Avatar: The Way of Water Has Talking Whales
I say again: talking whales
As legacies go, Avatar’s is pretty strange. Despite being the highest-grossing movie of all time — a title it took from Titanic, James Cameron’s previous film — it never seemed to bore its way into the public consciousness the way you’d expect of such a juggernaut. No one ever quotes it, there aren’t any Avatar memes or reaction gifs, and you’ve probably never met anyone who considers it their favorite movie. And yet it’s always there, humming along like background radiation, especially since Cameron has been threatening us with a good time in the form of four(!) sequels for well over a decade now. The first of them is finally upon us, and it’s a reminder of why the original was so successful in the first place.
Everything that was silly in the first one remains just as silly in The Way of Water, perhaps even more so. The premise still resides somewhere between FernGully and Dances with Wolves, Sam Worthington is still the least charismatic leading man in the history of leading men, and the Na’vi are still very, very blue. That The Way of Water is engaging nevertheless is a grand testament to Cameron’s abilities — as an immersive spectacle that no other medium could hope to replicate, it’s unlike anything we’ve seen since, well, probably the first Avatar.
(Coincidence I can't help pointing out: Kathryn Bigelow, to whom Cameron was married from 1989–1991 and who won Best Director the year he was nominated for Avatar, once made a movie called The Weight of Water. Just saying!)
Lest you worry it doesn’t live up to its title, rest assured this new Avatar is nothing if not watery. It’s as though Cameron spent the intervening 13 years trying to figure out how to top his prior two films and decided to simply merge them, which is to say that another seafaring vessel meets the same fate as a certain “unsinkable” ship here. The plot, such as it is, concerns our returning heroes fleeing from the forest to the sea, where they’re welcomed reluctantly by a turquoise Na’vi tribe known as the Metkayina who have adapted to an oceanic way of life. None of this matters much beyond the fact that it’s an excuse for a number of underwater sequences that come close to recapturing the magic that was our original introduction to Pandora; this alien world, which some super fans consider so beautiful it made them suicidal, is just as striking below the surface.
Cameron was never going to disappoint in this regard, but simply knowing that this movie will be visually arresting is little preparation for just how engrossing it is on a sensory level. One wonders if Cameron will repeat the trick by switching biomes in the remaining installments — if there are forest Na’vi and ocean Na’vi, are there also desert Na’vi and tundra Na’vi? I wouldn’t mind finding out.
Like its predecessor, The Way of Water is infinitely more memorable for its imagery than it is for its narrative, characters, or dialogue. The one exception are the tulkun, whale-like creatures who possess great intelligence and emotional intuition. Said to be even more intelligent than the Na’vi, they’re philosophically minded and speak in subtitled dialogue — a silly conceit that I absolutely loved. There’s a good chance that you, too, will find their plight much more involving than that of the Na’vi, which isn’t necessarily a criticism. Here again, Avatar succeeds not by avoiding the ridiculous but by fully leaning into it.
One thing The Way of Water isn’t is hip. There are no Marvel-like quips every five minutes, no self-reflexive winks at the camera, and certainly no mid-credits scene. Cameron is 68 years old, extremely offline, and utterly unconcerned with how literally anyone else thinks he should be doing anything. (Which, I mean, fair — the last time he directed a movie that didn’t become the highest-grossing of all time was 1994.) He doesn’t care that a lot of us think the Na’vi are cringe because it’s doubtful he even knows what cringe means. To show us how little he cares, he’s probably about to fuck around and drop another $2 billion movie. Honestly, you have to respect it. The Way of Water may not live in the memory much longer than its predecessor did, but neither will it have to — the next one is supposedly only two years away.