Big Jim. Never doubted you for a second! After spending a decade going to the Mariana Trench and generally living under the sea, James Cameron felt inspired enough to take his Avatars from 2009 and movie them from the sky to water. The Way of Water is closer to Jim’s heart, earning that decade plus layoff with the visual creativity Cameron himself experienced over and over in the depths of the Ocean.
Storywise, if you don’t remember, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) has completed his transformation from paraplegic marine to Na’vi, the giant blue natives of planet Pandora. Now married to Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), the two get busy quickly building their family: having 3 kids of their own, teenagers Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) and Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), and child Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), and adopting 2 others: teenager Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), and human Spider (Jack Champion), left behind with the other human Pandora nonviolent scientists. Those years of bliss cannot last forever though: in the years since the 2009 movie, humans figured out how to transfer human memories into Na’vi bodies, meaning Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) is going to find his way to settle the score with Jake Sully, one way or another.
Cameron eases us back into Pandora, preparing everyone for the sensual feast they’re about to go on. Through the forest majesty, big Jim also sets up our main characters for the movie: the Sully family. Each gets some distinct personality, with Lo’ak, Kiri and Spider being the most interesting besides our main couple. Then, Cameron introduces the enemies: bringing back Quartich and, in return, Cameron’s theme of lecherous, condescending, parasitic human behavior towards nature. Then we get an action appetizer: forest warfare between the Na’vi and the humans for supplies and natural reserves that would have been a highlight sequence in most other films. The black and white characterization of Sully and Quaritch is turned greyer, as the family element and next generation’s involvement throws a wrench into the Sully/Quaritch battle to the death. Even though we’ve seen this story 13 years ago, James Cameron takes his time setting the characters and plot into motion before he really kick things into The Way of Water.
Because all this hourlong table setting sends us to the sea, and the true magic of a James Cameron movie. While I enjoyed Wakanda Forever‘s underwater sequences, I’m SO glad it came out first, because The Way of Water had an 11ish year head start on that film. I could have spent hours under Pandora’s waters, filled with aquatic creatures and images that would have filled my 8 year old dreams. More importantly, it’s not just Jake Sully going through the majesty, no: we get multiple Sully family training sessions to learn The Way of Water, meaning the audience is given multiple versions of the flying banshee scene from the original Avatar over the rest of the running time. While we’re eating the sumptuous scenery, Cameron is using each character’s personal experiences to flesh them out even more as we learn how these new experiences treat the Sullys and Colonel Quaritch (who’s getting his own Na’vi lessons). The director brings new characters to the fore too, including the oceanic Metkayina tribe chieftans Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and Ronal (Kate Winslet), and their daughter Reya (Bailey Bass). And like a master visual entertainer, all this is to set us up for our finale set piece, giving us homages and enhancements to Jim’s own previous movies as a treat for his fans, as well as a fascinating emotional mixture more complex than his first film.
Cameron has already said he’s filmed multiple Avatar movies. Excellent! He leaves enough threads and meat on the bone to to really kick his Avatar stories into the stratosphere. First we had Star Wars. Then we had Marvel. Is Avatar next? Who knows, but Big Jim has to make a bad movie first before I second guess his movie choices again. Have fun on your next Mariana trench sub adventure!