I recently went to see the second Avatar movie, Avatar: The Way of Water. I hadn’t known there was going to be a second Avatar movie. I watched the first one at some point after it came out, which was 2009, so I probably watched it when I was in middle school. Like a lot of people on the Internet joke, Avatar left no cultural footprint on me. The thing I know most about Avatar is that everyone has seen Avatar but no one remembers anything from Avatar.
So I didn’t know there was going to be a second Avatar movie, but I felt neutral enough about the whole thing to be interested in it. Before going into the movie, what I remembered about Avatar was that they were blue aliens and the main guy was a human who fell in love with an alien and there was some kind of fight and I was pretty sure the humans lost.
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So I’ve looked up the first Avatar movie on Wikipedia to tell you very briefly about the plot, but just know that if you don’t remember any of this it doesn’t really matter. The first movie is about Jake Sully, a paraplegic Marine who is sent to the planet Pandora, where humans mining a resource. There are humanoid blue aliens on this planet named the Na’vi, who are really tall and live in harmony with nature. The humans have this technology where Jake operates a Na’vi avatar and is able to interact with the aliens, but his real body is in the lab. The humans are cruel and greedy and Jake falls in love with a Na’vi alien named Neytiri, who’s name I did not know until this moment, even after watching the second film. There are battles and many casualties but the Na’vi eventually defeat and expel the humans, except for a few scientists who were on the side of the Navi. Jake is permanently moved into his Na’vi body and is part of the tribe.
In the second movie, many years have passed and Jake and Neytiri have four children. Jake explains this in a voiceover in the first ten minutes. He also explains that one of his kids comes from the Navi avatar of someone named Grace, who I just learned was an important character in the first movie and died but who I did not remember. While watching it, I didn’t understand it fully but I knew one of his kids had something going on with her parentage. They also have her avatar in this incubator thing and it seems like she’s like, being born and about to wake up, which was what I thought was happening when I watched it, but now that I know that it’s the avatar of someone who died I’m not sure. There’s also this human kid, Spider, who grows up alongside them who is the son of the main villain from the first movie. Life is good.
Then, ten minutes into this movie, the humans come back and cause terrible, immediate destruction. At this point in the movie, I figured the movie would be about humans being terrible and there are battles and ultimately the aliens win and that’s exactly what it was about. They flash forward one year and the humans are also building a city and are planning to colonize Pandora. It also turns out that some of the bad guys have died but taken their memories and implanted them into Navi avatars and are essentially now also aliens, including the main villain from last movie, Colonel Miles. So Jake and the Navi are waging a guerrilla war on the human/humans who are now aliens.
The villains who are aliens take Jake’s kids and Spider hostage but Jake and Neytiri free all of them except for Spider. The colonel realizes Spider is his son, but not technically his son, because he’s not technically the colonel but just an alien avatar of him with all his memories and thoughts, and plans to take Spider around with him on Pandora. Jake decides his family isn’t safe among the tribe and begs for asylum among the reef tribe, which lives on the ocean. The family moves to the ocean, hence the name of the movie.
Now, I watched this movie in theaters, in IMAX and 3D, so this part was pretty cool. I know Avatar 1 made 1 billion dollars and was the best movie ever in theaters mainly because of the incredible special effects, and this movie was the same. For the rest of the movie, while the family lives with the reef tribe, the special effects were super cool and all the underwater shots and animals in the ocean were very compelling. It made me want to live on the water and go swimming in the ocean. Another super helpful thing about this part was that the reef tribe was a slightly lighter shade of blue than Jake and his family, so I was really easily able to tell them apart. During the first part of the movie, I couldn’t figure out which aliens were the main characters because they all looked kind of similar to me.
Jake’s kids learn the ways of the reef tribe from the tribe chief’s kids. There are some nice lines here about being one with the water, breathing slowly, and being calm. The kids learn to ride the sea animals and hold their breath underwater for really long periods of time. Jake’s nonbiological daughter especially bonds with the water. Jake and Neytiri đơn’t really learn the ways of the reef tribe, except to ride their sea animals. Jake is like, don’t worry, I can do this, and the tribe chief looks skeptical but then turns out Jake can ride the sea animals.
Jake’s second son, who is the angsty disappointment son, fights with the tribe chief’s son. Later, he is lured into the far ocean by the tribe chief’s son and almost eaten by a big fish. He’s saved by this really big sea creature who has a spear in one of his fins and a stump where his other fin should be. He bonds with the sea creature and learns its an extremely intelligent creature named a tulkun who’s kind is spiritually bonded with the reef tribe, except this specific tulkun is outcast from the pod for killing/attempted killing.
