Did you even know Kate Winset was in "Avatar: The Way of Water?"
Did Quaritch and Spider's relationship feel forced?
Here's the dumbest things that happened in the "Avatar" sequel!
"Avatar: The Way of Water" is stuck in a strange limbo: It's both a sequel, picking up where
"Avatar" left off in a literal sense, but also clearly made with a nostalgic zeal to
remind people of the original.
Think of the way the "Jurassic World" movies feel more like "Jurassic Park" theme park
rides than actual extensions of a coherent story.
The dumbest thing in "The Way of Water" that we just have to live with is how it shoe-horns
new roles for Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang into the story, even though both of their
characters died in the first movie.
Weaver's new character Kiri, a child mysteriously born of the Avatar of her original character
Dr. Grace Augustine, at least has some strange messianic qualities that are unique.
But asking us to just roll with Lang's psychotic Colonel Quaritch being reborn as a "Recombinant"
form of Avatar is a bit much.
It retcons "Avatar" in the sense that the technology to create a digital copy of a human
consciousness apparently existed at the time, and Quaritch and his team backed themselves
up before the final showdown.
So essentially, like the ill-fated ending of "Lost," "The Way of Water" is asking us
to invest in a world where death has no meaning.
Were Grace Augustine and the other scientists also backed up?
That would certainly explain why her Avatar is just hanging around inert in a tank, for
no discernible purpose.
The biggest criticism of the first "Avatar" is that Jake Sully is a classic white savior.
It's tone deaf that way that a complete stranger to the Na'vi way of life ends up uniting the
tribes and being chosen as Turok Makto.
You'd think years later in "The Way of Water," since Jake has integrated more fully and had
half-Na'vi children with Neytiri, that this would be less of a prevalent theme.
But it seems Kiri has been added to the story as a second white savior for the price of one.
Though raised as a Na'vi, she's essentially a sort of reincarnated version of Grace Augustine,
the other most benevolent white person from the first movie.
Kiri clearly has some "chosen one" type powers brewing as she communes with nature and can
hear the heartbeat of Eywa, the all mother.
Not to mention, "The Way of Water" goes the same route as "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace"
in introducing the idea of immaculate conception with a couple of casual off-hand remarks.
It's apparently "a total mystery" how Grace Augustine's comatose Avatar gave birth to
a child, although the movie pulls at a very disturbing thread a couple of times as Kiri
and other characters wonder who her father might be.
"Something really interesting going on there biologically.
I would die to get samples."
Few sins of the original "Avatar" as unforgivable as "unobtanium," the precious mineral that
humans were on Pandora to harvest.
Fortunately, no one utters that ridiculous word in "The Way of Water."
Although the reappearance of humanity is abruptly handled, we do learn early on that they have
a much more straightforward and urgent reason to return to Pandora than getting rich.
That is, earth is dying, and Pandora is to be entirely colonized as humanity's new home.
This creates a compelling global threat to all of the Na'vi clans that's not even based
on a bad pun.
But fully two thirds of the way through "The Way of Water," we learn there's an entirely
brand new magical substance that humanity is after on Pandora.
It's a serum harvested from the brains of giant sentient whale-like creatures called Tulkun.
This enzyme, called Amrite, apparently stops the aging process entirely in humans.
So the hunting of Tulkuns becomes another lazy, obvious allegory for the awful colonizers
not to respect sacred Na'vi traditions, since the Metkayina bond with the Tulkun and are
heartbroken at their loss.
The humans, of course, harvest just about a two liter soda bottle's worth of Amrite
from a Tulkun the size of a battleship and leave the rest to rot.
Were you even aware that the great Kate Winslet is in this movie?
She provides the voice of Ronal, the wife of the Metkayina's leader, and mostly glares
disapprovingly at Jake and family for endangering her tribe.
"The Way of Water" introduces many new characters, but not a single one has the star power of
Winslet, an Oscar winner and one of the greatest actresses of her generation.
So it's a bit dumb when you realize that like the majority of characters in this overstuffed
movie, she didn't have time for any sort of character arc or sub-plot of her own.
While it's likely she has a bigger role to play in future installments, it doesn't make
her bit part in "The Way of Water" any less of a missed opportunity.
Other than mourning her "soul sister" Tulkun's death and being very justifiably angry at
the Sullys for bringing destruction with them out to the islands, Ronal barely registers.
This is why Kate Winslet had to hold her breath underwater for more than seven minutes?
