absolutely blows my mind on how realistic everything looked, knowing that everything was rendered digitally. Since seeing the re-release of the first Avatar movie in theaters a few months ago, I can clearly see some of the graphics not aging as well as others, and the frame rate was horrendously low when you start to look for it. However, that’s not the case with this movie. I can comfortably say that CG technology used in this movie will never be surpassed, as nothing will look as realistic as this movie (I’m looking at you, Black Panther).
Frame rate wise, it is immediately clear that Cameron’s high frame rate claim for The Way of Water was not a joke. It really is a lot better the first movie. However, it’s not the case that the whole movie enjoys the high frame rates, rather only a certain parts, and there are still very serious tearing when there is a high velocity move across the screen. Again, this is something that a normal movie-goer will never be able to see, but it is something that critics might capitalize on now since Cameron had bragged about the frame rates improvement his team has created.
Another thing I really enjoyed was references to the first movie. Lines like “you’re not in Kansas anymore” is a really nice way to acknowledge the real fans of the first movie. This is something that normal movie-goers will never know, but is something that will be picked up immediately by a fan. I really appreciated the writers putting in easter-eggs like this.
The movements in the film is very much a step-up from its predecessor. Every action in the film does not feel strange in any way, and every muscle movement correlates to an action that in some way relates to our understanding of how our limbs work. If you need a point of comparison, look no further than the fight scene between Tsu’tey and Jake, where Jake threw the last punch, his entire upper body went with that punch, and it just looked uncanny.
The final thing that I liked a lot was how The Way of Water fleshed out some of the lores that were left unexplored in the first movie. As someone who purposefully bought official lore books and comic books, I have learned how to differentiate a Na’vi and an Avatar through the eyebrows and fingers, and how the Tree of Souls actually stores the memories of those who have passed and can live on eternally. It is nice to see how Cameron has decided to fully explore these little details and magnified them, and gave us a fuller and deeper understanding of each of these things that fans appreciate.
With that said, these are the only things that I liked about this movie. I never found the original Avatar’s plot to be boring, and for The Way of Water, it still holds true. The story is not boring at all. However, it is on such a small scale now, it doesn’t feel like a real “epic” movie that this film is trying to be.
The first film, while 13 years ago, featured a full-scale war between the Na’vi and the humans both on the skies and on the ground. We know that the human side has mobilized all available military units including mine workers, in its base on “Hell’s Gate”. Even though this is not a complete army setup, it is all they have got, and the immediacy that follows is quite clear. On the Na’vi side, Quaritch said based on satellite imagery, there are already 2,000 aboriginal hordes and more are on the way. The film featured a montage of Jake Sully and Neytiri going to different clans recruiting warriors for a battle to the death. It is indeed a full-scale war between these two factions, and they clearly will not stop until the other side has all but deceased.
In The Way of Water, though, things are a lot more soft. If I have to summarize this into one sentence, it might as well be “A few aboriginals fighting against one whale hunting ship”. Yes, the final battle only tallied less than 50 Metkayina clan warriors and a whole shipload of humans. And hear this, the side characters didn’t even fight for more than 1 minute, and they were gone by the final confrontation. Where did they go? Nobody knows.
If we are shown that the whale hunters are the only humans that descended from Earth, then perhaps, this is a battle to the death with the invaders. Yet, we are shown in the beginning of the film that the humans have a giant base on a piece of barren land that is many times larger than the base in the first movie. It is so big, in fact, it made me question what were they doing not sending more people into the battle, instead they had to rely on a group of whale hunters with only one ship? The final battle is so small, in fact, it made me feel that the core battle is only the struggle between Jake and Quaritch, and I can’t help but overthink that the side characters are really not that important.
It is true, I do not remember any of the side characters’ names. Cameron pushed the side characters hard, and in effect, massively reduced the original characters’ screen time; yet, the side characters did not leave an impression on me as hard as Neytiri did during the original film. You can clearly see that Cameron is pushing Kate Winslet’s character hard, but she is nothing but a plot device to show how bad the humans are. I really expected more from her since, you know, it’s Kate freakin’ Winslet! However, both Kate, and the actor that is supposed to be her husband in the film, did not do anything significant to warrant us remembering their names. In fact, the only names I remember are of the Sully family, but that’s only because I really wanted to.
And this, is my biggest gripe with this movie. It is very clear that Cameron is trying to retire Jake Sully and Neytiri. As someone who had the most dialogue in the last film, both Jake and Neytiri had the least on camera time. In fact, after they were kind of re-introduced in the opening montage, they became background characters to their new family members. To their credit, the characters are actually quite charming. To not spoil anything, I will not extend on why they are charming. They are following clear-cut character archetypes, but that doesn’t make them boring. HOWEVER, I really do not want to care about them.
