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Avatar 3: The Way of Fascism
Alternate titles:
The Way of Water 2
Can A White Boy (with dreads) Get Some Action?
WARNING: HERE BE SPOILERS
The movie was so unfathomably long and boring that my primary emotion during it was a nicotine craving. Once I was able to exit the cinema and get a puff on my vape, I was left with the lingering taste of strawberry, raspberry and regret on my tongue.
For more moments than I could count, I was genuinely confused if whole-ass minutes of the second movie had been mixed in on the cutting-room floor. Entire sequences of choreography, shots and events seemed to have been nabbed from earlier movies. The only thing that keeps me coming back to Avatar, namely the progressively cooler hard scifi military toys, proved to be stagnant. I couldn't spot a single hell yeah moment the whole movie. When the previous film opens with a hard montage of ISVs irradiating half a continent with the exhaust plumes of antimatter engines, anything less is lacking. It's not like the movie lacks spectacle, but like a secondhand eyeglass shop, nothing is new. Kudos to Cameron, or his overworked VFX team: they've clearly found a way to amortize their previous effort and expenditure over a longer time frame.
The plot, such as it is, concerns itself with Spider (the aforementioned white boy with dreads), who has apparently become such an insufferable presence that even his adoptive blue alien family wants him gone. After the Sully family's eldest son died in the previous film during what was essentially James Cameron directing Titanic again but with whales, Neytiri has decided that Spider is the problem. This is somewhat understandable given that he's a human teenager being raised by aliens, which is already a recipe for awkwardness without adding "your presence reminds me of my dead son" to the mix.
So the Sullys decide to exile Spider to live with distant Na'vi relations, which in any reasonable movie would be the inciting incident for a coming-of-age story about finding your place in the world. Instead, it's the inciting incident for 197 minutes of explosions and unconvincing family drama. I'd happily have traded all of the drama for more explosions.
Enter Varang, leader of the Ash People (the Mangkwan clan, for those keeping track of Cameron's increasingly convoluted Na'vi taxonomy). Varang leads a group who have rejected the deity Eywa after a volcano destroyed their homeland, which has apparently turned them into nihilistic fire-worshipping warriors. This is probably meant to be some deepity on how trauma can corrupt spirituality, but mostly it's an excuse for Cameron to film things catching on fire in high frame rate. While Eywa is definitely depicted as rather powerful, I feel like it's a bit much to expect it to deal with plate tectonics too.
The Ash People attack the Sully family's floating transport because, well, someone has to or we wouldn't have a movie. This leads to Sigourney Weaver (still bizarrely playing a teenager named Kiri, a casting choice that grows more inexplicable with each film) calling upon the goddess Eywa to save Spider's life. Watching a woman in her seventies perform motion capture as a Na'vi adolescent having a spiritual awakening is one of those experiences that makes you question the entire trajectory of cinema as an art form. Is the character supposed to be awkward and ungainly in universe, or is it all a consequence of asking an arthritic old lady to do somersaults? The people (me) wish to know.
Meanwhile, Colonel Quaritch, just as blue, just as mean. He's still hunting Jake, and also helping out with the general RDA pivot from unobtainium to hunting down the Tulkun whales for their anti-aging juice called Amrita, which is the kind of on-the-nose metaphor that would make a first-year film student wince. Humans harvesting alien whales for eternal youth. Get it? Do you get it? Cameron will spend another forty minutes making sure you get IT. After spending an entire movie on the same plot point last time. Is it that hard to find new macguffins?
The film briefly introduces yet another Na'vi clan called the Wind Traders, an airborne group led by a character named Peylak, who show up just long enough to establish that yes, there will be more Avatar movies, and yes, you will be expected to remember these people. They shelter the Sullys before everyone gets attacked again, because this is a James Cameron movie and if forty-five minutes pass without something exploding, his producer's contract requires him to forfeit his yacht.
I was somewhat concerned that the story would continue with a character assassination of Quaritch, but was pleasantly relieved at not being that disappointed. Sure, he goes off the reservation chasing blue poon, but is he the first Marine to do so? Not even in this franchise. Marines have needs, you know, and if the RDA doesn't offer Mustangs at ridiculous APRs... can you blame him for falling for a hot, murderous woman with the Na'vi equivalent of BPD (or CPTSD, if we're being generous)? I get the appeal.
No. Quaritch becomes increasingly unreliable, but remains loyal to humanity. It is unclear if that will persist to the next movie, since Cameron spends plenty of screen time (he's got that to spare) having Jake wax eloquent to him about the benefits of going native, and opening his third eye. He also wins dad of the year for being incredibly patient and understanding with his bitch-ass son, Spider, even after the latter shoots him with a crossbow. Another place where Cameron met my low expectations was not framing the hard-ass female general as a girlboss who can do no wrong. She makes several clearly correct decisions, and also demonstrates fallibility when Quaritch ungrounds himself and bails out her ass. Shame she dies in a magnetic fire tornado.
