Sparring between Sully and Quaritch is a rehash from Avatar, and Cameron and his co-writers understand that repeating themselves would be a waste of their creative resources. This simmering conflict drives the plot, but Sully and Neytiri’s kids cumulatively get more screentime. Oldest son Neteyam makes little impression, while youngest daughter Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss) is generically cute. Middle son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) and adopted daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) are the two Cameron is most interested in, followed closely by adopted human son Spider (Jack Champion). Lo’ak is headstrong and finds trouble before and after Sully moves his family to the ocean, a blue John Connor getting into scrapes with the Pandora equivalent of sharks instead of terminators. Kiri is a bit of franchise-work whose origin and burgeoning abilities are annoyingly being saved for later sequels, and Weaver never vanishes into a voice role that requires her to play almost 50 years younger. Spider is quickly revealed to be Quaritch’s son, abandoned on Pandora when the humans fled and taken in by Sully. Spider’s captured by Quaritch in a first-act raid and serves as a guide for Quaritch, the same role that Neytiri played for Sully in Avatar. This is theoretically the richest area of the film, but none of it comes across thanks to any number of insufficiencies, from the editing to the writing to the anti-charisma of young Champion in the most irritating haircut a white person can have.
Time spent with the child characters is a vast improvement on Avatar thanks to their general liveliness and the inherently recognizable scenario of the Sully clan essentially getting a new job and having to enroll the kids in a different school. The bullying that happens between the kids and their new ‘classmates’ provides the closest thing the Avatar films have to empathy for its characters. Wanting to be liked or having a silly crush is recognizable in a way that little else is on Pandora. Sadly, Worthington is still not capable of engendering the same feelings. His Sully is still dour and humorless and a drag of a character, while Neytiri, the universally acclaimed best part of Avatar, has fallen way down the depth chart within her onscreen family. She still stuns with her commitment to the motion capture, particularly in a late-film action sequence that communicates how powerful and dangerous the Na’vi are, but she’s being buffeted by the plot instead of driving it. Similarly, Kate Winslet plays the matriarch of the water clan, and based on the role, it is a mystery why she agreed to take this on. Didn’t she get enough of hanging around Cameron in a pool on Titanic? Her role is generic distrust followed by acceptance, and there’s nothing in the character that demanded her vast skills.
Winslet might have wanted to work with Cameron again under any circumstance, or it’s possible that he felt the most acclaimed actor in the cast was needed to communicate the full magic of speaking with Pandora’s equivalent of whales. These creatures, called Tulukun in the film’s mythos, provide the heart of the film in a way that takes me back to the most heartfelt plea from elementary school Earth Day celebrations. There are very real subcultures who think dolphins and whales have healing powers, and the only rational takeaway from The Way of Water is that Cameron is in this cult. The Tulukuns are spiritual brethren of the water clan, can communicate with them, are devoted pacifists, and just happen to have the key to eternal human life in their brains. Quaritch enlists the apparently booming whaling industry on Pandora to drive Sully out of his hiding place, just as Lo’ak is getting to know an outcast Tulukun. These sections are stunningly manipulative and unintentionally hilarious. Would a spacefaring civilization really leave the hulking carcass of a Tulukun to rot, having extracted its precious brain juice, or would they see the value in converting raw materials to fit their considerable needs? Nope, humans bad, they would leave the carcass. The funniest thing Cameron has ever put to screen is the first time he subtitles a Tulukun over its whale song. It’s not like he can purposefully make a joke at this stage of his career, a lack embodied by his casting of Jemaine Clement as a Tulukun scientist. Clement is a man in the 2000’s era Will Ferrell class, where his mere presence can make me laugh, but Cameron deprives him of his New Zealand accent and gives him the deadening persona of a man who hates his job and is one cutting remark away from blowing his brains out.
Where The Way of Water most improves is in how it lacks the most egregious white savior stereotypes from the original. Jake Sully wasn’t just a human in a Na’vi’s body, but he was also the greatest Na’vi who ever existed. He doesn’t rise to the top of the water clan in the same way, and the film backing off of his chiefdom of the tree clan is a tacit acknowledgement of how foolish that was. However, all the woo-woo emptiness remains in the way the characters speak about their lives. Everyone’s always so impressed with the world that they’ve spent their entire lives in, composing braindead poems and odes to Pandora that get repeated like bad memes destined for unoriginal kitchens. The most sticky idea from the original is that humans, despite having the ability to traverse space, don’t have anything to offer the Na’vi, but the way that gets translated in The Way of Water is shooing away scientists who are in the midst of diagnosing an illness to stick a comatose character full of acupuncture needles. This is the limit of the film’s imagination, to imbue the Native American equivalent characters with the quackery of a strip mall storefront. Grind up a poultice from the weird plant species on this planet and I’ll believe it, but why not have a little orientalism instead. There also had to be a way to avoid making all the child characters do vague accents. The viewer looks up what all these actors look like and, of course, they’re white kids.
The first Avatar rolled off my brain and was only a source of frustration for as long as it seemed possible that it would win Best Director or Best Picture over several far more deserving films from 2009. The Oscars have receded in personal importance and the value of people seeing movies in theaters has risen, so it’s impossible to be frustrated with these films’ success. The more butts in seats, the better. The Way of Water is getting marginally closer to generating a bigger emotion than economic gratitude, but beyond the occasional thrill or admiration for a well-framed shot, this remains a franchise that leaves me cold. It is an improvement on its predecessor, but the ingredients for a much bigger step forward were present and the failure to capitalize on them almost makes this the bigger failure. Cameron is going to be working on three more Avatar films, and promises the next one will finally introduce some shades of gray to the Na’vi. Whether that will be the thing to attach a better adjective than ‘pretty’ to his franchise remains to be seen. C