If you have been waiting to witness a magnum opus on the big screen all year — and nothing has impressed you yet — then it does not get better than James Cameron’s latest release Avatar: The Way of Water. Coming 13 years after the mega success of its 2009 prequel Avatar, this film has elevated the bar for underwater visual effects to the highest ever.
Created on a massive budget of $400 million, and with a 192-minute-long runtime, Avatar: The Way of Water is a cinematic masterpiece rooted in Pandora. Cameron has placed his interest in nature and the environment at the film’s core.
The prologue by Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) bridges the gap between Avatar and the new sequel. He informs the audience about what happened after the ‘sky people’ — humans colonising Pandora — retreated. Now, Sully, also known as Toruk Makto, has become the chief of his village Omaticaya, living happily with his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and their four Na’vi children — three biological ones and Grace Augustine’s (Sigourney Weaver) inert Na’vi daughter — and one human boy, a distant cinematic clone of Mowgli.
But just as Sully says, “The thing about happiness: It can vanish in a heartbeat,” the old foe rises, but not in human form. Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who Neytiri killed at the end of Avatar, is resurrected to life as a Na’vi. All he wants is vengeance, and the fight is personal now.
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‘The sea gives and the sea takes’
In Avatar: The Way of the Water, Cameron has weaved his take on the environment into the narrative. If Avatar was set in forests, The Way of Water travels to the serene, blue ocean of eastern Pandora. At two junctures, two characters put it into words: “The way of water has no beginning and no end. Our hearts beat in the womb of the world. Water connects all things, life to death, and darkness to light. The sea gives and the sea takes.”
If the words don’t speak to you, there are scenes where resource-hungry humans hunt a large whale-like creature in the oceans of Pandora. Cameron shoots the sequence in a way that makes the audience feel the pain of the creature. Shot to perfection, the sequence is difficult to watch, highlighting Cameron’s grip over his cinematic craft.
Avatar: The Way of Water dives deep into how imperialistic forces dominate a nature-loving indigenous population, only this time the core conflict has become personal.
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The perfect capture
When 90 per cent of what you see on screen is excellent visuals and grand optics, it’s possible that real characters get buried under the surface. But in Avatar: The Way of Water, the actors hold their own. What you see is a picturesque blend of performance and motion capture.
While the first film focused heavily on Worthington and partly on Saldaña, The Way of Water is rooted in the Sully family. While Sully and Neytiri play their part well, their children are a treat to watch too. Among them, Sigourney Weaver as Kiri and Britain Dalton as Lo’ak steal the show.
My biggest disappointment lies in the treatment of Kate Winslet’s character, a fierce matriarch named Ronal. At a crucial point, though, a heavily-pregnant Ronal, when told by her husband to stay back, insists on heading for an ocean fight — and that she does well! Besides that redeeming scene, the actor has nothing much to do.
All in all, Avatar: The Way of Water has attempted to chart a new course for motion capture in filmmaking, and Cameron will leave you spellbound.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)