Glub Glub Glub

 

Avatar: The Way of Water

starring Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldaña, Sam Worthington, Britain Dalton, Stephen Lang, Jamie Flatters, Trinity Bliss, Baily Bass, Cliff Curtis and Edie Falco.

directed by James Cameron (the first Avatar, a few other small independent things I think)

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I don't often do these review-type posts two weeks in a row as they tend to end up being the longest things that I write. It turns out I can really get going if I have something to actually talk about. This is in stark contrast to literally every other week when I'm fucking winging it and drawing out 300 words seems almost as hard as creating a public life as a fake genius. It's a lot to keep straight and in the end, you just get booed at a Dave Chappelle show. Or whatever your local equivalent of that might be. This is not my best metaphor.

But I was working today, my last day before a two-week break for the holidays, and I ran right through my normal quitting time trying to get loose ends tied up so I would maintain the option to not think about literally anything over these next two weeks. When I finally logged off, I found myself here, on a regular Thursday, mentally and emotionally spent, but obligated by habit to consider making something for the benefit of between two and seven of you out there (depending on the week according to my analytics). So I thought: why try to come up with something when I just saw this dang movie last night? Especially when any relevant topic of the day is just going to end in darkness, like an episode of Last Week Tonight, but without the professional jokes as a leavener. I mean, you saw the metaphor I tried up in the previous paragraph. This could get grim.

Not only is it a handy writing prompt, but it turns out if you opt to sit and think about Avatar: The Way of Water? Not really that taxing. I saw it with two of my adult children and one of the first things I asked them: was there anything in that movie that you'll quote or think about a year from now? A month? A week? And we all had a good laugh at the absurdity of the question and proceeded to lightly mock the end result of what looked like a lot of production effort, mostly by using quotes and jokes from other, better movies.

I can't be the first person to note that for a movie about oceans, it's all pretty shallow. My indifference for the first Avatar movie was intense and profound. It provoked roughly the same resultant feeling of an absence of experience as this one did. Cameron has swapped out the vaguely American Indian blue cat people who like trees for a slightly more turquoise vaguely Polynesian blue cat people who like water. They have face tattoos, they pull some haka faces when they're gearing up for war... it's all a bit more embarrassing than offensive. There's an earnestness to it that protects it from sliding too far into self-parody, but any attempt at profundity is undercut by a meandering, action-only plot with beats cobbled together from a quorum of other, equally unoriginal action movies.

The idea was likely that the look was the thing, not the characters or the story, was going to be the main draw. And it is incredibly impressive visually, luckily especially in the water sequences, a full three-quarters of the movie. There's no denying the innovation and unparalleled absolute triumph of the look of the thing. It's a celebration of the limits of what animation can do, making the line between what can be captured and what can be created that much more fuzzy as, ironically, the resolution gets higher and higher. That said, the last third or so of the film there are some pretty jarring sequences when live action intrudes on what you might have forgotten was essentially a cartoon for the previous two hours. The realities clash a bit, especially in the area of frame rates.

And that's the other thing: after two hours, you still have a whole-ass hour to go. It's not a subtle point to say it's just too fucking long. It's a simultaneous a failure and a celebration of editing. The fact that they are able to concoct a rigorously (almost oppressively) followable plot out of what had to be a mess of storyboards and animation assignments and tons of shot footage (a tiny amount of which would have been immediately useable without several VFX passes) was genuinely impressive. Like a paint-by-numbers that still gets you a creditable Mona Lisa. But holy shit, it is repetitive. The blue cat children get captured, like five different times. One of the cat boys becomes friends with a space whale, over what felt like five repeated versions of the same sequence. Evil humans hunt space whales in exactly the same way over I think three different sequences? I'm OK with a three hour movie, but it should be three hours of different ideas building to something. This is about 40 minutes of ideas with the ending of Titanic stapled to the end of it. Hell, Kate Winslet's even there.

And in the end, that's one of the problems. Kate Winslet was in it, but I didn't even know until I checked the cast list in preparation for this. In these thin action-first pieces, you need the actors to make it more than the sum of its parts, but this is all parts. Blue, animated, werecat parts. As far as the animation technology has come, especially for motion capture, there's still a layer of distance between real human expression and what comes out of a rubber-faced CGI marionette. Zoe Saldaña especially works her ass off to emote some truly deep human things, but it's blunted by the digital makeup and the fact that she spends most of the movie relegated to cooking. She breaks out in a big way at the end, motivated by grief and blood vengeance, in one of the only sequences that lands with any feeling at all, but it's all too brief and mostly just cool because she kills mech warriors with giant-ass arrows.

Some of the rest of the cast struggles from some mis-casting. Edie Falco could probably be a believable military presence, but she's exposition in a uniform here. Jemaine Clement doing an American accent alongside a guy doing an Australian one made him sound more Kiwi than ever, weirdly. There's no Laurence Fishburne or Hugo Weaving doing for this movie what they did for The Matrix, but to be fair to the cast here, there's really no opportunity for them to do so either. Stephen Lang gets to sneer (virtually) and chew some scenery as a one-dimensional silent-film-serial villain with no plan and less follow through (good god, stop threatening to kill your child hostages over and over and just kill one already!), but that's as big as it gets.

Making stars out of the stars is not the intent of an endeavor like this. It's to make you go "ooh, pretty," and I did. It made sense to pay a little extra per ticket to see it in the fancy Dolby theater near the mall out here, with the leather recliners and everything. The picture was sharp, even in 3D, with my 3D specs over my regular progressives, and it all felt alive and fully rendered, but unfortunately, only in the very literal use of the word.