As a fan of the first movie, I am emotionally attached to both Jake and Neytiri as main characters. After 13 years, all I wanted to see was their story. I mean, it’s been 13 years, so of course they have kids now; but I do not care for their kids to be on the centerstage of the story. I understand that my gripe with the main character choice does not in any way mean that the kids don’t make good center characters; but that’s not why I bought my ticket. To me, they can be good auxiliary characters, to Jake and Neytiri, not the other way around.
In a way, the trailer of the movie is very deceiving. It showed equal screen time between Jake/Neytiri and their kids, but in the movie, that’s not the case. It became so bad, that the cool shots featuring Jake and Neytiri that made it into the trailer, that’s mostly their only scenes worth mentioning, because there are no more scenes featuring them. Cameron has made it clear: you have to care about Lo’ak (second son of Jake’s) now because he is the main protagonist we’re pushing from now on, and he has the most screen time other than Sigourney Weaver’s character, but it is just very distracting when the character that I actually care about are in the shadow of this new character that I am just now being introduced to.
This should’t be a problem for you if you generally did not care for the first movie or has already forgotten most of its plot. I, for one, am too invested in the first film and its characters, and it is very hard for me to let go. I also do not like teenager related content (probably because I am still young!), so that also did not help when the main characters are just a bunch of teenagers, with the adults being left behind.
Speaking of Lo’ak, I do not like his character design. Both Jake and Neytiri from the first film had character design that looked slightly better than their respective actors. I mean, they are supposed to help the audience fall in love with this alien species, so they must look good. They still look the same in the second film, with Neytiri having some slight wrinkles to show aging, which is a sigh of relief. Lo’ak, played by Dalton Britain, is not attractive looking at all.
I specifically looked up Britain to see what he looks like, and he is a very attractive looking human. This is what confuses me. How did someone look as fine as Britain, look this much unattractive like Lo’ak? Lo’ak, by all means, is not an ugly character, but he is just not physically appealing enough to be a leading character in my books. His eyes are too farther apart, which made him look like one of those hammer sharks.
All other newly introduced characters looked fine. With the exception of Naytayem, who looked kind of plain, Kiri and Tuk both looked appealing enough to stand in as protagonists in future films. Speaking of Kiri, it is a teenager played by Sigourney Weaver, who is, I am guessing, close to her 60s or even pass that. She has done a wonderful job playing a teenager, but her voice, though, is just too wise and thick for a teenager. The film crew obviously manipulated her voice some way during post-processing, but it was not enough to mask Sigourney’s voice completely, which was kind of uncanny to see a teenager with a voice as wise as Grace Augustine’s from the last film. I am guessing that it was Cameron’s active decision to keep as much of Weaver’s voice in there as possible, that is a creative decision that I don’t disagree with, but it was still a little bit too much.
The aforementioned two points with the scale and the new characters are my two biggest gripes with the new movie. However, there are still many tiny things that a fan will notice instantly but not to a common on-looker. These things can look cute at first, but will become obvious enough to a point that it honestly looks like someone was too lazy during post-processing and just phoned it in using animation data from the last film.
One such instance was during the scene of the evil avatars trying to get a Ikran from the Hallelujah Mountains. When Quaritch chose his Ikran, and yes, that was the first Ikran he saw and he was just chosen by it, despite during the first film, it took Jake several tries to get chosen. This was, after all, a conscious decision to shorten the film, but I’m off topic. When Quaritch’s Ikran chose him, he displayed fight signal by opening its mouth and showing its teeth. This was the exact copy from the mountain scene when Jake was chosen, except the skin of the Ikran is different.
Also, during one of Jake’s fight scene that I can’t remember exactly which one, he opened his mouth to show his teeth in order to display fight signal, that was the exact same from the final war scene in the first movie. This one is more cute though, I am guessing Cameron made Sam Worthington do the exact same as an easter-egg.
One specific choice that Cameron made that left a bad taste in my mouth was with him leaving a trail of clues with one scene which made the audience curious and wanted more, but ultimately didn’t show anything in the end so things can be explained in the next film. The most obvious one was during Kiri’s connection with the tree of voices where she meets Grace Augustine. She had a seizure that ended the connection, which was left as a mystery, when the audience is finally going to know who her father is. Since the start of the film, we were given clues that Kiri was not born the normal way, and her connection to Eywa was strong enough that she can hear her heartbeat and control animals. Yet, this line of information was left unexplored. The only reason for this choice is that they can have something to explore in the third film.
