James Cameron hates himself
Peter Tonguette
From the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien to the outer-space epics of George Lucas, all myth-making ventures involve a degree of hubris on the part of their creator. But filmmaker James Cameron’s hubris, like his budgets, is bigger than most: The 68-year-old filmmaker takes it as a given that audiences, after all these years, will be as familiar with all this Avatar business as they are with some religions.
In his long, dull, amazingly unimaginative, and fundamentally anti-human sequel Avatar: The Way of Water, Cameron plops the faithful and the uninitiated alike back onto Pandora, the seemingly evergreen planet whose native residents include members of the Na’vi species, gigantic, lumbering, hunter-gathering Smurfs with the gait of Jar Jar Binks and a serene, one-with-nature disposition that suggests some combination of E.T., Frodo Baggins, and Kermit the Frog.
Making no allowances for the fact that the original Avatar, despite the billions it earned upon its release in 2009, never quite captured imaginations to the same degree as, say, Star Wars, Cameron nonetheless assumes that audiences will remember the characteristics, features, and “rules” of Pandora, as well as the backstory of our hero, Jake Sully. Actor Sam Worthington (remember him?) has been plucked from whatever C-list he has found himself on lately to return as Jake, a Marine who, in the first film, was dispatched from a dying Earth to Pandora. He arrives having adopted the likeness of a Na’vi — that is, as an “avatar” — but he finds himself so taken with the locals that, through some vaguely understood process, he comes to be a quasi-Na’vi.
The movie is a gigantic hit around the world — thereby assuring the arrival of further Avatar movies. Maybe it is a religion after all.
Indeed, the Avatar sequel, like its predecessor, functions better as theology than as cinema. To be blunt, The Way of Water has the approximate aesthetics of a video game set somewhere at sea — for long stretches, the movie is a jumble of fake-looking Na’vi creatures splashing, slushing, and sloshing among equally fake-looking ocean waves. It features dialogue that would not be out of place in an after-school special about troubled adolescents. “Why can’t I be like everyone else?” “Sorry, I don’t speak English to buttholes!” So, whatever it is that has caused the public to flock to the film, it must have less to do with its qualities as a work of art than its status as a holy book for a generation raised to accept the divinity of rainforests, the cult around the Silent Spring, and the fundamental badness of you and me — you know, people.
In fact, the Avatar franchise simply could not exist during any era but one in which the basic needs of humans — for fuel, food, land, and so on — are judged second-best next to the needs of, say, a soon-to-be-extinct bird or a swampy marsh somewhere. The entire plot of The Way of Water is premised on the audience’s implicit outrage at the former for daring to corrupt the natural world. In the film, the pesky earthlings — embodied, for maximum hatefulness, by the U.S. military-like Resources Development Administration, under the gung-ho leadership of Gen. Frances Ardmore (Edie Falco, doing a close study of Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2) — remain unrepentant in their desire to take over Pandora, whose status as a bucolic Eden depends on the leadership skills of Jake and the Na’vi insurgents under his command.
The deck is preposterously stacked in favor of the Na’vi: At one point, the RDA’s only way of drawing out Jake is said to be mounting an assault on peaceable whalelike creatures, which are, in the world of the film, already targeted for possessing some sort of anti-aging glop that resides in their skulls — here, Cameron, in one fell swoop, attacks militarism, whaling, and capitalism (and the beauty industry). This stretch of the film, occupying the third hour or so, suggests nothing so much as a virtual-reality ride inspired by the movie Free Willy.
It must be said that Cameron stages some mildly engaging battles between the RDA, led in the field by a Na’vi avatar iteration of Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), and Jake’s ersatz army. But the entire premise, properly understood, is rather unnerving: We are to take as an article of faith the evilness of humans and the goodness of Jake, who has, by the film’s lights, boldly renounced his earthling status and eased into domestic life. Well, they don’t have domiciles, but domestic life if your “domestic life” involves spearing fish with native Na’vi Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), with whom Jake has multiple children and an adopted daughter, Kiri, played, or voiced, or whatever, by Sigourney Weaver. (You haven’t lived until you have heard Jake address Kiri as “baby girl” and receive a reply in the voice of the 73-year-old Weaver.)
Who would actually want to live on Pandora? Visually, the place is both unappealing and monotonous. Jake’s adopted forest is a humid, rainy, icky snarl of ferns, leaves, and grasses. Imagine Terrence Malick aided and abetted by computer imagery. The oceanic-dwelling crew with whom Jake hides out, the so-called Reef People, toil in paradise if your idea of paradise is endless water inhabited by creatures resembling the sandworms in Beetlejuice. Spider, a human allied with the Na’vi played by Jack Champion, wanders through the film looking like a former participant of Naked and Afraid.
But, we are told endlessly, Pandora is holy, and water itself contains the secrets of the universe. “The sea is your home before your birth and after your death,” one character says, adopting an eschatology that sounds like it could have been written by Jules Verne rather than the church fathers. Cameron, though synonymous with technical achievement on the strength of such modern action classics as the Terminator films and True Lies, is peculiarly susceptible to mumbo jumbo, as when one Na’vi is injured and her cure rests not with modern medicine but with traditional methods. A tone of righteous indignation hovers over the production; one keeps expecting a cameo appearance by Greta Thunberg as the most aggrieved Na’vi.
It is one of the ironies of our age that Cameron expends hundreds of millions of dollars to advance arguments against civilization and that we are asked to long for Pandora — its warm breezes, its cool waters — while seated in cheap leather seats with molded plastic cup holders. As the filmmaker sees it, humanity itself can sink to the bottom of the ocean much as that ill-fated passenger liner Titanic once did. Only there, amid flora and fauna and presumably a kindly whale or two, might we be cleansed, purified, and revived.
Perhaps Avatar: The Way of Water is the culmination of several generations of human self-loathing. Yes, humans exist in a fallen state, but something has gone seriously awry if the answer to that fallenness is to depart Earth, transform ourselves into members of the Blue Man Group, and revert to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.