The colonel, as an alien and with help from Spider, learns to fly on Pandora’s birds. He also figures out that Jake is somewhere in a ring of about 50 Navi villages. He begins to raid, burn, and abuse each of the villages to find out where Jake is. The tulkun tribe returns from migration, and the colonel plans to kill them to lure Jake out. Also, it turns out each tulkun produces this goo that halts human aging and is worth about 80 million dollars. The plan works and Jake and his family, along with the reef tribe, attack the colonel and all his forces, which are a lot. He has this huge ship and hundreds of people and robots. The outcast tulkun helps them. Jake’s oldest son is shot. Jake’s kids are captured a couple of times, other battle shenanigans ensure, Jake strangles the colonel unconscious and lets him sink in water but he’s dragged ashore and abandoned by Spider, the Navi win the battle.
Jake and his family decide to stay with the reef tribe. Jake says something like “I realize I can’t run anymore. I have to fight.” End of movie.
So now that I’ve explained the plot, we’re on the same page. I thought this movie was fine. I did want to talk about it, though, because I hear it’s going to make another 10 million dollars and apparently is going to have three more movies after. I know a good way to lay out your thoughts about a subject is an internet-friendly numbered list, so that’s what I’ve done.
Length
This movie was 192 minutes long. That’s 3 hours and 12 minutes. That meant my movie started at 3 pm, and I walked out of the theater at 6:30 pm. I think that’s an additional reason I have so many thoughts about this movie, was because it was so long and I was in the theater for so long.
This movie could have been a 90 minute movie, easily. I am actually of the opinion that with some exceptions, most movies should be capped at 120 minutes. The plot was quite simple, and although a lot of time was dedicated to the effects, the world of Pandora, and the battle scenes, 192 minutes was a bit much. At times, I wished I was on Youtube where I could put the video on 2x speed.
2. General background science
I recognize this one might be a me problem, and maybe everyone else understands this part and doesn’t have a problem with it. Even with me not understanding it, it didn’t pose a problem for the rest of the movie. However, it was something that I thought about at times and I wished was further explained.
I didn’t understand what they were doing with the aliens in the incubators. Were they reanimating them? Were they doing the same things that the humans were doing with the alien avatars with dead people’s memories and thoughts? I specifically wondered about Grace’s avatar, because Jake’s nonbiological daughter seemed to view her as her mother, even though her actual parents, Jake and Neytiri, were also there. Also, there were some research people left on Pandora who seemed to be good guys. They did their work in a stark, white, sterilized lab, that Jake and his kids would sometimes run into casually, which implied the lab was right next to the trees, but was always a jarring cut because it seemed like completely different environments that I couldn’t imagine next to each other.
3. Story
I touched upon this earlier when I talked about length. Some movies deserve their long runtime. For example, Titanic, which is also directed by James Cameron, is over three hours long, but I never mention that as a main talking point. Titanic has a lot going on and is action-packed the entire three hours. Avatar 2 is three hours long for no real reason, because the story is extremely uncomplicated and therefore doesn’t require three hours to explain, unpack, and resolve. Ten minutes into the movie, I knew exactly what was going to happen, and for the next three hours, I was just waiting for it to happen.
When Jake sees the spaceships coming back, I knew the humans would continue to be greedy and destroy Pandora and the Navi, and Jake and his family would have to fight back. I was sure it would be a very long and costly battle, with a lot of explosions and death, but eventually Jake and the Navi would prevail. I actually assumed there would be some kind of twist in this general storyline, which is the only thing I got wrong—there wasn’t.
Even with such a simple story, there were a couple of moments where things happened that were obviously out of convenience and only to drive the story forward. The humans, for example, are explained to be attempting to colonize Pandora because Earth is dying. Three-fourths of the way through the movie, though, when the colonel decides to hunt the tulkun, it’s revealed that there are also groups of human whalers on Pandora that hunt the tulkun because they produce a goo that stops human aging, and it’s apparently this resource that is paying for all of their operations on Pandora. This is super convenient, since now the colonel has a group of people who’s entire job is to kill the tulkun, exactly what he needs to kill the tulkun.
I know that the story is not really what people come to see the movie for. I know Avatar is about the special effects. But I was still disappointed at how lazy the story was. Just because your movie’s main attraction is the special effects and the beauty of the world doesn’t mean you can ignore every other building block of a movie. If you do, your movie becomes just pretty filters and nice backgrounds, but nothing of substance. It’s all frosting and no cake.
4. Characters
As you can probably tell from how I’ve explained the plot, the characters are extremely one-dimensional and their motivations are narrow, poorly explained, and singular.
The colonel is the villain, and he’s the character I’m going to specifically focus on in this section. He is greedy, vengeful, and cruel. The fact that the actual colonel has died, and the character we see is a reborn avatar that has all of this dead man’s memories, doesn’t really seem to bother the character. He watches a video from the actual colonel explaining this to him and immediately accepts it and is evil.
His main motivation is that he hates Jake and wants to kill him. It seems like in the first movie, Jake was his subordinate and betrayed him by helping the Navi. He says that Jake is the head of operations for the Navi resistance, which is definitely true at the beginning, but after Jake and his family move to the reef tribe, they literally just try to live in peace and harmony with this new tribe and have no communication with the forest tribe and are not involved in the war effort at all. It is implied that the guerrilla war is still going on, but that Jake and his family are just not involved anymore and are simply trying to survive and adapt, but that doesn’t faze the colonel. His singular aim is still to capture and kill Jake and he spends the entire movie using all his resources to do that.
