ONE
There's something genuinely interesting about making a movie whose message, on some level, is a low-key "fuck the patriarchy"—this movie really does not respect men trying to take authority, which is true of most if not all James Cameron movies—while simultaneously making its protagonist a guy who is absolutely convinced that he ought to act as a patriarch. This tension pops up all throughout the movie, and is never really addressed; it just sits there, complicating everything, there if you notice it but not insistent that you notice.
TWO
Broadly speaking, that's Cameron's attitude to a lot of narrative storytelling. So many themes, and surprisingly intricate and subtle ones, present themselves in this movie, but most of them don't intrude directly into the narrative. Cameron doesn't lampshade them, and he doesn't let them drive the narrative. That willingness to let things hang in the air, suspended and unresolved, is a neat thing to see; I've seen arguments that it's proof of Cameron's incompetence as a screenwriter, but to believe that you'd have to think James Cameron is a bad screenwriter, and I simply don't think that's the case at all.
THREE
There's an early moment in this film, where the Sully kids have been separated from their friends and family after a vicious battle, and the one human child in the mix—Spider, who perpetually wears an air-filtration mask to survive on a world that's literally toxic to him—runs out of oxygen altogether. The kids have no supplies. A vicious raiding party stands between them and the only home they have, and is actively pursuing them. They're scared and they're alone, and this is the moment where one of them starts to die, helplessly, in front of them.
We know that Spider's air has run out, because his mask starts blinking red. Here, in the middle of a bioluminescent forest defined by vivid blues and lush greens and dark browns, that warning-light red cuts through the gentle tapestry of colors. It's absorbed by the greenery and the reflective wetness: a living world reflecting an urgent warning.
That penetrating red light is the story, in that moment. There are lines of dialogue, there are plot beats being hit, but in Avatar, as with many of Cameron's work, the dialogue and the plot beats serve the visual, and not the other way around. Cameron is a sensual and emotional storyteller; he's good with words and with plot structure inasmuch as he knows how to make both flawlessly service the real subject matter of his films. (A genuinely bad writer, I'd argue, would make us cringe far more frequently than Cameron ever does—and it takes skill to know, among other things, exactly how often you can get away with using made-up fantasy words, and at precisely which point they'd start sounding clunky.)
If you believe that stories in general, and films in particular, can be told through sensation alone, you already believe that Cameron is a master of his craft. If you don't, well, there's a sophisticated argument to be made about exactly why this is true, and exactly why it matters that this is true, but you're also allowed to plain old not like a guy. I just wouldn't conflate your dislike of him with any proof that he's actually bad.
FOUR
Every time a new Avatar movie comes out, its critics love to claim its absolute irrelevance by asking fans how many characters' names they actually know.
All I could think while watching this movie was: I only saw The Way of Water once, yet I remember each individual character shockingly well. Cameron doesn't bother re-introducing every character, or including lines of dialogue that remind us who they are or how they relate to one another; instead, they just keep on being themselves, and each one is portrayed vividly enough that I found I remembered exactly who they were.
And I still don't remember their names, partly because they almost never use each other's names. I'm pretty sure there are major characters in this film whose names aren't spoken a single time. That doesn't make them any less memorable, in the same way that you remember colorful people who you meet at parties or in bars or on the subway or around and about even if you wouldn't know what to call them the next time you met them. And I think it's a strength of Cameron's, rather than a weakness, that he couldn't give less of a shit about whether you remember his characters' names.
It had me reflecting on the tendency that some blockbusters have to go the exact opposite route: to revolve screenplays and visual direction around making every character pop *so* much, making sure each and every one of them gets a Big Moment and a memeable quip, that they're reduced to a series of calculated ploys. Even their "substance," oftentimes, is a gimmick: sometimes I watch a film or a show and I can watch the writers go through the motions of Injecting Substance, or Making A Moment Meaningful. It makes my skin crawl. It's not even legitimate melodrama, because that would require writers and directors to sincerely express something. It's the Vitamin Water of art: it's convincing you that you're ingesting something healthy and good for you, and all the while you're just guzzling sugar.
Cameron, I think, writes more substantial characters than he's giving credit for. But I'm following my rules and sticking to my notes in the order I jotted them down, so we'll get back to that in a little while.
