Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ on Disney+ and Max, the Exhilarating Continuation of James Cameron’s Visionary Excess

Avatar: The Way of Water (now streaming on Disney+ and Max, in addition to VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) followed the James Cameron template with remarkable precision. Like T2, Titanic and the first Avatar before it, The Way of Water was: Incredibly expensive to make (estimates range from $350-460 million). Almost endlessly delayed (original release date: 2014!). Met with heaps of pre-release skepticism (What an expensive mess! Do we even CARE about Avatar anymore?). A megablockbuster smash anyway and one of the highest grossing films ever ($2.3 billion in worldwide box office). Technically groundbreaking (underwater motion-capture, yo!). Really, really long (192 minutes). An Oscar nominee (four) and winner (one, for best visual effects). And hey guess what, it’s also a pretty damn good movie for the most part, so Cameron has once again proved himself capable of backing up his boasts by delivering the goods. 

AVATAR 2: THE WAY OF WATER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Brief Avatar (2009) catch-up: In the year 2154, desperate jackass Earthlings have used up all their natural resources and need new ones, y’know, like when you wear out a sock. They set their sights on Pandora, a moon chock-full with a gorgeous bounty of lush and prosperous life, which they have no problem massacring in order to mine the covetous mineral unobtanium. Pandora’s intelligent life consists of the Na’vi, tall-’n’-skinny blue-skinned humanoids with tails and very little clothing; Earthlings deposit their consciousnesses inside Na’vi-human hybrid “avatars” so they may explore the moon and infiltrate the Na’vi civilization. As you’d expect when ruthless colonists get to enacting genocide, war broke out, and the Na’vi staved off the Earthlings’ military might thanks to Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a human-avatar hybrid sympathetic to the Na’vis’ plight. Jake permanently melded with his Na’vi avatar and hitched with his Na’vi lover Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and they didn’t live happily ever after flying around on their almost-but-not-really domesticated dragon monsters, because this movie exists with three more to come, and there’s no way in heck James Cameron makes four Avatar sequels without mind-blowing violent action sequences.

The Way of Water picks up 16 years later. Jake, now clan chief, and Neytiri have settled into family life. They have two teenage sons, Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) and Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), and eight-year-old daughter Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss). They’ve also adopted Kiri, the teen Na’vi daughter of Jake’s dead human friend Dr. Grace Augustine’s avatar (which almost kind of explains why Kiri, like Grace, is played by Sigourney Weaver), and Spider (Jack Champion), a human teenager who scampers around like Mowgli with dreadlocks; he happens to be the son of Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the scarfaced Earthling military leader who had a real hard-on for Jake and wanted to eradicate the Na’vi, until he ate shit and died during the war for Pandora. But he’s not dead! He now inhabits one of them there Recombinants, Na’vi avatars with the memories of dead soldiers – and he wants revenge against Jake Sully.

There’s some context for this personal grudge: Earth is darn close to kaputskies, so the Resources Development Administration – the corporate-gobbledygook moniker for Earth’s colonial military machine of massively destructive destructiveness – wants to raze Pandora and presumably put up strip malls and parking lots. The RDA is led by Quaritch and General Frances Adrmore (Edie Falco, barking like a drill sergeant exclamation point!), accompanied by a marine biologist (Jemaine Clement) and a Captain Quint-type guy (Brendan Cowell), both of whom come in handy when Jake and Neytiri pack up the fam and R-U-N-N-O-F-T to live with the aquatic Na’vi peoples, who are more of an aqua-shade of blue compared to the jungle Na’vis’ cobalt skin; they evolved swimmy-hands and tails and live on beautiful pristine beaches and hold their breath for really long periods of time while riding around on flying fish-dinosaurs. They’re led by Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and his lifemate Ronal (Kate Winslet), who’s pregnant but still a fierce-as-hell warrior; their kids mingle with Jake and Neytiri’s kids, so they get into some high-school shenanigans, Pandora-style, which involves lots of joyriding of flying fish-dinosaurs and crazy-ass whales. Yes, whales! SMART whales, with feelings and strategies and everything, which might come in handy if Quaritch and his Recombinants should find Jake and kidnap his children and start another war, a development that was as inevitable as Cameron continuing his reign as the king of the box office world.  

