And we're back with another Oscar Film Journal entry, here at Enuffa.com!
The slate of films nominated for Best Picture in 2022 included not one but two popcorn blockbusters, both of them late sequels, both of them made with impressive technical innovations, and both of them more or less devoid of substance beyond that. I already wrote about Top Gun: Maverick, so now it's time to take a deep dive into the other one, Avatar: The Way of Water.
Set sixteen years after the first Avatar, this film catches us up via a narrated montage, showing us that Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) now have a family - two teenage sons, an eight-year-old daughter, and an adopted teenage daughter inexplicably birthed from the dormant husk of Sigourney Weaver's character's avatar, for some reason voiced by Sigourney herself (yes the septuagenarian actress plays a 14-year-old) - and everything is good on Pandora.
Until the bad guys show up again. The Resources Development Administration (RDA) is back to once again try to colonize this lush moon, because Earth is still a mess and they need stuff. Oddly the word "unobtainium" isn't mentioned in this film (or if it is I missed it), and the villains' objective this time is never made quite clear, beyond "First we need to pacify the hostiles." This time the human forces are technically led by General Frances Ardmore (a horribly miscast Edie Falco), but the guy running the show is still Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang). But how can that be, you ask, since he died in the first film? Well apparently before that mission was carried out, he uploaded his brain into a hard drive, and they transferred it to an avatar, just like what Sully went through in the first movie. Quaritch's objective IS made clear: he wants to kill Sully out of revenge, even though he has no memory of Sully having killed him since his consciousness was uploaded before that event. You might wonder why the RDA and General Ardmore would be okay with him wasting all their time and resources hunting down one dude, but don't. Because "reasons."
The bad guys attack and kidnap Sully's kids, plus their young human friend Spider who is Quaritch's son (I didn't remember him having a baby in the first film but I guess he did), the Na'vi free them, and Sully decides to relocate his family far away to the east, where a different, water-based Na'vi tribe lives. We spend a lot of time as the forest Na'vi learn the ways of the water Na'vi, and there are a slew of thin, largely unresolved subplots involving the teenage characters. Kiri (Weaver) wonders why she's "different" (we aren't really shown what's so different about her, or why she exists at all, but no matter), Sully's older son keeps neglecting his duty to protect the younger son, and the younger son forms a bond with a whale-like creature named Payakan (Honestly this was the only part of the story I found interesting). Meanwhile Quaritch somehow convinces Spider to help him acclimate to being a Na'vi so he can better hunt them, which he somehow manages to do with very little trouble. And somehow Spider never seems to try to escape or sabotage Quaritch's plans.
Inevitably the film builds to another Sully vs. Quaritch showdown so we can have obligatory battle sequences. The problem is the storytelling offers basically nothing new. Just like with the first film it's the Na'vi protecting their home and their people from the evil military guys, now with more water!
Something occurred to me as I watched the first Avatar years ago, and that feeling was magnified considerably with this film: at this point in his career James Cameron is much more interested in showing off what he can do with cutting edge filmmaking technology than he is in telling an actual story (I mean, why else would he go all in with the Avatar films instead of seeking out other film projects the last 25 years?). The script feels like a hurdle the filmmakers HAD to clear in order to start shooting/rendering, rather than a narrative they were excited to create. I feel like if George Lucas had made the Star Wars prequels using today's technology, they'd look like this. That's not a compliment to either director; this movie is near-headache-inducing. The "camera" for lack of a better word, since it's just a CG render, moves about so freely and impossibly it hardly pauses to let the audience regain our bearings. The human performances were filmed using motion capture at 24 frames per second (standard film framerate), but the CG is rendered at 48 fps and the live-action elements had to be upconverted to match. Thus somehow everything in this film looks simultaneously too smooth AND too jerky to trick the brain into thinking anything is real. This is like watching a three-hour cut scene from a video game. Contrary to what some critics claim (I'm looking at you Brian Tallerico), at no time did I ever have to "remind myself" that this wasn't real. This film never climbs out of the deep Uncanny Valley it digs itself into. There's no weight, no sense of actual physics, just a series of slick, rapid movements.
Part of the problem is the character design. Let's be frank - the Na'vi are ridiculous-looking creatures. Besides the absurdity of their tall, thin stature and their impossibly smooth, blue, hairless skin, their facial features had to have been designed in a board room. Giant vulnerable eyes so we'll find them sympathetic, literal cat noses so we'll find them kinda cute, and luscious human lips to give them sex appeal. There isn't anything realistic about their appearance, so no matter how adeptly their skin and hair texture is rendered they'll always keep us at arm's length when it comes to our brains accepting them as tangible, three-dimensional creatures. Couple that with computers' continued inability to totally replicate real-life movement, and I was aware at all times I was watching a cluster of pixels. Couldn't Cameron have just used prosthetics? James Gunn has done some great things with that technology.