FIVE
While the Avatar franchise's comment on colonialism, indigenous peoples, etc. is lacking in many very obvious ways, one of several interesting questions at the heart of these movies is: how do you maintain the heart and soul of a culture as the world changes around it? Insisting too fiercely on adhering to tradition can become reactionary; insisting that all change is inherently good, on the other hand, is a quick way to abandon everything of value.
It's telling, maybe, that the Marines and various corporate interests are incredibly adaptable. It's one of the strengths that makes them a threat. They readily incorporate animal species, new technologies, natural resources, and even new bodies into their repertoire. But they do this without modifying their culture in the slightest, which means they destroy the very meaning behind everything they adopt. Taking the materials and not the meaning is a way of killing whatever meaning existed behind the materials in the first place. The question this raises—though Cameron, again, implies it more than he addresses it directly—is how to achieve the opposite. How do you incorporate new discoveries into your existing sense of meaning and purpose, without forsaking the deeper meaning of everything you already know?
(At one point, Cameron silently answers this question, in a very delightful fashion.)
SIX
Cameron should not be taken as an expert on indigenous societies or invading empires' impact on them, but he is passionate and perceptive about social and familial relationships. To the extent that he's interested in depicting various cultures, it's to show the ways in which their participants relate to one another, and how they're shaped by their relationship to their broader society as a whole.
If there's a specific message there, it's that the ways we relate to one another are our culture. They're what make culture meaningful. And they're why the loss (or outright description) of a culture is so perilous. What we lose, in the end, is our understanding of how we can connect.
SEVEN
A subtle and clever detail of the franchise is that Cameron's Marines adhere to a code of fraternity and honor that they genuinely never deviate from. While they serve absolutely scuzzy and murderous corporate interests, they take their sense of honor seriously, and never go back on their word. They take their camaraderie seriously too, and are loyal to one another to a fault. Yet they never show genuine friendliness to one another, or intimacy, or warmth.
The genius, I think, is that they're a faithful depiction of a culture that many, many people see as aspirational, or even ideal. Cameron gives it to us, and he doesn't cheat. He just puts that portrayal next to a depiction of a different kind of family, and lets the contrast say it all.
EIGHT
Fire and Ash's storytelling is more intricate, less focused, than The Way of Water's was. In the end, I found it less emotionally compelling, and less viscerally thrilling. (Comparatively. It was compelling and thrilling just the same.)
Regardless, there were moments through the first two-thirds of the movie where enough different plots were introduced that I found myself struggling to imagine how they'd all intersect. Each was striking on its own, but didn't show immediate signs of relevance to any of the others.
Which made it deeply satisfying when, without seeming effort, all the storylines abruptly knotted themselves together, a series of strands suddenly uniting into a whole. What's most impressive is how casually it all seemed to do so. This might be the first Avatar film that genuinely gets better the second time around.
NINE
Is anyone better at both fantasy artwork and visual composition than the team that Cameron has assembled? I can't imagine anyone who spent their childhood poring over the artwork in D&D manuals or on Magic: the Gathering card sets NOT immediately losing their shit about everything to do with this movie. The design of every creature, every vista, is absolutely stunning, and then on top of that, Cameron just knows how to assemble a fuckin' shot.
It would be such a waste to be cynical or jaded or dismissive about this. These films are a genuine gobsmacking achievement, on a shot-for-shot basis alone. This is what we always dreamed of fantasy storytelling being. I hope we don't fancy ourselves "too intelligent" to recognize that, and to marvel in it. That wouldn't be very intelligent at all.
TEN
More than anything, Cameron uses his 3D filmmaking to accentuate space, light, texture, color. The roughnesses and slicknesses, the membranes and foliage, are astounding. And I found myself wondering whether perceiving objects in 3D genuinely allows them to have a depth of color that 2D imagery lacks. So much of our perception of color relies on relativity and context; when we comprehend the depth of a space, or the surfaces along which color emerges, we experience that color more richly and fully than we possibly could otherwise.
James Cameron genuinely spent hundreds of millions of dollars looking for ways to make us experience light in brand-new ways. There's a direct throughline that leads from traditional painters to him. As a work of visual composition, as a work of pure evocation, Avatar remains utterly unmatched.
