More than a decade after the original,
James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water once again brings us back to the beautifully alien world of Pandora.
And once again, even more so than with the first movie in my opinion,
the conversations around it, especially from critics, feel weirdly shallow and incomplete.
I’d agree that these aren’t necessarily the most complex movies, but still,
I do believe that Avatar offers worthwhile insights into the art of storytelling that tend to be overlooked,
and that it is, in its own way, deeper than generally given credit for.
I think that, in order to properly understand Avatar you have to understand that in these movies,
more than pretty much any other modern blockbuster;
the world is the story.
This might not seem like a grand revelation, but it does come with some nuances, and works on a couple of different layers.
It has to do with how Pandora is presented to us, and with the purpose that it is in service of.
Or to put it like this; with the way Avatar uses its world to convey an often underappreciated, thematic message.
This video is brought to you by me, and my brand new Nebula Class in which I break down everything I know about how to analyze stories,
but first, let’s see it in action.
Beginning with the way Cameron presents the world of Pandora.
Obviously, there’s a lot that can be and has already been said about the CGI and the more general technical qualities of both Avatar movies.
It was already impressive in 2009, and now with the Way of Water, Cameron yet again pushes the envelope.
But the thing is, I don’t think raw technical power is the key to what makes Pandora feel so real and immersive.
Sure, it’s important, but the real reason it shines so brightly here
is because even though to some it might seem like Cameron is just showing off some powerful tech,
I believe that it actually is but a means to an end, that it actually is but one element, one part of a larger storytelling philosophy.
Because you see, it has become clear to me that Cameron understands one simple truth about human beings,
one that so many other blockbusters seem to have forgotten about:
we love adventures.
We enjoy the sensation of exploring new worlds, of venturing into the unknown in a way that feels exciting, tangible and immersive.
And in its essence, that’s exactly what Avatar gave us. Twice now.
For in The Way of Water too, we get to feel that same sense of discovery, of adventure,
as Jake and his family travel to a new place where they encounter new people, new animals, new ways of being.
This feeling of adventure, however, is not just a matter of novelty, it’s about the way that novelty is treated.
Because what Cameron does, and does really well in my opinion,
is that he captures a certain mode of experience, and immerses the audience into a specific form of engagement.
What it comes down to is that Cameron understands that if you create a world with passion,
in this case one that is filled with unique ecosystems, with different biomes, mysterious phenomena, and a wide variety of flora and fauna,
and present it through characters who are equally passionate about it, who are eager to jump in, to explore it, interact with it,
then the audience will feel the same way.
Then they too will be captivated by the mystery and the beauty,
and they won’t need a convoluted plot that rushes from one place to the next
and that turns what once might have been a captivating world into mere window-dressing.
No, Cameron understands that if the world is one that’s worth being in, then that is enough.
The purpose is to be present, to be in that world, to be enjoying what’s happening, to sustain a feeling.
And so, whenever I see reviews arguing that the Way of Water was a 90 minute or so story stretched out for over 3 hours,
or that it was merely a largely purposeless tech demo,
I just feel like they’re completely missing this fundamental idea that the experience of adventure,
the time spent exploring a world, can be a storytelling goal in its own right.
I find it especially strange considering how we do seem to assume this so naturally with open world videogames,
because when you take a game like Skyrim, The Witcher or Red Dead Redemption,
and criticize them for being 10 hour stories stretched over 100 hours of pointless filler,
would you not say that this fundamentally misunderstands the whole purpose of these experiences?
Everything is backwards now, like out there is the true world, and in here is the dream.
All this, however, is not to say that meandering aimlessly and smelling the proverbial roses is what The Way of Water is about as a story.
I see it more as a storytelling technique,
and while it’s one that has a direct purpose on its own by providing escapism into an immersive and enjoyable world, that’s not where it ends.
For I believe that all this attention to the world of Pandora also carries a significant thematic meaning,
that it serves a deeper function too that I haven’t really seen being discussed in earnest by any professional critic,
and this has to do with what seems to be James Cameron’s other great passion, which is the preservation of our natural world.
I'm trying to understand this deep connection that people have to the forest.
To be fair, people have been talking about Cameron’s environmentalist message since the first Avatar,
but as far as I can tell, it rarely went beyond the basic observation that there is one,
that Cameron cares about nature, and that he wants us to care more about it too.
But I don’t believe it was often seen as much more than platitude, as a sentimental and rather simplistic appeal to save the trees.
And to be honest, after the first movie, that’s kind of how I felt about it too.