"Yes, that's true."
Probably the most preposterous running thread in "Avatar: The Way of Water" is the relationship
between the Recombinant Colonel Quaritch and his long lost son, Spider.
The kid is the most prominent fully human character left in the story, having been left
on Pandora as a small child and raised with the Na'vi.
"The Way of Water" wants us to buy into big plot points pivoting on the burgeoning emotional
bond between this child of two worlds and the lab-grown Avatar of his deceased father.
The problem with this is that Quaritch, in either human or Avatar form, is by far the
most one-dimensional character in either movie.
He's nothing but a murderous soldier, and he outright tells Spider that since he's technically
a form of clone, he's not actually his father anyway.
Sure, Quaritch and Spider may have had a few bonding moments while the latter was being
held hostage, but it really didn't go far enough.
Then seemingly out of nowhere, Quaritch is suddenly concerned about Spider when Neytiri
threatens his life in a late standoff.
Spider then saves Quaritch's life, which doesn't feel earned at all.
It also doesn't even really matter because presumably the humans could just keep growing
new Quaritch Recombinants and re-downloading his consciousness anyway.
James Cameron has had an incredibly successful career, so perhaps he's earned a little bit
of self-referential leeway.
But we have to bring into question the sequence near the end of "The Way of Water" where star-crossed
crushes Lo'ak and Reya attempt to survive by clambering around the outside of an over-turned ship.
These moments are pretty shamelessly close to the beats from Cameron's "Titanic," to
the point that it takes you out of the movie a little bit.
It's already a bit much to ask us to just roll with their romance, which lazily recreates
the same beats as Jake and Neytiri's story in the first movie.
Just like his father, Lo'ak is a stranger to the Metkayina clan but learns their ways
and charms the chief's daughter.
He also befriends a dangerous and sacred animal that they revere, and is told "I see you"
by Reya in a direct echo.
"Alien, that's all they see!"
"I see you."
During the sequence when a whaling vessel slowly turns upside down, Lo'ak and Reya end
up precariously perched right on top of it as it submerges in the water.
Just like Jack and Rose in "Titanic," they promise to hold on to each other when they
take the plunge.
What's James Cameron up to?
One of the strangest scenes in "Avatar: The Way of Water" is when Norm and Max fly out
to the islands to try and see what's going on with Kiri, who had a seizure while connected
to the Metkayina version of the Spirit Tree.
Attaching diodes and machines to Kiri's head, Norm speculates that her spiritual
connection to Eywa may be a side effect of epilepsy.
It's an abrupt and strange suggestion after lots of evidence that there may be nothing
special about Kiri at all.
This flies in the face of the generally faith-forward nature of both "Avatar" movies and never gets
followed up on.
In general, the spiritual purity of the Na'vi and the real-world influence of Eywa is empirically obvious.
In the first movie, the Na'vi basically are losing the fight until Eywa intervenes and
possesses all the animal life on the planet to attack the human forces.
"Avatar" as a franchise seems to have no interest in sincerely exploring the delicate balance
between science and faith.
This scene, which dabbles in skepticism just for the sake of a distraction, is one of the
dumbest things in "The Way of Water."
Most people don't go to the movies to read, so subtitles can often be a deal breaker when
you're browsing the Netflix menu.
As Jake Sully learned the ways of the Omaticaya Clan of the Na'vi in the first "Avatar," the
movie was committed to showing both English and Na'vi being spoken consistently, and subtitling
the alien dialogue whenever necessary.
The way language was treated was logical and consistent.
But in "The Way of Water," director James Cameron and company must have realized early
on that since Jake now has been living with the Na'vi for more than a decade, they would
essentially be making a foreign language film.
To solve this, very early in the sequel, Jakes tells us via voice-over that he's learned
the Na'vi language so thoroughly that when he hears it, it may as well be English.
And presto, suddenly we also hear his children and all other Na'vi speaking English.
When Na'vi interact with other English-speaking characters later, they're still subtitled,
but whenever Na'vi are talking to each other, it's all English for convenience's sake.
It does save the audience a lot of subtitle reading, but it's a bracingly dumb and inelegant
tweak to the rules of the way the reality of what we're seeing it being depicted.
After the earnest pride that the first "Avatar" took in realizing Na'vi culture, it's kind
of surprising that "The Way of Water" just shrugs and transforms 90% of potentially Na'vi
dialogue into plain old English.