This might be the film in the franchise that uses color in the most astonishing and startling ways. View it as three and a half hours' worth of explorations into color, and you'll have received more than your money's worth.
ELEVEN
Another reason why it's frustrating that James Cameron gets reduced to a weird little oddity, or dismissed (somehow) as a talentless hack: in an era of vanishing attention spans, in a world where we legitimately fear multiple generations' ability to sit still for long enough to process information, Cameron convinces more people than any other filmmaker to sit in a dark room and take in a singular experience. That he manages to do this without screenplays full of clever quips or characters whose names you remember makes him more impressive, not less: he captures audiences by daring to offer them something worth their attention, and has faith that people have it in them to receive something like that once it's been offered.
TWELVE
And to people who think Cameron lacks storytelling imagination or playfulness or basic ingenuity, I'd just point to this: there is a lengthy sequence in this film involving borderline-eldritch horrors attacking and violently dismembering men and women who are literally pleading for their lives, screaming in abject terror, without any details omitted or any gruesomeness spared... and when that sequence arrives, you literally want to hoot and holler and cheer on the eldritch horrors as they commit mass murder.
Leave aside that this is an impressive feat of empathetic storytelling. Let's focus instead on just how funny this is, on a purely conceptual level. Cameron is much too self-assured to wink at his audience here—as with most of this movie, either you notice this or you don't—but he's blatantly having fun with movie history, inverting some classic tropes, relishing presenting monsters-versus-humans in a way that has you wholly convinced that the monsters are maybe more humans than the people who look like us are.
Isn't that an impressive feat? Maybe even a useful one, in a day and age where it's of life-and-death importance that we teach people how to relate to folks who don't look or sound or act like them? Possibly! But it's also just a whole lot of fun, as is each and every one of the two dozen or so action set-ups in this movie. No one of them stands up to the lengthy hour-long sequence that ends The Way of Water, but it sure says something that the main critique I have of Fire and Ash may be that it had too many inventive ideas.
THIRTEEN
And if you don't think that Cameron understands some deep truths about human beings, let me just say that Cameron sure understands the profound emotional intricacies of a certain kind of disturbed girlie who's just been handed a flamethrower for the first time. If you know, you know.
There's something genuinely interesting about making a movie whose message, on some level, is a low-key "fuck the patriarchy"—this movie really does not respect men trying to take authority, which is true of most if not all James Cameron movies—while simultaneously making its protagonist a guy who is absolutely convinced that he ought to act as a patriarch. This tension pops up all throughout the movie, and is never really addressed; it just sits there, complicating everything, there if you notice it but not insistent that you notice.
TWO
Broadly speaking, that's Cameron's attitude to a lot of narrative storytelling. So many themes, and surprisingly intricate and subtle ones, present themselves in this movie, but most of them don't intrude directly into the narrative. Cameron doesn't lampshade them, and he doesn't let them drive the narrative. That willingness to let things hang in the air, suspended and unresolved, is a neat thing to see; I've seen arguments that it's proof of Cameron's incompetence as a screenwriter, but to believe that you'd have to think James Cameron is a bad screenwriter, and I simply don't think that's the case at all.
THREE
There's an early moment in this film, where the Sully kids have been separated from their friends and family after a vicious battle, and the one human child in the mix—Spider, who perpetually wears an air-filtration mask to survive on a world that's literally toxic to him—runs out of oxygen altogether. The kids have no supplies. A vicious raiding party stands between them and the only home they have, and is actively pursuing them. They're scared and they're alone, and this is the moment where one of them starts to die, helplessly, in front of them.
We know that Spider's air has run out, because his mask starts blinking red. Here, in the middle of a bioluminescent forest defined by vivid blues and lush greens and dark browns, that warning-light red cuts through the gentle tapestry of colors. It's absorbed by the greenery and the reflective wetness: a living world reflecting an urgent warning.
That penetrating red light is the story, in that moment. There are lines of dialogue, there are plot beats being hit, but in Avatar, as with many of Cameron's work, the dialogue and the plot beats serve the visual, and not the other way around. Cameron is a sensual and emotional storyteller; he's good with words and with plot structure inasmuch as he knows how to make both flawlessly service the real subject matter of his films. (A genuinely bad writer, I'd argue, would make us cringe far more frequently than Cameron ever does—and it takes skill to know, among other things, exactly how often you can get away with using made-up fantasy words, and at precisely which point they'd start sounding clunky.)