It is true that the first Avatar relied heavily on archetypes,
on easily recognizable characters; good guy, bad guy, science guy, etcetera,
and easily recognizable thematic elements; greedy humans bad, destroying the forest also bad, protecting the forest good.
As Cameron has pointed out, this was however a conscious decision, and I can definitely see why.
Archetypes make stories more easily digestible, which in this case,
is what helped audiences to jump right in and spend most of their attention, even on the first viewing, on just being present,
on exploring and enjoying this world without being too intellectually engaged,
without constantly worrying about where the plot is going, or about what it’s all supposed to mean.
And in return, somewhat inversely, by really letting the world be the story,
by having the primary goal be to connect the audience to this beautiful new place emotionally,
that sentimental appeal to safeguard it did come with more weight.
Because towards the end of the first movie, it wasn’t just a forest that was under attack,
it was the one that we just fell in love with;
the one where we got to spend so much time in,
where we got to see its wildlife, touch its plants, and fill ourselves with awe and wonder.
To me, it felt like an attempt to reconnect us to nature in our own world,
to shake us out of apathy, out of our mindless consumption and aimless expansion to reflect on the things that truly matter.
And while I think this is definitely a solid message regarding an important, almost existential issue,
personally, I also found it to be somewhat ineffective.
Because I think that by now, we’ve all seen documentary footage of rainforests being cut down, of animals losing their habitats.
We all know that our current way of living is, in many ways, destructive to the natural world.
And we’ve all felt the pain that’s connected to that,
which is another reason why I think people so intuitively sided with the Na’vi to protect the forest against the invaders;
because it played right into a very real emotion that so many of us have already experienced in our own relation to nature in the real world.
But then again, given that we already know all this, that we already are so familiar with this conflict,
I couldn’t help but wonder if yet another spiritual appeal was really going to make a difference,
either in inspiring direct action or in providing new insights into environmental issues and in our relation to them.
Now, one can argue that if our default state is one of indifference, of carelessness,
then awareness is something that needs constant reminders and attention.
But still, I was hoping for a little bit more.
And then came The Way of Water, some spoilers ahead.
At first glance, it seems like the Way of Water does the same thing as the first Avatar, but with a shift in focus towards the oceans and to the whales.
Once again, we’re introduced to a wonderous new world that we get to explore and grow emotionally attached to,
and we then experience that same visceral outrage when that world comes under attack by the sky people.
But what’s different here, thematically speaking that is, is the introduction of Jake as a father,
which I think adds an interesting new layer to that rather simplistic environmental message of the first movie.
I know that a lot of people initially saw Jake as kind of bland and generic, and to some extent, I agree.
There’s an argument to be made that this too was intentional so that he could serve as the avatar for the audience,
as an almost empty vessel through which we could more seamlessly project ourselves into the world of Pandora.
But even so, I also thought that Jake had more personality than given credit for.
I thought he was resourceful, perceptive, adaptive, and just generally open-minded.
My cup is empty, trust me.
And although qualities like these can be easily mistaken for Jake being passive or reactive,
the Way of Water adds a deliberateness to these traits by having Jake explicitly teach them as virtues to his children as they try to fit in with the Metkayina clan.
“Learn fast, pull your weight,” he says at some point.
In doing so, Jake demonstrates, more actively than in the first movie,
an approach that does not seek to impose its own ways,
but is rather built around observing and assuming the ways of the other, or more generally, to the ways of the world,
be it the way of the forest, or now the way of the water.
The message, I think, is pretty clear; we are the ones who should adapt ourselves to nature, not the other way around.
Having said that, as a father, Jake also reveals a distinct flaw in the Water of Water.
Though he starts off in a pretty good place, a happy place, as he narrates in the beginning.
The moment the environmental threat posed by the sky people returns to Pandora, something changes.
And by that, I don’t mean the way he starts running his family like a platoon of soldiers,
which I personally think is a bit of a tired story trope.
No, what I mean is the more subtle way in which he seems to fall back into his more individualistic roots as a sky person,
which clearly conflict with the more communal culture he has been living in as a Na’vi.
He argues that it’s a father’s job to protect his family, that his family is his fortress,
and it is this belief that, after being targeted by the bad guys, prompts him to take his family, leave his community, and flee across the ocean.
What Jake captures here, I think, is a distinctive response to collective dangers that has become all too prevalent at least here in our Western society.
One that basically has people losing hope in the possibility to solve our collective crises,
and subsequently abandoning communal action to focus only on themselves and their loved ones.
It’s the idea that if I can’t save the world, maybe I can at least save my own family.