All this begs the question, what exactly is the "groundbreaking" technology with which Cameron made these films? To me they look like a hundred other CG-filled blockbusters, except in the case of Avatar 2 there's almost no human characters at all. Why not just make a fully animated film at this point? Performance capture can be used very effectively to trick the brain - see the Planet of the Apes prequels - but it needs to be done tastefully and with really extraordinary physical performances. Neither of those things happened here.
Speaking of POTA, two of the creators of those films, Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffra, co-wrote this film, and their work veers dangerously into self-plagiarism. Where the first Avatar was just Dances With Wolves on an alien planet, this film contains a lot of elements from Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and it kept reminding me of how much better and more substantial that film was. Never a good thing. This film even ends with a shot of the protagonist lamenting that war is coming, as it zooms into a closeup of his face, just like the final shot of Caesar. I understand the third Avatar will pit our beloved Na'vi against a hostile tribe. Yeah, that's the exact plot of Dawn. Jesus Christ, Rick and Amanda, come up with new material.
Their script also offers nary a single memorable line of dialogue. Every word feels like a placeholder. "We need to have the blue man say something here to the blue woman." Similarly every performance feels stunted and a complete waste of the talents involved. Sigourney Weaver's dialogue is limited to less than a few words at a time, to the point that it took me multiple lines to figure out it was her (and of course once I did I never once believed Kiri was a teenager). Kate Winslet's character is barely onscreen and only has one moment of real acting. And poor Zoe Saldana, one of the two main characters in the first film, has almost nothing to do here except be a concerned mom. Even when there's a moment of high emotion, the fact that it's buried behind a firewall of CG robs it of any urgency. The only cast member who seems to be having any fun (and no, it's not the charisma vacuum that is Sam Worthington) is Stephen Lang, who was probably just pleasantly surprised he got to play this character again. But even Quaritch is a stock villain character, given no depth other than one conflicted moment over whether or not he cares about Spider. Being cast in one of these films is a thankless job indeed. Kate Winslet got some press during shooting when she broke the record for the longest held breath underwater during a film shoot. Seven minutes it was. Quite a stunning achievement. But so what, she doesn't actually appear onscreen. The humanity has been stripped from every performance, and for all the reviews lauding this auteur's vision vs. Marvel's corporate machine, Avatar 2 truly feels like sterile, soulless filmmaking. Say what you want about the MCU, but I actually felt something while watching those characters. The only one I cared about in Avatar 2 was the whale, ironically the one character NOT played by a human actor.
I'm honestly baffled at how much money these two films have made. Over $5 BILLION combined. And yet, I don't know a single human being who considers these films a significant contribution to pop culture. No one quotes Avatar movies, I never see Avatar shirts being worn out in public, there's almost no Avatar merch in any stores, ever. The first film made a bunch of short-lived noise and then vanished from the public consciousness. Avatar 2 pulled in $2.3 billion worldwide and yet I barely heard a peep about it in mainstream discourse. I'm not sure I've ever seen a wider disparity between a film's box office take and its cultural impact. Star Wars this definitely ain't.
I am convinced this film and Top Gun: Maverick were only nominated for Best Picture that year because they each made an absolute killing at the box office, at a time when fewer and fewer people were going to the movies. And I can respect that, to be sure. Both films gave people a reason to want to visit a cinema, a feat that gets harder and harder the more home theater technology and content improve. But that doesn't make them good films.
I guess I have to give Avatar: The Way of Water a couple points for its technical achievements, but again, when you're rendering 95% of the film in a computer it ceases to impress me from a filmmaking standpoint. Pixar films are entirely done in a computer, plus most of them actually have a human story I care about. Avatar 2 is just a (very long) series of colorful images created with zeroes and ones, with barely a plot to give them any purpose. I more or less hated Top Gun: Maverick, but at least the action scenes in that film were real people flying real planes and doing real dangerous stunts. When a major character died in Avatar 2 I was reminded of Chandler Bing's quote from Friends about why the death of Bambi's mom didn't make him cry: "Yes, it was very sad when the man stopped drawing the deer." Hey, at least with that film there was an actual man doing an actual drawing.
Fuck me, we still have three more of these goddamn films to sit through....
I give Avatar: The Way of Water *1/2 out of ****.
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