In the interests of “constructive” criticism (which is what we do here; check the name), I have some things to say about Avatar: The Way of Water. I say this now, as the Oscars rapidly approach, because the Oscars are ostensibly meant to be some sort of taste arbitration machine and I frankly think the inclusion of this movie in their best picture category is an embarrassment.
Let me level-set: I don’t want to yuck someone else’s yum, and if you had an uncomplicatedly enjoyable experience watching this movie then that is great. There’s a lot to like about the movie. The underwater visuals are extraordinary; the sea creatures swimming around in all their multi-colored weirdness were, simply put, cool. There are a couple different numbers being bandied about, but all those aquatic acrobatics were as highly produced as humanly possible; Cameron has said Avatar needed to make at least $2 billion to turn a profit (it did). There’s no question in my mind that a big part of the attraction of this movie (and one reason it’s been nominated) is that it represents the best of what can be done with current technology. In a review of the first Avatar, critic Anne Thompson wrote “Avatar is a joyous celebration of story craft and the visual possibilities of cinema.” In regards to both movies, I highly agree with the second part of her statement. But we need to talk about the first.
Avatar: The Way of Water is not a movie. At best, it’s a three-hour video game playthrough. At worst, it’s “a soggy, twee, trillion-dollar screensaver.” The day before I saw the movie, I went to the aquarium. Our aquarium has a big central lobby with different types of underwater life in each of six sections that lead off the center. If someone had been playing a hardcore action movie in the lobby while we walked from section to section, that experience would have been nearly identical to the experience of watching Avatar: The Way of Water. You watch some beluga wales drift majestically, ghost-like, ancient; then there’s a flurry of machine gun shots and punching and screams. You learn about the mating habits of stingrays; then there’s suddenly some guy in a giant robot suit trying to eradicate an entire species. In Anthony Lane’s review for The New Yorker, he focused on the way Director James Cameron’s two selves seem at war in this film, saying “Cameron’s two strains—the vegan who wants to plumb the mysteries of nature, and the hard-core weapons guy—are at odds.” Instead of finding a way to somehow harmonize these discordant strains, Cameron has instead opted to give us the most visually impressive version of both his imagination can conjure. But what are all these visual fireworks actually in service of? If not in service of story, then why do it at all?
Movies are a visual medium. I’m not blowing any minds with that statement; but let’s take a minute to examine what that actually means. It isn’t required that a movie have a linear plot. Much experimental storytelling privileges the visual over the plot; post-modernism in literature and art has taught us that a well-plotted story is not enough to create a unique work of art. What is the plot of Ulysses? A man spends his day walking through Dublin, worrying that his wife is having an affair. I could rewrite Ulysses in twenty pages of neat prose and you would recognize it as such, but all the art of its many hundreds of pages would be utterly lost. In film, one of the great challenges is to find a way to use the possibilities of the medium to tell your story. You can film actors saying lines in shot/reverse shot for two hours, but is that really using the medium to tell a story? As the YouTube film series Every Frame a Painting so brilliantly stresses, when you do this in comedies you’re not making a movie, you’re just filming standup.
Yet when you have on hand the budget of a small nation in which to make your movie, I would assume some of that could have been spent on the writers’ room. The Way of Water has embarrassingly bad writing. It is stuffed with plot and has three bloated hours in which to weave its many threads, yet many subplots are either so confused as to be almost unintelligible (there are two brothers and one of them is dating this girl and by the end when one brother dies I still could not have told you which one of them was dating her), or so sparse as to be basically meaningless (Sigourney Weaver’s character has somehow had a magical daughter while… dead? and now she has mega-powers but only at the end when they’re needed to save people we sort of cared about in 2009). The movie has the same hero and the same villain as the last movie; they literally reincarnated the dead villain from the previous movie so that we could just have the same fights I watched in my senior year of high school. I can only guess they really thought we all forgot the plot of the first Avatar so no one would notice when they recycled it, added a few mermaids, spent half a billion on animating the water droplets on blue skin and called it a day. I don’t care about any of these characters. Even their deaths just meant… nothing to me. How are we supposed to care about them enough to follow them through movies three, four, and five?
I think there’s art to be found in The Way of Water, there’s even brilliance, and I think the vast diversity of reactions to the film reflects this tension. We can all see there’s something amazing and technically difficult there, and our desire to reward that leads us to do very silly things like nominate it for a best picture Oscar. Were this an immersive exhibit at Miami Art Basel, I’d be hyped. But as a movie, it is a failure. A movie is the visual realization of a story. It is the partnership between those two elements, the visual and the narrative, that gives this medium its magic and its joy. I have been to the aquarium; I have seen West Side Story. Although I am thrilled to live in a world where both experiences were available to me, only one of those would I consider a life-changing event. James Cameron has taken us to the aquarium, then distracted us with a deeply mid action movie.
And yet, the movie made $2.3 billion, making it the third-highest grossing film of all time after the original Avatar and Avengers: Endgame. Titanic, Cameron’s other aquatic behemoth, sits in fourth. With a track record like that, you can make any movie you want at any cost, and apparently making five Avatars is what James Cameron wants to do. Years back, when the studio tried to shorten the first Avatar, Cameron said “You know what? I made Titanic. This building that we’re meeting in right now, this new half-billion-dollar complex on your lot? Titanic paid for that, so I get to do this.” And he was right. No one is quite certain what will make people go to movie theatres these days, but for whatever reason, Avatar: The Way of Water got a whole lot of people to go to a movie theatre (for me, the heated seats, reclining back, and people willing to bring hot french fries directly to my seat certainly helped make three hours bearable). But getting people to go see your movie in droves is not enough to make your movie a great movie.
Being nominated for an Oscar is the way the movie industry recognizes great movies. This was not one of the 10 greatest movies of 2022, and including it on a list with 9 other films like Women Talking or Tar is so embarrassing I don’t know what we’re even doing here. Giving this film that kind of recognition means its laziness will continue. Why put together a competent plot with individually-rendered characters who experience growth and change over the course of two hours (no more than two please God James Cameron) when you can instead make a movie that sounds like it was plotted by those two guys you know who like to microdose mushrooms and then corner you at a party to share their profound visions about how we’re all just connected to nature, man.
It’s a bit late to vote with your feet, but if you can, spend your Saturday at the aquarium instead.