Avatar 2: The Way of Water

  I find it weird to talk about Avatar. "Yeah, it looks better than almost anything else out there, and the action is top-notch. It's just OK!"

 Given just how good the action and the effects are... how bad would the script need to be to kick it down that many notches? And yet... it's not that terrible. just hackneyed, overtly melodramatic, and uninteresting. But enough so that it kind of casts a pall on all the rest. There's nothing out there quite like the first Avatar, but its story makes you forget that.

 Thirteen years later comes a sequel that is even more visually impressive. And I mean it - it's absolutely stunning, a visual marvel. So how's the script this time around?

 It's... utter garbage.

 This time it's all about family. At the end of the first one, Sully had gone fully native, and in the span between these two movies, he's had three children of his own, adopted Sigourney Weaver's daughter(!) and all but adopted Spider, a human kid that was left behind as a baby when the humans were kicked out of Pandora. Who.. just so happens to be the son of the main antagonist on the first movie. Sigh; you can already hear the script creak as it's lining up contrivances.

 But we're just getting started. You see, said main antagonist has been cloned and his memories reimplanted, and he's been sent to Pandora as an well, not exactly an Avatar, but with a Na'vi body to hunt down Sully, I guess because the human military has correctly identified that without his guidance and plot armor the Na'vi are completely useless and would capitulate in half a minute. This contrivance I mind less because Hey! Free Stephen Lang!

 So anyhow, there's a full-scale invasion now, it's not just a mining operation - Earth is becoming uninhabitable, and Pandora is to be the new home for humanity. The ships arrive with loads of military and begin establishing a huge base, wantonly destroying the forest while the soundtrack goes for maximum tragedy. The war is on again, and the movie jumps forward a year.

 As in the first one, the only action that ever happens in this movie happens to Sully - and in this case, his family. So while his brood are out and about wandering in the forest, in the kind of astronomically implausible coincidences that happen way too often in these movies, they run straight into Lang's character, who tries to kidnap them but only manages to nab Spider.

 Sully, whose main priority is to protect his family, realizes they're hunting him, so he basically just drops everything and heads off to a faraway island chain to live with another tribe.

 As a narrative choice it's deeply unsatisfying, but since Cameron's passion for filming underwater is legendary, well, you better believe you're about to get your money's worth, and then some, of alien underwater flora and fauna.

 The water tribe accepts Sully and his family, with some shitty drama attached, but like in the first film, the Na'vi are largely relegated to the background, because this is Sully's (and his family's) story, baby.

 The script goes dormant for an hour or so while the kids start to adapt to their new environment, but the eye-candy is so good (and the story so unengaging) I didn't mind.

 Well, there's still dumb developments and contrivances - for example: because the force of Sully's sperm is so strong in them, you better believe one of his sons immediately captures the eye of yet another princess as soon as she sets eyes on him. This is shortly after a bit where she surfaces just like Ursula Andress in that one Bond film, by the way, which made me laugh. Cameron does have a sense of humor.

 After an hour of so of aimless wandering, something needs to happen, so the bad guys manage to finally track down Sully to his new digs. In a classic Avatar 2 logic moment, instead of taking a military detachment, They for some reason embed Lang's character and a small squad with a space whaler operation. Because of course. And so on- a lot of stupid happens, a lot of truly great action, there's a climactic confrontation (on which the Na'vi are conspicuously absent, despite lacking a valid plot reason to not be there) and the stage is set for Avatar 3, complete with a ridiculously cheesy/clichéd final shot.

 It's bad. It's really, really bad. I haven't even touched on all the obvious, really cheap manipulative shit that's pulled - like a storm breaking in the background on sad moments or as the bad guys torch a village, or a whale baby crying over her dead mother as the bad guys chuckle in the background. If I haven't made it clear so far, well, the storytelling here will metaphorically put its hand up your ass to the shoulder to try and pluck at your heartstrings. Crassly manipulative, possibly more than the first one.

 Ok, there are some nice things to say about the script; there's a line where it transitions from one bit where someone loses an arm to another scene in a control room where someone's, I imagine, trying to operate a crane and screams "the arm is not working!". That was funny. The moment to moment writing- dialog and conversations, are ok; I didn't care about any of the characters, but I didn't hate them either. And there are some recognizable themes beyond the very blunt (however right I think they might be) environmentalist concerns - I liked, for example, that the kids manage to teach the parents a thing or two.