If you believe that stories in general, and films in particular, can be told through sensation alone, you already believe that Cameron is a master of his craft. If you don't, well, there's a sophisticated argument to be made about exactly why this is true, and exactly why it matters that this is true, but you're also allowed to plain old not like a guy. I just wouldn't conflate your dislike of him with any proof that he's actually bad.
FOUR
Every time a new Avatar movie comes out, its critics love to claim its absolute irrelevance by asking fans how many characters' names they actually know.
All I could think while watching this movie was: I only saw The Way of Water once, yet I remember each individual character shockingly well. Cameron doesn't bother re-introducing every character, or including lines of dialogue that remind us who they are or how they relate to one another; instead, they just keep on being themselves, and each one is portrayed vividly enough that I found I remembered exactly who they were.
And I still don't remember their names, partly because they almost never use each other's names. I'm pretty sure there are major characters in this film whose names aren't spoken a single time. That doesn't make them any less memorable, in the same way that you remember colorful people who you meet at parties or in bars or on the subway or around and about even if you wouldn't know what to call them the next time you met them. And I think it's a strength of Cameron's, rather than a weakness, that he couldn't give less of a shit about whether you remember his characters' names.
It had me reflecting on the tendency that some blockbusters have to go the exact opposite route: to revolve screenplays and visual direction around making every character pop *so* much, making sure each and every one of them gets a Big Moment and a memeable quip, that they're reduced to a series of calculated ploys. Even their "substance," oftentimes, is a gimmick: sometimes I watch a film or a show and I can watch the writers go through the motions of Injecting Substance, or Making A Moment Meaningful. It makes my skin crawl. It's not even legitimate melodrama, because that would require writers and directors to sincerely express something. It's the Vitamin Water of art: it's convincing you that you're ingesting something healthy and good for you, and all the while you're just guzzling sugar.
Cameron, I think, writes more substantial characters than he's giving credit for. But I'm following my rules and sticking to my notes in the order I jotted them down, so we'll get back to that in a little while.
FIVE
While the Avatar franchise's comment on colonialism, indigenous peoples, etc. is lacking in many very obvious ways, one of several interesting questions at the heart of these movies is: how do you maintain the heart and soul of a culture as the world changes around it? Insisting too fiercely on adhering to tradition can become reactionary; insisting that all change is inherently good, on the other hand, is a quick way to abandon everything of value.
It's telling, maybe, that the Marines and various corporate interests are incredibly adaptable. It's one of the strengths that makes them a threat. They readily incorporate animal species, new technologies, natural resources, and even new bodies into their repertoire. But they do this without modifying their culture in the slightest, which means they destroy the very meaning behind everything they adopt. Taking the materials and not the meaning is a way of killing whatever meaning existed behind the materials in the first place. The question this raises—though Cameron, again, implies it more than he addresses it directly—is how to achieve the opposite. How do you incorporate new discoveries into your existing sense of meaning and purpose, without forsaking the deeper meaning of everything you already know?
(At one point, Cameron silently answers this question, in a very delightful fashion.)
SIX
Cameron should not be taken as an expert on indigenous societies or invading empires' impact on them, but he is passionate and perceptive about social and familial relationships. To the extent that he's interested in depicting various cultures, it's to show the ways in which their participants relate to one another, and how they're shaped by their relationship to their broader society as a whole.
If there's a specific message there, it's that the ways we relate to one another are our culture. They're what make culture meaningful. And they're why the loss (or outright description) of a culture is so perilous. What we lose, in the end, is our understanding of how we can connect.
SEVEN
A subtle and clever detail of the franchise is that Cameron's Marines adhere to a code of fraternity and honor that they genuinely never deviate from. While they serve absolutely scuzzy and murderous corporate interests, they take their sense of honor seriously, and never go back on their word. They take their camaraderie seriously too, and are loyal to one another to a fault. Yet they never show genuine friendliness to one another, or intimacy, or warmth.
The genius, I think, is that they're a faithful depiction of a culture that many, many people see as aspirational, or even ideal. Cameron gives it to us, and he doesn't cheat. He just puts that portrayal next to a depiction of a different kind of family, and lets the contrast say it all.
