Pandora from under water looks more and more like Adornoesque horror - a technologically incongruous, empty vessel of hope in nature.
In his 2005 documentary Grizzly Man, director Werner Herzog disagrees with his subject Timothy Treadwell, who lived among grizzly bears for 13 summers, before ending up in one of their stomachs. Treadwell at times ponders emotionally, when a friend fox is found dead, or when a baby bear is eaten by his mother: “I just don't understand.” Herzog, in narration, responds by saying: “I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.” These words have always rung a bell of truth for me, and came to mind immediately when I walked out of James Cameron's latest aqua-epic Avatar: The Way of Water.
We return to Pandora, 13 years after Avatar opened the doors to the world of the Na’vi, and the invasion of humans that used avatar host bodies to infiltrate the native communities, in order to mine ‘unobtanium’ – you might have forgotten, but I kid you not. War hero Jake Sully, a crippled former marine, is now a family man permanently residing in a Na’vi host body, with equally blue adolescent children. When the 'sky people' return, reaping more chaos, hostility, and murder, Sully and his family are forced to flee their forest home, and seek refuge with the Metkayina water clan, who are a tad more turquoise than blue. The film revels in new technology, making it possible for the first time to record performance capture underwater. As such, we are introduced to the water world of Pandora. And like with the first film, the Na’vi of the waters connect their ponytails to the fauna of their environment, fly on the backs of reptiles, and exchange stories of hardship and happiness with whales that have rare golden brain fluid – this film’s unobtanium – and save their partner Na’vi from predators of the sea.
The performance capture is certainly good. Although Sam Worthington as Sully never seems to possess the type of charisma needed for proper blockbusting, Zoe Saldaña is quite spectacular as Neytiri, giving a performance that is as expressionistic as those found in silent films of the 1920s. Also returning to the cast are Sigourney Weaver, now playing her previous character’s daughter – apparently conceived in an offscreen romance – and Stephen Lang, whose evil colonel Miles Quaritch in a Cameronian twist of fate is allowed to survive his previous film’s death, by having his consciousness implanted in a (yet another) indestructible avatar host body. Both Lang and Weaver are in their 70s, and although their efforts are admirable, their digitally death-defying characters are also a clear example of Cameron’s inaptitude to say goodbye, and his need to transcend the darkness in the natural world.
Cameron and his crew create a substitute world for us, where substitute humans interact with substitute animals, and everything is posited as an exaggeration of ‘natural harmony’, threatened only by human colonialists. The consequence is that The Way of Water creates an unfair comparison between our world and this animated world. In our world we can't speak to whales, nor expect them to save us from sharks. In our world we don't have trees that are connected with the forest around them in such a complex way that it exceeds the complexity of human brain connections. As such, our fragile world won’t listen nor respond to our efforts to possibly save it.
This brings me back to Herzog’s quote, as I believe that the universe is not concerned with our species’ durability on the planet. It progresses in cycles of darkness and demise, in which humanity’s existence is only a small part. The universe can and will consume humanity at any given moment. The animated realism of Cameron’s Pandora therefore only serves to inspire the type of awe that gives a false hope that nature can return to its ‘former harmony’. It doesn’t face the actual issues that threaten the future of nature as created by ourselves. It substitutes our experience of nature, making our experience inferior to this technological victory over truth.
Whereas Avatar felt like a relatively innocent paradox that used its visual advancements to point to the white colonial horrors of the past inflicted on our fellow man and habitat, The Way of Water starts off blatantly contradicting itself, substituting nature for incongruous technology in the process, and ultimately failing to live up to its self-indulgent pretensions. In the end, this 3D borefest tells an uninspired save-the-planet tale with indestructible blue pieces of carton yippying on eight-eyed whales, accompanied by an acutely mistaken sense of (other)worldly importance and harmony among Na'vi. And like much of Cameron's work, they'll be back.
1.5 / 5 stars
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