Water Tribes

Film: Avatar: The Way of Water
Format: Streaming video from Disney Plus on rockin’ flatscreen.

Well, I knew I was going to have to watch this eventually. I very much didn’t want to watch Avatar: The Way of Water, and had it not been for my personal commitment to watch every Best Picture nominee that I can, I would not have watched it. For starters, I don’t have that much interest in it, nor any real desire to remember the mythology from 2009. Second, and importantly, this thing clocks in at 196 minutes. If ever there was a poster child for runtime bloat, it’s this.

We’re going back to the planet of Pandora, and thankfully this time we won’t be dealing with the ridiculousness of looking for a mineral called unobtanium. We’re going to spend the start reintroducing ourselves to our main characters. On the one side, this is going to mean getting reacquainted with Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). It’s years later, though and now they have kids. These are sons Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) and Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), and daughter Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss). It also includes adopted daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), born from the inert avatar of Dr. Grace Augustine (also Weaver) from the first film. Also in the mix is Miles “Spider” Socorro (Jack Champion), a human child who we learn is the son of Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang),the bad guy from the first film.

On the bad guy side, Quaritch and the rest of his crew are back, this time as the giant blue-skinned Na’vi. Yep, they’ve had their recorded memories permanently implanted into Avatars. Quaritch is the only one who has any real personality—the others are distinguishable only by things like “wears sunglasses” or “has a mohawk.” Also on the bad guy side is the new military commander, General Frances Ardmore (Edie Falco).

Anyway, for the last however long, the Na’vi have been living their lives while the “sky people” have left them alone. But no longer—humanity is back on Pandora with a hankering for conquest and revenge and for a new chemical found in the brain of giant whale-like creatures. The chemical stops aging in humans, making it the most valuable substance in the universe, at least for the humans.

But a lot of this is about Quaritch trying to settle a score with Jake Sully. To that end, he and his team are sent into the forest, and this is precisely the moment where I checked out on this being anything like a movie that was going to try to be smart. As they go off, General Ardmore tells them that they hope they will be taken as natives. And then they proceed to gear up in military equipment, use human weapons and materials, move in human military fashion, and speak English. They’re even wearing combat boots. Naturally, though, they temporarily capture of few of the Sullys’ kids and much fighting commences. Wanting to keep their people safe, Jake and Neytiri leave the forest with their kids and go to the reef people called the Metkayina, who are a greener version of the Na’vi with webbed fingers and a flat tail. We get a little mild racism happening here, both because of the skin color difference/tail difference and because Sully’s kids have human hands rather than Na’vi hands. Oh, and Spider remains trapped by the humans and has an awkward meeting with his father.

A surprising amount of this movie is essentially hazing of the Sully kids by the water tribe. They are also not particularly welcome by the chief’s wife Ronal (Kate Winslet), but the chief of the tribe, Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) accepts them on a tentative basis. Because we have to have a love interest that actually works (because the obvious Kiri/Spider love affair ain’t happening) we’re going to have sparks between Lo’ak and the daughter of the chief, Tsirea (Bailey Bass).

Here's the thing. I’m not going to dive too far into the plot here. If you liked the first Avatar, you’ve probably already seen this, and if you didn’t, a plot rundown isn’t going to make this more attractive. So let’s talk about what works and what doesn’t.

What works is that it’s pretty. I don’t know that it carries the same graphic weight that it did a decade and a half ago, but it does look good. Except, that is, for the Na’vi themselves. I think they fall very much into uncanny valley territory, and I find them kind of disturbing. Still, the animation is good, and I won’t take that away from the film.

There are, I think, two significant problems with Avatar: The Way of Water. The first is that it is unbelievably predictable. As with the first film, there were moments that I predicted with disturbing accuracy, not merely in terms of what would happen, but at times the exact moment things would happen and lengths of shots. It’s also very derivative of Avatar: The Last Airbender in the sense that we end up traveling across the planet to meet up with the water tribes. There are three more Avatar movies planned. It wouldn’t shock me a great deal if the next two involved an Earth Kingdom and a Fire Nation.

It also feels very racist. I don’t mean in the sense that the Sullys are treated like outsiders by the Metkayina, but in a very real sense that it feels really racist in the “Mickey Rooney playing a Japanese guy” sense. The Metkayina are at least in part modeled after the Maori. So why the hell is Kate Winslet playing one of them and speaking in a Maori-like accent?

As I said above, there are three more Avatar films planned over the next eight years, which means I will probably have to watch another 9-10 hours of this over the next almost decade. Look, I know people like these, but I just can’t roll my eyes hard enough.

Why to watch Avatar: The Way of Water: It’s pretty.
Why not to watch: It’s also pretty vapid,