James Cameron takes the Sully family to the seaside and films water better than anyone else working. The whales are extraordinary and the last hour is his old self; the 192 minutes also hold a great deal of dialogue nobody should have had to say.
Thirteen years after Avatar (2009), James Cameron goes back to Pandora and the first thing he does is put it underwater. Avatar: The Way of Water runs 192 minutes, and for perhaps ninety of them it is as handsome a thing as we have seen on a cinema screen: the reef, the whales and the last hour of fighting are Cameron at full stretch. The rest is a family drama with the dialogue of a teenage sitcom, cut with less discipline than anything he has made before. It is decent, flawed in ways that matter, and worth a large screen.
The setup is quick. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) have spent the years since the first war raising children in the forest, among them Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), an adopted girl whose birth nobody can explain. Then the humans come back with more ships and orders to stay. Among them is Stephen Lang’s Colonel Miles Quaritch, killed the first time round and now poured into a Na’vi body with memories and grudge intact. Rather than bring the war home, Jake takes the family across the sea to the Metkayina, a reef clan led by Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and Ronal (Kate Winslet). Cameron then spends the middle of the film teaching them, and us, to swim.
That middle is where the money went, and it shows. Dylan Cole and Ben Procter design a village of woven huts on stilts among mangrove roots, and things to ride: the ilu, a four-finned seal-fish, and the tulkun, whales the size of a house who sing, remember and have names. Russell Carpenter lights the shallows like a real reef, dappled and blue-green, and when the camera comes up for air the sky has the haze of an actual afternoon. Deborah Lynn Scott dresses the reef people in shell, cord and tattoo, so you can tell a Metkayina from a forest Na’vi at a glance.
There is a sequence around the two-hour mark, involving the tulkun, a fleet of human boats and machinery, that we will not describe. We will say that we were horrified, and that the horror was earned. Cameron shoots it with the flat attention of a film about industry, men doing a job with winches and drills and paperwork, and Jemaine Clement’s Dr. Ian Garvin, a scientist, watches with a face that says he has seen this before and is ashamed anyway. For twenty minutes the film’s ideas and its pictures are the same thing. Nowhere else are they.
The trouble is the talking. The screenplay is by Cameron, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, from a story that also credits Josh Friedman and Shane Salerno, and five writers have produced children who call each other bro and cuz and a father who says Sullys stick together often enough that you start to count. Cameron has never written a graceful line, but in Aliens (1986) his people were in a hurry; here everyone has time to talk. Neytiri, the fiercest presence in the first film, gets a bow and some shouting. Weaver plays Kiri, a teenage girl, with a wide-eyed seriousness we found oddly touching, and the script keeps leaving her for another scene in which Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) gets into trouble, is told off, and sneaks out again.
Four editors are credited, Stephen E. Rivkin, David Brenner, John Refoua and Cameron himself, and the middle hour feels like four people each protecting a favourite scene. Some sequences run at a higher frame rate than usual, so movement loses its blur; underwater this makes the reef look like a reef, and on dry land it makes the actors look like a good television broadcast of a play. Simon Franglen’s score, loyal to the themes of the late James Horner, is handsome and never once surprising.
Then the last hour arrives and Cameron is Cameron again: one long fight, on the water and under it and finally inside a ship going over, staged with the clarity he has always had, so you know where everyone is and how far away the air is. We stopped checking our watch. See it in a cinema, as large and as dark as you can find; at home it becomes a long, well-made nature programme interrupted by a family argument, and the water shrinks to an aquarium. The whales are worth it, and by the end we wished the film had been about them.