Avatar, the original film, is in every way, a complete film. It has an arch, from the beginning of the hero’s journey to the end, everything that was of importance to the film makers were all explored enough that it had a complete ending. If you leave something in the story, for example, a clue with Kiri’s parents, then it must pay off later so it is complete story telling. That’s not Cameron’s choice. It is very clear what his end goal is here with the exclusion of a satisfying answer to a question he left earlier in the film, and sad to say, I do not agree with his choice. This is bad screen play. This theory is called “Chekhov’s Gun”, an interesting concept, you should read more about it.
Remember how I complimented The Way of Water’s beautiful CG work earlier in this post? It is also one of the biggest boo boos for this film. The only reason how the first film was a visual masterpiece that drew people to appreciate Pandora’s CG view is with its familiar yet strange floral and fauna. The bioluminescence in the first film was such a visual masterpiece, it has left a huge impression on everyone who has seen it. We see trees that are hundreds of meters tall, and rocks that actually float to the sky. We are very familiar with everything in the first film, yet, they are still completely unfamiliar to us because it is something new; something otherworldly. That was the genius of Pandora’s world design.
This great asset to this Avatar universe was sadly not as pronounced in the second film. The second film, obviously, is set in an oceanic area, where we get to see a lot of exotic CGI fish swimming around. Yet, nothing about the ocean of Pandora looked “otherworldly” to me. It just looks like a regular, blue, ocean on earth. Obviously, the newly designed fauna for the water scenes are cool to look at, but since humans never explored the deep sea that much, we have no point of comparison. Perhaps for Cameron, who spent years down the Mariana Trench, the fauna that was designed for this film is extremely otherworldly, but for us, we don't have references. In the first film, the design of the fauna like the lemurs and the Ikrans are designed based off of exotic deep sea creatures that were extremely colorful, and that’s why they looked extra special for non-aquatic animals. When it is just fish, it is just, not as special anymore. Even though the sea created by Cameron’s CG team is extremely realistic, it is perhaps “too realistic”, to our own earth counterpart. It takes away the specialness of the ocean in the second film, making it quite boring to look at after a while.
There are two more things left, hang in there, we’ll get through everything. One of the last two things that I do not appreciate is with how they handled the details that they purposefully created in the first film, but was discarded like old fart in the second. The Na’vi language was created by a Linguistics professor in University of Southern California. It is, by all means, that professor’s love child, and is a language that is very much usable in the sense that it has a grammar structure very similar to German. Yet, a whole language that was created for the sake of the world of Pandora was discarded in the second film. The only occasion where Na’vi was spoken was at the very very beginning of film where Jake and Neytiri were having fun with their children. After that, everything is done in English. Yes, everything.
I can understand how Jake speaks English to Neytiri and their children, but how can the Metkayinas speak English? It is shown that they have limited interactions with humans because the humans do not purposefully hunt the whales in front of them, so how come they felt the need to learn English like how the Omaticayas did? The Omaticayas, the clan from the first film, needed to learn English because the humans are very close to them and they need a way to communicate. It was a very clever premise that got forgotten in the second film. Everyone in the Metkayina clan spoke English. When they welcomed Jake and Neytiri, they spoke English. When Neytiri was having an argument with Kate Winslet’s character, they spoke English. The girl that flirts with Lo’ak, only speaks English to him. I mean, from a logistic stand point behind the scenes, it might be easier for the crew to speak English and easier for the audience to not feel the need to read subtitles at all times, but come on, this is something so unique for the Avatar universe that got thrown away for convenience’s sake.
After reading about this online, I see people saying that the reason why they are all speaking English in this one is because Jake narrated earlier that Na’vi sounds like English to him now. That is even more confusing. Is the film in his narrative now? Maybe a better way to ask this question would be: is this film in his mind now? Are we supposed to view the film through Jake’s eyes now? If it was even more clearly spelled out, perhaps it is not a bad choice. However, since it needed the audience to clearly know that this film is now played through Jake’s eyes, it was a bad choice. Like how it cannot explain why they are still speaking English when Jake is not around.
The Na’vi body movement that was purposefully created for the first movie also got thrown out for no apparent reason. In the first film, the Omaticayans walked differently, hunted differently, and fought differently compared to humans and the Avatars. Action coordinators created specific movements for the Na’vi characters so they would look alien to us, the humans. This was even explored in behind the scenes tapes. Yet, it got thrown away. The Metkayinas, just walk like normal humans, and they throw spears exactly like how humans do it. So, how are they different from humans again? What’s the need with the CGI blue skin again?
