Avatar: This spectacular but slim-scripted sequel is all about loving the family

Avatar: The Way Of The Water made us wait for thirteen years. Now that it is here, I cannot say it is a disappointing sequel. It is not. It leaves you revved up moved and feeling good about just being alive.

It brings into focus the importance of family togetherness which is hammered every fifteen minutes or so, lest some sections of the audiences gets restless and asks: why is this film saying the same thing over and over again? Does it think the audience to be dumb, or plainly numbed by the whiplashes of civilization? Or is it like Zindagi har qadam ek nayi jung hai? So enamoured was Subhash Ghai of this song that he played it every ten minutes in the film Meri Jung?

And, pray troll, why is Cameron shooting the climax of Titanic all over again as the climax of this designer-epic film, albeit in a new….errrr…avatar?”

Admittedly there is something keenly appealing about a family drama where the most of characters are from a humanoid species with faces so expressive they tell us things we want to hear. Their behaviour attitude and sheer humanism makes them more human than human beings.

A lot has changed since James Cameron gave us the first Avatar film. The human factor in our civilization has diminished drastically since then. I would say watching Jake and Neytiri (every time she is called out I hear ‘Gayatri) ,their love for their children and the family’s determination to stay together through the worst human attacks, is the core of Avatar: The Way Of The Water.

Cameron captures the family frolic with utmost joy and affection. So deep is the humanism of the Sully family and so captivating the chaos that is captured around it , that we are left with no choice but to go with the flow.

Be warned: there is a lot of water in the second Avatar film. Unlike the fabulous foliage of the first film, Avatar : The Way of The Water is filled with spectacular stretches of water. Tranquil or raging, the water is a character of its own here. It rushes onto us, speaks to us, it flows into the arteries of the theme of humanism, nurturing and irrigating it.

There are lengthy stretches of the characters swimming underwater. Only God and Cameron (not necessarily in that order) know how the motion-capture technique was so fluidly used underwater.

At times the lengthy three hour-plus film seems to stop to admire itself. And with reason. Cinematographer Russell Carpenter, who has collaborated with Cameron for the fifth time, captures the vibrant vista in colours and tones of supple splendour. The world as seen in Avatar is vibrant and inviting and yet dedicated to a dense atmosphere of tragic grandeur where Man and Nature are seen to be constantly at loggerheads in wars that are sometimes profound but mostly sophomoric.

There is a sense of infinite wisdom in the way Jake Sully holds his family together. On the other end of the sensory spectrum, Jake’s son Lo’ak’s bonding with a mammoth sea creature named Payakan harks back to the ecological innocence of the Lassie films.

Cameron has an equal respect for both the extremes: he is as skilled at swimming in shallow waters as the deep end.

Avatar : The Way Of The Water is a paradoxical blend of the profound and the shallow. It is cinematic entertainment at its most basic. The Good embrace Nature and value family above all else. The Bad are seen sneering at integrity, they insult Mother Earth and are born to lose.(One of the earthly marauders, a strike-trained soldier, even blows bubblegums as he sneers). The moral conflict could have been less glib. But I am not complaining. This is three hours of solid entertainment with an italicized message on ecological imbalance: thou shall not yawn while viewing this shallow masterpiece.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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