MIDNIGHT REVIEWS Avatar: The Way of Water
Midnight Reviews features reviews and thought pieces written and edited by a parent, at night, after bedtime.
This afternoon’s movie…
“I would like Mr Bump, Daddy. He’s funny.”
Review: Mr Bump is indeed highly amusing, with a central character that we can at once be frustrated by and root for. Mr Bump is a great series of comedy skits that rely entirely on the character’s personality and the skill displayed in physical comedy. That he finishes his story not learning how to avoid bumps, but how to make the bumps work for him, is a great lesson in life many of us, including yours truly, could do with thinking about more deeply.
The evening review…
AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER (3hr 12mins)
Directed by: James Cameron
Featuring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Winslet, Stephen Lang
Synopsis: Years after becoming a member of the Na’vi jungle tribe, Jake (Worthington) must protect his family from a renewed human threat by travelling far from home.
Review: One year on from its release and Avatar: The Way of Water works under an old-fashioned premise. It reminds me of great films both past and present because, despite the space-age technology used to create it, it boils down to great craft and great care. This is a movie made by the best, under great strain and with problems to solve no other film has had to solve, and it brings me the most immense joys to talk about how brilliant it is.
The mixture of visual and practical effects is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else. People who were blown away by other CG images, such as the money-gorged MCU films, would have seen this and had their expectations of big-budget, CGI-heavy movies seriously re-evaluated. The visuals are sumptuous. The images move like paintings, especially in the dark, and to say the makers of this movie have created something beautiful would be a severe understatement.
The film is stuffed full of […] characters that could be the subject of their own movie.
It must be difficult at first to not just inhabit a character, but do it with tiny dots all over everyone’s faces and cameras attached to your forehead. But all performances fit the bill. Sigourney Weaver, marking her third collaboration with director James Cameron, is probably the member of the main cast given most to chew on as Kiri, a character not just lost with her family, but lost within it as well.
Sam Worthington as Jake is still a blank slate, but not a blank slate I can ever project any thoughts and feelings onto. Fortunately, unlike the first film, he can hardly be classed as a main character and we get to spend more time with more interesting characters and performances. Kate Winslet isn’t given much to do (perhaps this is more of a waiting game with three more Avatar films currently in development). Zoe Saldana builds on a terrific character built from the ground up, which was the saving grace of the first film, letting us in on a character full of conflict and moments of turmoil.
Stephen Lang, predictably, is fantastic as Colonel Quaritch. The questions and decisions he makes could be the subject of its own story entirely and Lang completely sells the idea of Quaritch being torn between the appreciation of being alive again and being stuck inside a Na’vi body, despite any advantages it brings.
We get to absorb it completely.
Indeed, the film is stuffed full of these characters that could be the subject of their own movie. The first film, derided by some as ‘Pocahontas with blue cats in space,’ perhaps suffered from having the heavy task of introducing everything to audiences that didn’t know about Pandora, or how the avatar bodies worked, or anything else including us humans and how we fit into it. The writers of The Way of Water are now able to have fun with the premise and I can almost imagine them sitting around a table asking each other ‘But what happens if…?’
And we get to enjoy the fruits of the first film building everything for us as we get to see the makers of this sequel take the world and break it to their heart’s content. It’s just one of the many amazing things this film does that each story is balanced with the others and we’re able to keep track of not just what is happening but where each character is emotionally. And unlike the first movie, which felt like it was on rails, The Way of Water feels like it could go in any direction. Which helps with such a behemoth runtime.
Whilst three hours does seem a tad galling, it never feels overlong or stretched. The Way of Water achieves a brilliant balance between moving at a fair clip and enveloping us inside this story so we get to absorb it completely and feel like it’s a real place we too could go. The first film felt a little like peeking at a strange land from an airplane window; The Way of Water feels like we’ve been dropped right in it. I can’t wait for more.
As of writing, Avatar: The Way of Water is currently available to watch on Disney+.
