Avatar: The Way of Water
Very late to the party on this one. I couldn’t remember the plot of the original Avatar, beyond blue people and a love story and a save the Amazon style subtext. After Mark Kermode’s very funny review, I wasn’t sure. But I buckled and I’m glad I did — what a work of imagination, what a world, what artistry, it didn’t feel like a three hour film. Such a story and characters. Completely drawn in.
There are blue people. Bad dudes from the first film (apparently) have been cloned as blue people to destroy the indigenous blue people (and horribly harvest the ‘whales’ for one life giving substance). The bad blue dudes a hunting the blue people from the first movie, so the whole family has to vamoose and seek sanctuary with the green people — and learn a whole new way of being.
Horrible techie people want to kill, steal and destroy the whale population and generally pillage the resources, whilst getting rid of any blue, green or other indigenous peoples who get in the way -i.e. by wanting their homes and whale friends left alive and well. Miles, son of the dead (now cloned and blue) evil dude has conflicted times — he wants to be blue, but they won’t fully accept him — he’s blonde. Nor does he want to ally with the horrifyingly brutal, cruel and wasteful techie crew and their cloned blue people — even though one of them is sort of the clone of his deceased dad. Miles wants to be decent and kind — a human being.
Then are the kids of Sully who spend so much time getting into peril that surely true helicopter parents are needed here — they literally can’t move, sneeze or breathe without being captured, escaping, being rebuked by parents (and parental figures), then recycling through the whole capture, escape again. As well as dealing with her pesky kids, Sully’s wife also has to deal with having to leave her whole community to act nice to the green people and live another day, safe from harm. Not to mention dealing with her husband trying to turn their family into a military unit.
Whilst I laugh at the plot, it is an entirely engrossing movie. It jumps in so many unexpected directions. The world itself, language, creatures, cultures are so fully realised that it’s hard to doubt its authenticity and tangibility. It’s incredibly beautiful and restores wonder…in wonder itself. Look, James Cameron, says, just look at how beautiful the created world is. Whilst it could potentially be like being immersed into a three hour Enya video, the kids propensity for peril, the Sully family’s susceptibility for having trouble come and find them, and the unexpected introduction of talking whales shakes us out of complacently and New Age froth into something far more compelling.
Respect is a big theme as is what it looks like to be safe from harm, who and what family and community truly are — it’s utterly beguiling as everyone is interconnected with everyone else (and very few people ever stare at a phone or glowing screen— even outcast killer whales can be rehabilitated. What does it mean and look like to really see, really look, to wonder? Utterly restoring our sense of awe and appreciation of beauty bigger than ourselves — that we really are small specks of created dust in need of a Saviour and Creator, someone bigger than ourselves to restore our meaning and purpose. Faith is assumed here — who could not in a world of such wonder and awe, and danger. There is much too to say about gender roles and relationships — shown not only amongst the adults, but the kids too.
I wasn’t expecting it to go Orca the Killer Whale for a time; nor for a Poseidon Adventure/Titanic section. Nor to be enraptured with the rescue of whales and confronted with how wasteful we can be in all our high tech vanity and glory. Cameron takes a huge risk and win, even sacrificing a main character — there is loss and grief here too, and characters face tough choices.
My only quibble is that all of the blue and green characters are impossibly thin and nubile (even the pregnant ones) — perhaps they feed their aged to the whales? They all look very Western Vogue ethnically chic. Not so the techie people — one of those will be ‘armless (in a cringe moment).
Having watched it, I just can’t get over the rendering, the ‘animation’, the textures and colours, the whales, the sky and underwater worlds, the reflections on the shiny space surfaces. It’s a film that makes you want to look beyond the immediate action — just gaze. What a work of invention. Was it all green screen or did actors really splosh around in giant water tanks — how did they all make it out alive? The completeness of the world is breathtaking and utterly satisfying — as is the learning to ride and tame the bird-dragon things or the giant flying fish. The stabby Poseidon Adventure stuff could have been cut at the end , as could much of the 1980s style swearing — but it’s also a breath holder moment as how will they all get out of there alive? A wonder — go and marvel too!
Such a funny review — but I wasn’t bored! Instead it feels like one of those old fashioned big, expensive epic movies with a story and characters and budget, lots of budget. And it invites us to look, really look.