EIGHT
Fire and Ash's storytelling is more intricate, less focused, than The Way of Water's was. In the end, I found it less emotionally compelling, and less viscerally thrilling. (Comparatively. It was compelling and thrilling just the same.)
Regardless, there were moments through the first two-thirds of the movie where enough different plots were introduced that I found myself struggling to imagine how they'd all intersect. Each was striking on its own, but didn't show immediate signs of relevance to any of the others.
Which made it deeply satisfying when, without seeming effort, all the storylines abruptly knotted themselves together, a series of strands suddenly uniting into a whole. What's most impressive is how casually it all seemed to do so. This might be the first Avatar film that genuinely gets better the second time around.
NINE
Is anyone better at both fantasy artwork and visual composition than the team that Cameron has assembled? I can't imagine anyone who spent their childhood poring over the artwork in D&D manuals or on Magic: the Gathering card sets NOT immediately losing their shit about everything to do with this movie. The design of every creature, every vista, is absolutely stunning, and then on top of that, Cameron just knows how to assemble a fuckin' shot.
It would be such a waste to be cynical or jaded or dismissive about this. These films are a genuine gobsmacking achievement, on a shot-for-shot basis alone. This is what we always dreamed of fantasy storytelling being. I hope we don't fancy ourselves "too intelligent" to recognize that, and to marvel in it. That wouldn't be very intelligent at all.
TEN
More than anything, Cameron uses his 3D filmmaking to accentuate space, light, texture, color. The roughnesses and slicknesses, the membranes and foliage, are astounding. And I found myself wondering whether perceiving objects in 3D genuinely allows them to have a depth of color that 2D imagery lacks. So much of our perception of color relies on relativity and context; when we comprehend the depth of a space, or the surfaces along which color emerges, we experience that color more richly and fully than we possibly could otherwise.
James Cameron genuinely spent hundreds of millions of dollars looking for ways to make us experience light in brand-new ways. There's a direct throughline that leads from traditional painters to him. As a work of visual composition, as a work of pure evocation, Avatar remains utterly unmatched.
This might be the film in the franchise that uses color in the most astonishing and startling ways. View it as three and a half hours' worth of explorations into color, and you'll have received more than your money's worth.
ELEVEN
Another reason why it's frustrating that James Cameron gets reduced to a weird little oddity, or dismissed (somehow) as a talentless hack: in an era of vanishing attention spans, in a world where we legitimately fear multiple generations' ability to sit still for long enough to process information, Cameron convinces more people than any other filmmaker to sit in a dark room and take in a singular experience. That he manages to do this without screenplays full of clever quips or characters whose names you remember makes him more impressive, not less: he captures audiences by daring to offer them something worth their attention, and has faith that people have it in them to receive something like that once it's been offered.
TWELVE
And to people who think Cameron lacks storytelling imagination or playfulness or basic ingenuity, I'd just point to this: there is a lengthy sequence in this film involving borderline-eldritch horrors attacking and violently dismembering men and women who are literally pleading for their lives, screaming in abject terror, without any details omitted or any gruesomeness spared... and when that sequence arrives, you literally want to hoot and holler and cheer on the eldritch horrors as they commit mass murder.
Leave aside that this is an impressive feat of empathetic storytelling. Let's focus instead on just how funny this is, on a purely conceptual level. Cameron is much too self-assured to wink at his audience here—as with most of this movie, either you notice this or you don't—but he's blatantly having fun with movie history, inverting some classic tropes, relishing presenting monsters-versus-humans in a way that has you wholly convinced that the monsters are maybe more humans than the people who look like us are.
Isn't that an impressive feat? Maybe even a useful one, in a day and age where it's of life-and-death importance that we teach people how to relate to folks who don't look or sound or act like them? Possibly! But it's also just a whole lot of fun, as is each and every one of the two dozen or so action set-ups in this movie. No one of them stands up to the lengthy hour-long sequence that ends The Way of Water, but it sure says something that the main critique I have of Fire and Ash may be that it had too many inventive ideas.
THIRTEEN
And if you don't think that Cameron understands some deep truths about human beings, let me just say that Cameron sure understands the profound emotional intricacies of a certain kind of disturbed girlie who's just been handed a flamethrower for the first time. If you know, you know.