Will Avatar: The Way Of Water stand the test of time? Yes and no

The debate has started, the comparisons are on. Did Avatar: The Way Of Water live up to its hype as James Cameron’s follow-up to the pathbreaking first film of 2009? Cameron’s sequel to Avatar is a cinematic experience like never before, and the film has opened with a day one collection of $15.8 million from 15 overseas markets according to a Variety report. Trade pundits predicted a tulkun-sized first weekend of around $525 million in global intake long before the film’s release, and the makers always had a winner at hand. The bigger question follows post release: Will The Way Of Water stand the test of time as a cinematic achievement?

The answer is yes and no. Yes, the film will stand the test of time but only as part of a franchise of films that seem destined for cinematic greatness cumulatively. And no, not as a singular entity, because going by the first two releases of the franchise at least, Cameron does not reveal the intention to craft individual pop classics with any of these films.

The irony about that observation is all the more evident if you consider the popular reception the film series has seen so far. Avatar 2, like its predecessor, is emerging a crowdpuller, primarily mesmerising audiences as a technological marvel and 3D extravaganza. Like Avatar, which went on to become the biggest film of all time upon release, the sequel could break multiple box office records. Yet, try and cite a single iconic character from the two films — there are none. The hero of the Avatar films, Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington), lacks the automatic recall of, say, Luke Skywalker from the Star Wars saga or Neo from The Matrix trilogy — prominent instances of popular protagonists of non-comicbook sci-fi franchises. The antagonist, Stephen Lang’s Colonel Miles Quaritch, could be a cold killer from any run-of-the-mill action potboiler, only his character gets a plot-necessitated sci-fi twist. The denizens of Pandora, the fictional exoplanetary moon where all the action takes place, are simply the ‘Blue People’ to most viewers, who would be hardpressed to remember names of even key protagonists played by Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver or Kate Winslet (unless you’ve just watched The Way Of Water). Clearly, Cameron’s focus was on VFX-loaded action details and scenario that would sustain the phenomenal world of Pandora over five films rather than memorable characters.

The approach is, perhaps, intentional. It could be Cameron’s way of underlining the fact that it is the world of Avatar that matters and not its individual denizens. He did spend meticulous decades creating it for the screen. We, as an audience, are supposed to watch this world from the perspective of Jake Sully, who originally arrives in Pandora as an outsider. Cameron wants you to remember that Pandora is a world of people that fight heroically as a community rather than as individual heroes.

Just as the characters, the plots of each film aren’t individually outstanding either. Think of the crux that drives the 2009 original, beyond its sci-fi razzmatazz: Jake Sully, with vested interest, infiltrates a group of unsuspecting strangers — in this case Pandora’s Blue People, who are known as the Na’vi. Sully has been sent by folks from earth to collect information on the Na’vi world,which the humans need. However, on learning about the nefarious plan our hero turns against his own people and joins the Na’vi in their fight against the scheming humans. The turning point, as it often happens in films, is triggered by love. Sully falls in love with the Na’vi woman Neytiri played by Zoe Saldana.

The plot of the sequel is even more simplistic, Cameron doesn’t even try exploring new possibilities. In the new film, Sully, in his Na’vi avatar, and Neytiri have settled down with their kids on Pandora but the human invaders, whom the Na’vi call the Sky People, are back. So, Jake, Neytiri and the Na’vi warriors must protect Pandora from the latest invasion. It’s the story of practically every alien invasion film. Only, Cameron makes it special with his imagination.

The USP of Cameron’s cinema is he has rarely ever banked on groundbreaking stories. Rather, he crafts spectacular blockbusters out of stories that are predictable from scene one — think Titanic or the Terminator saga or True Lies. Cameron is a classic mainstream filmmaker, for whom fresh plots aren’t a priority. His winnability lies in finding new ways to present familiar tropes.

In this context, with The Way Of Water, Cameron takes us deeper into a universe he had already laid bare in the first film. The risk factor about such an idea was huge, considering he has invested 13 years of labour and research in the sequel, which rides a mammoth budget of around $350-400 million and runs for over three hours. Yet, despite the familiarity of milieu, the intrigue quotient never drops all through the film’s elaborate runtime. That’s because the screenplays of both the films have been written in a way that they form a cohesive whole. The two films balance each other while exploring the world of Pandora. If the first film was primarily based in the jungles of Pandora, The Way Of Water takes us into its enchanting seas. While the original gave a fascinating first glance into Pandora, replete with a new language Cameron and his team created for the Na’avi, the sequel finds new ways to explore that fictional world.

For Cameron, that sense of continuity will be important for the upcoming three films in the franchise, a reason why Avatar 3 started shooting simultaneously with Avatar: The Way Of Water in September 2017, on location in New Zealand. A sense of continuity across the five films stresses on the fact that this is essentially one story across multiple movies. It is precisely the reason the significance of the Avatar films in popular culture cannot and should not be gauged individually. From now to 20 December 2024, when Avatar 3 is scheduled to release, The Way Of Water has left a message strong enough onthe human apathy about the environment to keep green activists happy, and unleashed enough VFX wizardry for the buffs not to miss superhero cinema for a while.

Vinayak Chakravorty is a critic, columnist and film journalist based in Delhi-NCR.

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