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: WARNING: NONCONTROVERSIAL OPINION INCOMING. Cameron’s films are standard-bearers and pretty much comparable only among themselves. I hereby offer this ranked list of his feature-length non-documentary films:

9. Piranha II: The Spawning (gotta start somewhere)

8. The Abyss (honestly don’t remember this one very well)

7. Avatar (highly enjoyable, but never wanted to see it anywhere but in a theater)

6. Avatar: The Way of Water (pretty much the same as Avatar but one-ups the game with the whale shit)

5. True Lies (a total ripper of a classic Ah-nuld action movie)

4. The Terminator (“I’ll be back.” SMASSHHSHSHHSHHHHHH tinkle tinkle)

3. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (absolutely in the conversation for the best action movie ever made, along with No. 1 on this very list)

2. Titanic (when Kate Winslet weeps and nearly freezes to death while watching her beloved sink into the hoary deeps, the whole world weeps with her)

1. Aliens (insert your best Paxton Whine here)

Performance Worth Watching: There’s so much next-level motion-capture whatever going on here, I barely know who’s playing what (me during the credits: oh right, that was Winslet!) or what they had to do to get to what we’re seeing, which is exactly the kind of how’d-they-DO-that movie-magic stuff we wanna see from Avatar (short, stupidly reductionist answer: it’s CGI!). All that said, I guess it’s easy to appreciate the warrior-mother fierceness that Saldaña and Winslet bring to their Na’vi characters, with the hissing and the badass archery and the don’t-touch-my-children stuff, and Ronal doesn’t hesitate to take out mofos even though she’s bounteously preggers.

Memorable Dialogue: Quaritch sums it all up with a godawful pithy pun: “Why so blue?”

Also, Neytiri goes all Fast and Furious on us with this one: “This is not a squad – it’s a family.”

Sex and Skin: Na’vi female toplessness, a symptom of their skimpy wardrobes. (If we ever meet the snow Na’vi in Avatar 5 or whatever, will they have fur or wear parkas?)

Our Take: Pandora is as immersive as ever, and The Way of Water doubles down on that immersiveness by frequently guiding us into the no-accusations-just-friendly-crustaceans environs under the sea. And it’s eye candy galore whether we’re underwater or above it. Funny, how you lose all sense of context in our familiar reality and just accept all the reference points in Cameron’s fully artificial world as a new reality – such is the ingenious metatextual concept of the franchise, which is about humans adopting alien bodies and we, the moviegoers, adopting a new set of eyes, a new point-of-view very much unlike our own. One of Cameron’s innovations for this film was figuring out underwater motion-capture techniques (Winslet held her breath while freediving for seven minutes, in case you haven’t heard), and the visual achievement makes Aquaman – a perfectly fine movie! – look like stick figures in a second-grader’s rudimentary flip-book animation.

Cameron wants us to feel as if we’re existing among the Na’vi for three hours, and he succeeds in creating that uncanny experience with technical inventiveness and masterful visual storytelling. Sure, step outside his world, and the pro-eco adventures of the tall blue people versus the loathsome, snarling humans look silly. But once you step into it, you’re lost, fully in the moment and, most importantly, invested. It’s cinema as a great escape.

Story-wise, The Way of Water isn’t quite as ambitious. It ticks many boxes from Cameron’s oeuvre: Earnest protagonists, hoo-rah military caricatures, loathsome villains and broadstroked messaging, bless its big fat corny heart. He does exhibit progress, pushing away from the glorified violence of his 1980s and ’90s pictures, here depicting it as a reluctant response by the Na’vi, lovers of peace who are warriors only of necessity. But when they’re faced with aggressive takeover, their only response is to show us how they sync with the animals in their world to kick ass in amazing, thrilling fashion. The film shows us all kinds of really cool violence as an anti-violent message, which is a way for the director to have his cake and eat it too.

We could ding Cameron for struggling to justify so much movie for so little plot, especially considering it’s a basic revenge story that’s frequently waylaid by long, drawn out sub-whatevers in which land Na’vi contend with a reverse fish-out-of-water situation – non-fish in the water, I guess? – and struggle to fit in, and teen Na’vi get into trouble and say “bro” all the time. This is Cameron’s noble attempt at balancing spectacle with character development; it might be tiresome in a world less lovingly, painstakingly rendered than Pandora, which has no shortage of eye-boggling backdrops (submerged forests, glistening coves, the interiors of whales, etc.) to distract us from the humdrum interpersonal conflicts and the cheeseball dialogue, a Cameron staple.

So The Way of Water pretty much delivers on a big promise, meeting our expectations for a James Cameron extravaganza. We emerge from the film remembering not the story, but the experience. The urge to watch it again comes not from our involvement with the characters and themes – which are rudimentary but acceptable, and serve to enrich the visuals – but from a more difficult to define desire to inhabit a place derived from a filmmaker’s passion and vision. We look forward to Avatar 3, Avatar 4 and Avatar 5 (slotted to arrive biannually starting in 2024) to see what other variations on a visual theme Cameron has cooking.

Our Call: Avatar: The Way of Water is brilliantly transporting. It will inevitably lose something in the translation from theater to your home, but STREAM IT and, for the sake of all that’s holy, watch it on something bigger than your laptop. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.