It’s an understandable reaction, and I like that Cameron depicts it with some degree of sympathy.
Because obviously, when faced with a direct danger, it feels natural that people would want to protect their loved ones first.
But what Cameron also shows here is that when it comes to collective problems that will inevitably affect everyone,
the belief that you can run away from them is pointless at best, and irresponsible at worst.
For even though Jake believes that he can just isolate himself and his family somewhere
and not have to worry about the implications that this has for the rest of Pandora,
we know that this time the sky people are here to settle down for good,
we know that there’s going to be widespread world-changing consequences to that intention.
And indeed, it doesn’t take long before the conflict Jake tried to escape from finds him anyways.
But perhaps even more interestingly,
I think The Way of Water also wants to show us that making a stand for the world we live in is not just a matter of ensuring our own survival,
it is also a matter of ethics, it’s about questions of collective responsibility.
Again, in Avatar, the world is the story.
And this time around, we do not only get to know a new ecosystem as we explore Pandora’s ocean,
but we also get to know the Tulkun,
which are these extremely intelligent whales that can communicate, philosophize, and which are shown to have deep relations with the Na’vi.
On first impression, I thought this was another slightly overzealous attempt from Cameron to spiritualize the natural world like he also did in the first movie,
you know, that “everything is intelligent and precious and harmoniously interconnected” vibe,
which I think was perceived by a lot of people as somewhat hokey.
What the hell have you people been smoking out there? They're just goddamn trees.
But as The Way of Water progressed, and the Tulkun were shown being hunted by the sky people,
I began to feel differently about it.
Maybe it was because we were now dealing with explicitly sentient creatures instead of the more general idea of an ecosystem,
but somehow the real world parallels seemed much more poignant and relevant.
One can obviously point fingers at the countries that engage in whaling practices similar to the ones depicted in The Way of Water,
but I think this conflict extends to the much broader issue of how the animals that we share this world with are appreciated and treated by us.
Consider the octopus for example,
which is not just known for its incredible puzzle solving capabilities and capacity for emotional attachment,
but also for having an essentially decentralized consciousness that is spread out over 9 different brains,
thereby giving them a completely unique form of sentience that is so unlike our own that we barely even know how to begin to understand it.
Nevertheless, last year, Spain announced their plans to build the world’s first octopus farm,
provoking strong reactions from environmental and animal rights groups over the ethical implications
of submitting these highly intelligent and sensitive creatures to what is very likely a high degree of structural suffering.
It’s an issue that unfortunately already defines so much of our global animal industry,
and one that, again unfortunately, tells us a lot about the values that we actually put into collective practice as a society,
about the world that we are actually creating while we are too concerned with ourselves.
And so, perhaps more than anything, I feel like this is the essential message of The Way of Water;
that although it might seem easy to turn away from collective problems, to carve out your own little island,
sooner as later, you will either run out of hiding places, or end up in a world that’s no longer worth hiding in.
And so as Jake concludes in the end,
it is vital that we come to truly acknowledge that the world is our only real fortress,
and that if we want to protect it, we have to protect it whole.
Now, it’s still not a particularly complex message, but to me it does feel like a progression compared to the first movie.
It’s more specific, better articulated, and it has me curious to see where the series goes next.
Of course, I realize all this might feel like I’m overstating the thematic depths of what is first and foremost a piece of entertainment,
and I’m definitely not arguing that The Way of Water functions as a direct guide to collective environmental action,
but still, besides just being a fun adventure, the movie did get me to think about these things, and it did feel more meaningful to me because of it.
And it’s precisely this kind of analysis, the kind that combines storytelling archetypes, personal reflection and real world connections,
that is at the heart of my new Nebula Class: “How to Analyze Stories and Enrich Your Own.”
In this extensive educational course, I cover pretty much everything I have learned about storytelling in the last 10 years,
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to dissecting their structural elements, their archetypes, their socio-political contexts,
and finally, to really digging into our own personal connection to them,
and learning not only how to watch movies analytically, but also how to engage with them emotionally,
which I felt was just so important with Avatar;
to look beyond the technology, beyond the obvious story structure, and really ask yourself:
how does all this really make me feel? What does it really mean to be present in a story like this?
You can watch the class right now exclusively on Nebula,
because without them, I simply would not have been able to make it, especially not with this kind of production value.
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Right now, besides my new class, there’s a wealth of beautifully made Nebula Originals,
there are exclusive videos of mine, and bonus episodes of my podcast Cinema of Meaning,
the last of which also covers Avatar: The Way of Water.
And all that’s just scraping the surface, there’s a lot more to come.
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