One more detail that got thrown away in service for convenience was with the whole mask situation for humans. It is made clear that humans cannot breathe Pandora’s air because it contains some element that is too much for humans. That is why humans need to wear a mask that filters out Pandora’s air and convert it to normal oxygen that humans breathe. The mask that they are wearing is just a filter. This is from the official lore book and all the wiki books that were all official. However, this detail was glossed over conveniently when, somehow, Spider, a human character, can use it as an oxygen mask under water. It is the same mask from the first film because it had a filtration device by the end of the cables; yet, some how, that device is an oxygen tank now? Well, this is a detail that no one will know unless they read the lore book, and this was never explicitly stated in the first film, so normal people would not know, but for us dedicated fans, this is a slap in the face. The lores of the world that writers created are fascinating because it extends the world to people who give crap about this world. It is a way for the fans to know more about this world and have a better understanding of the story. If the lore is false, I don’t know what to say.
Last but not least, music. If you have read earlier blog posts from my website, you would know that I very much care about the scores in films. Click here for a blog post where I defended the original film’s music choice. Like I said in that blog post, music is the absolute most important thing other than the cinematic angles of a modern film. If the music sucks, then more than likely, the film will suck as well. That is why people spend big bucks on movie music. It can make or break a film. That is why I appreciate James Horner a lot for his contributions to the first film. His scores are more than epic; they convey the emotions that were needed during crucial points of the story.
That is not the case with the second film. For The Way of Water, the music was divided in half. The first half is the new original score written for this second entry into Avatar’s universe, and the second half is just the music from the first film. When I say it is “just the music from the first film”, I mean it literally, as it was the same exact audio file used in the first film. Since I do a little music on the side, and since I love the score of the first movie so much, I can notice if the music was played by a different orchestra or if there are slight variations to the original one; but no, there is no difference. It really is just a copy and paste job that Cameron decided was a good idea.
If the copied music was actually pasted onto a great spot of the movie, then I would not have a problem with that. Except, that’s not the case. One such instance is during a scene with Lo’ak. I don’t remember who he was fighting, or if he was suffocating under water; but the piece of music that was playing when he was losing consciousness was “The Death of Quaritch” in the Deluxe album of the original movie. When the high pitched sound was played, in the original movie, that is when Neytiri freed herself from the Thanator, grabbed her bow, and shot Quaritch to his death. That music combo with the scenery was so fitting that it still gives me chills every time I see it. It is such a powerful combination. However, when it is just a teenager choking under water or losing consciousness, it is not as powerful. It actually is quite confusing, as the theme of the song and the theme of the action is quite different. What in the theme actually warranted that specific placement of that specific song? It is quite baffling.
What doesn’t help is that the original score created for this second film is lackluster at best. Unlike the first film where the music left a huge impression on me, this one did not. When James Horner passed away during a plane crash in 2015, this is exactly what I feared. I feared no one can successfully succeed him as Avatar’s sequel’s composer, and my fear was realized in the most horrific way possible. As Horner’s disciple, Simon Franglen did not do a very good job at actually doing his job. His music is extremely boring, and was overshadowed by the questionable placement of the original score where it was way more impactful and, what’s the word, not boring!
When I saw the first trailer for The Way of Water, I was extremely amazed by the etherial music that I was very excited for Franglen’s rendition of his own and Horner’s original scorer. I thought my doubt in 2015 was unfounded because of that trailer. I was so wrong. I was extremely disappointed by his music. Horner’s mastery, it seems, will never be surpassed by anyone else. For that, I respect him even more.
So, if you read all the way til here, that means you have read all almost 5000 words that I wrote for this review type thing. As an avid Avatar aficionado (wow that’s all letter As), seeing a sequel coming into fruition was what got me through 2022. And now when it is finally here, I started to doubt myself. Maybe I have too much of an expectation for a sequel to a film that I find perfect. If I did not see the re-release for the original film, perhaps I will not feel as disappointed as I am right now. In a way, I think the re-release destroyed the second film, as it helps people make distinctions between the two films really well. If I saw the original film in 2009 once, and saw The Way of Water in theaters now, perhaps I will not be as disappointed. After all, it is still an entertaining story that got stretched from the appropriate 1 hour time frame into 3 hours.
I hate that I don’t like this movie more. After all, this is what I have waited for 13 years. This is what I have always wanted since I was 9. When my parents asked me to come back to China last month, I was slightly reluctant to do so before December because I knew The Way of Water was going to premiere on December 16th, and I didn’t know if China would allow this film to be in theaters. This is how much this movie meant to me; and this high expectation paralleled my shock when the movie was over. For once, a Cameron sequel is not as good as the original? This kept ringing in my head the night after I watched the film.
Still, despite the massive disappointment I got from watching this movie, I am still going to view it again for old time’s sake. After all, I am still the person who watched the 2022 Re-release of the first Avatar film 5 times in theaters. If this is what Cameron can produce for anything Avatar related, then this will be something that I pay to watch. Though, next time, I am not going to withhold drinking liquids for the entire day to stop me from going to the bathroom when the movie is playing. Now I know the when to go to the bathroom.