In the “Avatar” sequel, Cameron’s two strains—the vegan who wants to plumb the mysteries of nature, and the hard-core weapons guy—are at odds.
Another blue movie. Thirteen years after “Avatar,” we have a sequel. The director, as before, is James Cameron, who has promised (or threatened) further installments. The new film is subtitled “The Way of Water,” which sounds like the memoir of a celebrity urologist. Once again, the center of operations is a moon called Pandora, whose inhabitants, the Na’vi, have azure skin, luminescent freckles, and magic ponytails that they plug into plants and animals. They are at one with nature and at sixes and sevens with encroaching humans, most of whom are nasty, brutish, and so short that they barely come up to the Na’vi’s navels.
The hero of the first movie was a mortal man, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who went rogue, native, and nuts for a Na’vi named Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña). In the end, he became a full-fledged Pandoran, in body, mind, and all-round spiritual oomph. The big news, in “The Way of Water,” is that he and Neytiri have been busy in the intervening period, spawning three children and adopting a couple more. (Cameron is too prim to reveal exactly how the spawning works, but I’m sure it must be heavy on the ponytails.) They all live together in a forest, bathed in bliss, until, one day, descending spaceships signal the return of Homo sapiens—specifically, a military task force, led by General Ardmore (Edie Falco), which wastes no time in churning up the soil and setting fire to innocent trees.
These early scenes of destruction recall the nuclear inferno that Cameron dramatized in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991), and they verify the strange—one might say pathological—contradictions in his instincts. On the one hand, we have Cameron the vegan, as green as the Na’vi are blue, who likes nothing better than to plumb the mysteries of the deep in a submersible. On the other hand, we have Cameron the hard-core weapons guy and tech fetishist, whose works resound to stuttering guns and the whirr, shunt, and click of metal upon metal. It’s as if Sir David Attenborough divided his time between birds of paradise and monster trucks.
The split is all too visible in the look, and in the structure, of Cameron’s latest film. To nobody’s surprise, Jake becomes the chief of the anti-human resistance, riding his mount—a dragonfly the size of a dragon, sporting pretty wings—into battle against a thundering train. (Had he been around in 1962, he would have seen Peter O’Toole pull a similar stunt in “Lawrence of Arabia.”) Opposing him is Quaritch (Stephen Lang), a marine colonel who has taken on Na’vi form: a cunning disguise, rendered utterly useless by his telltale crewcut. The only solution is for Jake, Neytiri, and the kids to quit the woods and make for the seaside; the central phase of the movie tacks back and forth, over and over, between the splashy utopia of their new home and the dark machinations of Quaritch and his ilk as they prepare to hunt Jake down.
Life by the shore is a shock. The local Na’vi are of a turquoise tint, with thick and finny tails, and they can swim as smoothly as they can run. Think of them as Na’vi seals. Jake’s children get picked on for being landlubbers, but there are compensations: the sea abounds with funky creatures, including a whale that understands sign language, and there’s a splendid moment when Jake’s adopted daughter, who is super-attuned to all sentient things, fends off a hostile human, beneath the waves, by urging a spindly invertebrate to wrap the attacker in its tendrils. Now you know: my enemy’s anemone is my friend. What, however, is the point of these marvels? Do they really advance the plot, or could it be that the film is an excuse, or at least an opportunity, for the refining of Cameron’s craft? Remember “Finding Nemo” (2003), which was a showcase for what Pixar could do with water, ripples and all? Well, this movie gives off the same proud gleam, magnified to the max.