 Of course there's a nasty mysticism over science bit of shit peddling, but hey, swings and turnabouts. 

 But -and this is a big but, I cannot lie- it looks so good you can honestly ignore all that. I may have laughed at a really stupid boy and his whale moment, or the nth moment when the bad guy seems to forget to use his hostages and position of superiority, but I enjoyed every second of those scenes. The action is crisp, clear, and full of holy shit! moments, the cinematography is superb and the environments are tactile and wonderfully designed. It's a flat-out beautiful movie, and that counts for a lot.

 It's got to, to make up for that script, and I'm happy to say it pulls both of their weight and then some.

Avatar

 So... what could I possibly say about Avatar that hasn't been said elsewhere before a hundred times, and better?

 Well, nothing, that's what. But that's never stopped me before.

 Upon rewatching it I'm kind of surprised at how few... well, surprises it held for me; I had forgotten a lot of the specifics, but my reaction to the whole remains completely unchanged. Maybe a bit more positive, since I knew what to expect, but there are no new real insights, nothing to add to my opinion of it; The only surprise was how well the CGI has held up over the last (oh god!) thirteen years. For good or ill, everything's there... right at the surface.

 Overall, I like it. It's a good spectacle/action movie with a carefully crafted but extremely shallow and very manipulative story. Despite that its science fiction is bad (let's not hold that against it, though, almost all Hollywood movies fail at the Sci part of Sci-Fi), it spends a lot of time focusing on the planet of Pandora and its species with an almost documentary-like focus, letting  you inhabit the setting more than just about any other movie (the only exceptions I can think of right now is Dune and the Blade Runners.)
 It almost feels more like a videogame than a movie, and this is one of the rare cases where I mean that as a compliment; so much focus on the backdrop is rare in non-interactive media. I say it's bad sci fi because, well, it is, in the same way Star Wars is bad sci fi, but like Star Wars it's got a very detailed and well thought-out fantasy setting. A little derivative in the sense that most things are recognizable as an analog of something from earth, but the amount of detail layered on top of it -the amount of spectacle poured on even the most unimportant elements of a scene- honestly makes it all right to me even if it underwhelms as a a plausible alien world/ecosystem. Suspension of disbelief is easy as hell when the production has been so tightly designed.

 Cameron's populism on the story department is, unfortunately, much harder to swallow. Beyond it being a white saviour movie that very cynically exploits white man's guilt (re: American natives, not black men)... it's just a bit shit, right? I mean, our protagonist almost immediately falls in with a fucking goddamn princess! Through dumb luck and cheap contrivances he's able to accomplish more in days than the scientists that trained years for the same mission ever did. And.. of course he ends up being the Pandoran Kwisatz Haderatch. Fuck that noise. One thing that people miss when ripping on Dune is that Herbert was a very smart cookie and most of the cheesy tropes in the first book end up being subverted or they're explained by other, more powerful players' ulterior motives. Paul Atreides is a pawn, not a chosen one. Herbert had something to say. Cameron... well, he's got things to say too, but to put it kindly they're not nearly as sophisticated or nuanced. 

 It's Titanic all over again; You can call it elemental storytelling, playing with archetypes, whatever... I'd just call it manipulative and really, really fucking basic. However, this time the tropes and melodrama are action- and sci fi-related, so of course I'll find it easier to give it a pass.

 Another reason that it works is that Jake Scully makes for a very likeable protagonist. The only scene I respond to emotionally at all in this movie is when he first gets his Avatar - after an undetermined time as a paraplegic, he can't contain himself and just bursts out running... it's a lovely scene, and the only honest one in the movie. He's got a child-like purity that makes him a very engaging character throughout.
 (This is directly at odds with how long it takes for him to betray the military in favour of the Na'vi, which is the rare slip in an otherwise very slick script; it could be explained by military conditioning and naivety, but it comes off as another cynical script device.)

 And... that spectacle! It's a movie that never lets up and never cuts any corners, and it's hard to overstate just how good it looks, how goddamn cool everything is even after more than a decade of technical advancement in CGI. The action is clear, exciting and full of awesome moves and pyrotechnics, the designs are intricate and consistent, the cinematography clear, crisply edited and punchy. It's easy to roll your eyes at the story, but the spectacle more than fills out its two hours and a half nicely. The script may be shallow and cynical, for sure, but there's so much of everything else to make up for it.