In the run-up to The Way of Water’s release online discourse seemed to focus on how, despite being the highest grossing film of all time, Avatar has no cultural impact. Nobody can name a single character from Avatar or say anything about the plot. Beyond its similarities to Dances With Wolves (or Pocahontas for those who were too young to be aware of the former) and the tail sex, nobody remembers the plot. People aren’t even writing fan-fiction about it. The one positive aspect of the film almost everyone seemed to agree on is that both the 2009 original and the trailers for its 2022 sequel was that they are visually unparalleled. Avatar still looks better than most modern blockbusters despite the decade of technological advances they have. Trailers for The Way of Water before Marvel’s 2022 releases in particular highlighted how advanced the franchise’s visual effects are compared to any other films. Praise for The Way of Water has largely stuck to its aesthetics. I won’t contest that Pandora and its inhabitants are possibly the most beautiful CGI creations I’ve ever seen but limiting praise for The Way of Water to its visuals does a disservice to how astonishingly good the rest of the film is.
In a world where media is dominated by an ironic detachedness The Way of Water distinguishes itself by taking itself seriously. It has jokes, which landed more often than they didn’t in both screenings of the film I attended, but they aren’t jokes at the expense of the film. Half of the trailers which played before The Way of Water were full of jokes about how silly they are, jokes which we have seen time and time again serve only to undermine any emotion or verisimilitude a film might cultivate. By rejecting this Whedonesque humour Cameron forces the viewer to meet with his film on its level, to accept it for what it is, a choice which contributes to the sense of realness the world of Pandora just as much as the ground-breaking special effects do.
Although many view the characters as one of the weakest aspects of Avatar the Sully family, their allies, and their enemies were what truly made me fall in love with these films. Sam Worthington’s Jarhead father doing the best to keep his family alive and together might be the best performance of his career. The four Sully children all feel like believable characters even though one of them is a fourteen-year-old being played by seventy-three-year-old Sigourney Weaver. Returning villain Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) is delightfully evil yet just deep enough to be elevated from fun to compelling. Even the film’s non-verbal characters ended up being some of my favourites of 2022. My only real criticism here is how badly Naytiri (Zoe Saldaña) is side-lined here. The children are the real focus of the film, but it is a real shame that Neytiri had to play such a limited part in this chapter of her family’s story.
All in all, The Way of Water is a worthy successor to one of the best blockbuster films ever made, continuing Cameron’s tradition of producing sequels which blow their predecessor out of the water, which also sets up the Avatar franchise for continued success for years to come. Its characters and world should be enough to get you to buy a ticket, but if that’s not enough it also has the best visuals you will see on screen, at least until Avatar 3 comes out next year.
“Avatar – Bow and Arrows” by k-ideas is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.