CONTAINS A FEW SPOILERS
So it's been thirteen years since Avatar and let's be honest: a return to Pandora has not been in my thoughts. Indeed, until this new one was about to arrive in UK cinemas I had felt not the slightest urge to rewatch it. And occasionally I might see another of James Cameron's movies: I'd reach for Aliens or The Terminator from the DVD shelf or I'd stumble across True Lies or Titanic while button-punching through the Freeview channels, and idly wonder "what's Cameron been up to recently?" before getting immersed in the chosen movie or clicking away to something else. In fact, if you'd asked me to list Cameron's films I'd probably have forgotten about Avatar entirely; I'd have remembered Piranha 2: The Spawning quicker. So, thirteen years later: was it worth the wait?
The answer has to be no. It's not that I'm annoyed that I've waited this long for something this unremarkable, something that leaves you with such a feeling of "well, it's alright". (Frankly, I haven't waited; I've just got on with other stuff.) Avatar: The Way Of Water is just about okay but that's as far as it goes and for that long a gestation and that much money "well, it's alright" and "just about okay" simply isn't good enough. For a major event movie there's scarcely a ripple of interest. Why? Because as any schoolchild knows, the way of water is downstream and we weren't exactly starting from great dramatic heights. And while the technical look of Avatar 2 is astonishing, it's dramatically quite dull and it doesn't engage emotionally, so all that's left is a vast selection of pretty images and creature designs.
It's fifteen years later and Jake Sully (Sam Worthington, who never appears as a human this time around) is now fully integrated into Na'vi society with wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and children Lo'ak, Tuk and Neteyam. Until Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the villain from the first film, returns in his Na'vi avatar to [1] gain his revenge, [2] harvest gloop from giant whale brains because it halts the human ageing process and [3] seek to turn Pandora into the next Earth colony (with no regard for the indigenous peoples). Jake and family flee for sanctuary with the Omaticaya tribe on the island of Metkayina, but Quaritch and the whalers are on their trail...
And I don't care. I can't care, it's practically impossible to care. And three hours and twelve is a long time to sit in a cinema not giving a toss what happens. There are clunkingly obvious Real World parallels in the tension between the blue forest people and the green water people, between the five-fingered human avatars and the four-fingered natives, between the abandoned human boy and the returned humans, between the avatar Quaritch (whose uploaded memories of real Quaritch don't include how he died from Neytiri's arrows) and Jake. The underwater scenes go on for ever, and the human colonisers are moustache-twirling caricatures of evil stopping just short of firing puppies out of cannons.
It's telling that Cameron's best films remain The Terminator (less than two hours and there's not an ounce of flab on it) and Aliens, which plays best in its shorter theatrical version; the longer they get, the less interesting they are. Avatar: The Way Of Water could probably stand to lose 20 minutes or so of pretty pictures and rack up the tensions instead; you kind of enjoy the action sequences because you've been waiting so damn long for them. Incidentally, there's not a single moment when I thought this would be any better in 3D: I saw the standard flat version and at no point did I wish I was in the other screen with the glasses on. Not even in the big final extended battle on a giant battleship which reminds you of Titanic (and briefly of The Poseidon Adventure), when the film finally, finally shifts out of first gear and starts moving. Up until that point it's just been an overly serious, ponderous plod. Yes, it's visually gosh-wow spectacular, but so what when so much of it is mocap and CGI? Superbly rendered on the finest, fastest hard drives known to man, maybe, but that's not what movies should be about.
We're at least not expected to wait another thirteen years for Avatar 3, which is apparently coming at the end of 2024 and every two years after that. I did spend much of Avatar 2 wondering what they're going to do in Avatar 3: maybe they'll hide out in the volcanoes with the red-skinned fire people or the deserts with the beige-skinned sand people, and the humans and bad avatars will turn up again and again blowing everything up with superbadass helicopter gunships and being ever more cartoonishly evil. And still I probably won't care. Avatar: The Way Of Water isn't awful, but it is very dull and way overlong, there's little humour, there's no subtlety, there's really nothing to get that excited about. It was on, and then it stopped, but not much happened in between.
**
