Assorted thoughts about Avatar 2: The Way of Water 2: Way Waterier

Mostly spoiler-free.

The middle hour of The Way of Water consists entirely of a family getting to know a new community they belong to, while also discovering the ecology that that community is defined by. That's the movie in a nutshell: community belonging to its environs, families belonging to community, individuals belonging to family. There are no overt dramatic arcs, because there don't need to be. The story is of people discovering the world around them.

The last hour of The Way of Water, which is tremendous action filmmaking through-and-through, matters only because you care about this world on all these scales: not just the individuals but the families; not just the families but the culture; not just the culture but the natural world.

What Avatar gets about blowing hundreds of millions of dollars on CGI that other sci-fi/fantasy franchises don't is that ecology is the heart of worldbuilding. The fancy spectacular visual details don't matter unless they're a reflection of a world that seems alive. The middle hour of The Way of Water works beautifully (and could have been hours longer) because all that "empty space" is full of oceanic flora and fauna so dense that every shot pulls your eyes in a dozen different directions at once. I lost count of how many species we're shown almost immediately. It doesn't distract, because the throughline is always this story of people coming to know and appreciate a new place, but it also makes these scenes feel rich rather than obligatory.

Similarly, an amazing amount of this movie's character drama is told through body language alone. I started noticing how many stretches of the film were completely wordless, with its characters expressing themselves through body language alone. And there's a similar density here as there is to the fantasy ecologies of this world: the characters may not be complex as depicted through their lines alone, but there are plenty of sequences with seven or eight characters on-screen, not saying much, but communicating with an impressive visual density. I kept looking at side characters' faces rather than the speaking characters', because I didn't want to miss a thing. Half a dozen different unspoken conversations are happening in every scene at any moment.

Cameron's screenplay isn't mediocre—it's intentionally quiet, because it wants its story told through all these other means of communication. It's technically superb: I marveled at how it sequences all those seemingly-plotless moments in its middle act, because they obviously had a logic but just-as-obviously were operating according to subtle patterns too big for me to pick up on. I'll watch that middle hour alone a dozen times just to see how it's all laid out.

The American military is fundamentally characterized as devoid of ecology and community. Their faux-masculine banter and ongoing "oo-rah!" chants serve to punctuate how little they're actually saying and doing; their pretenses at "being family" or "having honor" pale in comparison to the genuine family connection we see among the Sullies. This is reflected in the way that their technology mimics organic life: faux crabs, faux humans, faux Na'vi. At the end of the day, they're glorified businessmen—their only mission is economic, as underscored by the way their place in this film largely consists of (minor spoilers) helping whalers while claiming it serves a national purpose.

Avatar's anti-colonialist message gets misinterpreted when it gets critiqued. The whole "guy wishes he was a different race and culture" part is there, but it's unimportant; the real stories are "guy wishes he was connected to a meaningful community" and "guy wishes he could care about the world he lives in." Which is why the human sympathizers bond with one another, not just with the Na'vi; it's why you get Jermaine Clement as a marine biologist in this movie, mourning the whales his expedition is hunting and loathing that the people he's with are too apathetic to mourn.

I haven't bothered with the original Avatar since it left theaters, but I have nothing but fond memories of how powerfully it affected me when I saw it there. The Way of Water was no different. It's stunning as a work of fantasy, stunning as an action movie, stunning in how many different techniques it uses to tell its story—both in how smart those techniques are and in how many different levels they operate on—and its family drama is solid as hell, which is what it needs to be to justify a non-stop hour of people blowing the shit out of each other in ways that make you care.

I highly recommend you find a big-ass screen to see it on.