We've got the obligatory sequence of Jake reuniting the tribes and embracing the title of Turoq Makto, though I must admit that explicitly using a bundle of arrows to represent strength through unity was a bit much. In a movie that was less explicitly leftist to the point of tears, it might be interpreted as some kind of dogwhistle. I'm left scratching my head as to whether nobody in the production team noticed, or whether the screenwriters were having a giggle at Cameron's expense.
The climax involves Jake and Quaritch fighting in a magnetic vortex while rocks hurtle through the air, which sounds exciting but mostly makes you wonder about the physics of Pandora and whether Cameron actually listened to his consultants. They briefly team up to save Spider from falling to his death, have a moment of understanding, and then Quaritch throws himself into a fire pit rather than... continuing to live? Hope that the Na'vi signed up to the Geneva convention? It's unclear. We don't see him actually die, so presumably he'll be back for Avatar 4: This Time It's Even More Identical To The Last One.
Kate Winslet's character dies while giving birth during the final battle, which allows Cameron to recycle the emotional beats of Titanic one more time. Neytiri promises to raise the baby as her own, which is touching until you remember that this family already has approximately seventeen children and has proven spectacularly bad at keeping them alive. Someone also named Rotxo dies, but I couldn't tell you who that was even if you held a gun to my head. The movie has so many characters that deaths occur with all the emotional impact of someone announcing they're switching to a different cellular provider.
Cameron has been explicit that the runtime is longer than The Way of Water's already-punishing 3 hours and 12 minutes because modern audiences "long for a moment of focus." This is a man who has apparently never encountered the human attention span, or who believes that "focus" and "watching blue aliens have the same argument for the eighty-seventh time" are synonymous concepts.
The film cost over $400 million to make, which works out to roughly $2 million per minute, or approximately $33,000 per second. I spent several stretches of the film calculating how much money was being spent to make me feel absolutely nothing, which was more engaging than anything happening onscreen.
The movie randomly switches between 24 and 48 frames per second, I will admit that I didn't really notice, but I wish he'd been less of a coward and just went high refresh rate. It's 2025, we can do better than 24 hz. Others hated the inconsistency; Cameron insists this was intentional, which is the kind of artistic decision that makes you wonder if perhaps success has insulated him from people willing to say "Jim, this looks bad."
In the end, Varang disappears, Quaritch maybe dies, the Sully family adopts another child, and we're left with the certain knowledge that there will be two more of these films, currently scheduled for 2029 and 2031. By the time Avatar 5 comes out, the youngest cast members will have aged out of their roles, Sigourney Weaver will be playing a kindergartener, and I'll presumably still be standing outside theaters desperately sucking on my vape, trying to forget the preceding ten hours of blue people having feelings about colonialism.
The worst part is that it's not even aggressively bad. It's gorgeously rendered mediocrity, the kind of competent, expensive blandness that makes you wonder if Cameron has reached the apotheosis of blockbuster filmmaking. It's aggressively boring, but it makes billions. Solve for revealed preference. Every frame is painstakingly crafted. Every motion-captured performance is technically impressive. And yet the overwhelming sensation is one of exhaustion, of having witnessed something that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of hours of human effort to produce an experience roughly as memorable as a particularly long elevator ride.
Cameron has created a franchise that makes enormous amounts of money while leaving almost no cultural footprint beyond "remember how those movies made a lot of money?" It's the cinematic equivalent of empty calories: technically nourishing, massively consumed, and ultimately unsatisfying. All I ever saw of Avatar 2 after release were rather patriotic edits of ISVs scorching the
Earthearth of Pandora. I don't think this movie can muster up even that much.But hey, at least the vape was good. And the movie actually strengthens the case I made earlier, about Pandora being some kind of engineered high-tech-masquerading-as-low retirement home. The film explicitly confirms that Eywa maintains a high fidelity VR afterlife. It has the bioengineering chops to rewire a human to survive unaided on Pandora. It is described as having firewalls or "encryption". I enjoy being correct, or at least having takes more defensible than what the director intended.
Was quite an experience slowly cottoning on to the fact that Cameron literally just remade Avatar 1 & 2. I would understand if we were coming full circle and ending this but we have two more to go!
I don't know if he realized he didn't have enough material or he's trying to stuff theaters but the audacity is incredible.
I would be more angry if I paid IMAX prices but they only had 3d showings (eye issues make it pointless). TBF: I was also high and Spyder's triumphant welcome to the cookout sent me out on a high note.
I mean, she was pretty wrong - and I don't remember her being that antagonistic or stupid in the first sequel. Quaritch didn't go native. He made an alliance with a local tribe ( and used them more effectively than she used RDA resources btw) leveraging a personal relationship with the local chieftain (usually you'd marry his daughter or something but w/e) . That meant absorbing a few of their visible traditions to keep them onside.
What did she think colonialism meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?
Please don't let Quaritch succumb. Do you know how many Humanity Fuck Yeah memes would go down the drain if he became a traitor?
General Hairbun was depicted as competent in the last movie, but it would have been so easy to flanderize that into a version that can do no wrong. I will be grateful for small mercies.
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