We see an entire colony of humans destroying a huge area of Pandora’s biodiversity and using robots to build an ugly city not in harmony with the natural world. The head of operations there says Earth is dying and humans need to get ready for their move to Pandora. The colonel doesn’t really seem to care that much about this issue, and it’s not really brought up again. The forest tribe, who I assume are still fighting the humans, are also not brought up again. The colonel brings a huge ship and so many people to these random islands because he thinks Jake is there, even though both Jake and the reef tribes pose no threat to the humans and are trying their best to not be involved. I understand that he’s upset about Jake turning on him and ruining their entire mission, but I feel like if I were the colonel, there would be other things I would be worrying about.
The only not evil part of the colonel’s character is his relationship with Spider, who he at first denies having a relationship with, but at the end there’s a standoff where Neytiri threatens to kill Spider and the colonel backs down. His feelings towards Spider are the only time he acts with any kindness, empathy, or interest in others. At some point in the beginning of him and Spider being together, Spider teaches him how to ride those bird things in the mountains. He ends up figuring it out and (presumably) hair-bonding with the birds. I thought this might be a hint that at the end he realizes that he’s also destroying a beautiful alien world, and maybe he can’t just wipe out the entire planet after he’s destroyed his own, but that doesn’t happen. He begins to assimilate into Pandora’s world and is able to ride on the back of the birds, but this doesn’t seem to pose any ideological or moral issues for him.
The alien colonel is also not actually the colonel. He’s a lab-grown (“born”?) Na’vi alien that was implanted with the colonel’s memories after the colonel died. I was expecting some kind of identity crisis at some point, like maybe he would realize he was technically more alien than human and the world he was trying to destroy was actually his own. Maybe there would be a twist and he would have some kind of existential crisis. I would’ve liked to see an existential crisis. There was an opportunity for some interesting exploration that was never fulfilled—what does it mean to “be” someone? If you have the memories of a dead person, are you that person or are you someone else? What if you’re not even a human, you’re an alien with a dead human’s memories? How do you deal with that in the midst of a full-fledged war between the aliens and the humans? What is “right” and “moral” in these situations? At no point did the alien colonel even seem to consider these questions; he was always, unfailingly, completely evil. It was a disservice to his character and the potential arc he could’ve had.
5. Sequel bait
I hear that Avatar is slated for three more movies, and the ending of this one was obvious sequel bait. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, and if this were a movie I enjoyed, this section would probably be in the positive column.
However, because I didn’t enjoy Avatar 2, the sequel bait only served to annoy me. I didn’t care about the next movie and didn’t want to think about it. I was just happy this one was finally over.
6. Themes
Perhaps this is because of my specific education, political beliefs, and values, but when I watched Avatar 2, I was struck by the parallels and themes of colonization, imperialism, and exploitation. To me, that was what the movie was about—the entire planet and people of Pandora were metaphors for Indigenous and native communities and people, and the humans on Pandora were metaphors for the Western imperialist nation-states on Earth. Under this lens, the entire movie is aggressively anti-colonialism, and it is very obvious about this message: the humans are clearly, unequivocally evil and the Na’vi and nature of Pandora are clearly, unequivocally innocent. The humans coming to Earth after the destruction of their own planet and immediately mining Pandora for its natural resources, destroying precious swarths of land for industrial areas and machinery, disregarding its biodiversity and the sentient life that already calls the land home, is a point about our current, unsustainable exploitation of Earth’s natural resources and our past exploitation of non-industrial communities.
I appreciate this message and I’m not opposed to how unsubtle it is. However, where this takes a downturn is that the movie decides to spend the rest of its three hour runtime focusing on Big Hero Man Jake Sully, White Savior, Strongest and Most Important Being Ever. You would think the narrative would require some discussion on how the Na’vi communities are affected, or how the guerrilla war is doing (are they making any headway? Do they have any impact at all?), or what the humans plan to do with the Na’vi once their base has been built. But no—it is completely, only about Jake Sully and his family. Avatar by definition should be a sociological story, presenting a sociological problem on a planetary and species scale, but somehow Avatar 2 has turned it into an individual, psychological story about one man. The only time we see other communities is when they’re being tortured about Jake Sully, who again is the most important linchpin in this entire narrative. The only time the Na’vi seem to do any significant damage to the evil humans is when Jake’s family is in danger, and Jake and his wife go to save the day. This is because Jake is apparently the strongest, best Na’vi and probably the only one who can save their entire planet.
I am going to be honest. I don’t care about Jake Sully. It is the world building, the planet and Na’vi, the way that the nature looks, that draws me and the rest of the world to Avatar. So why is the story insistent on focusing only on Jake? Why is Jake the most capable, the best fighter, the most morally correct? The first Avatar at least incorporated the entire community of Na’vi and forced Jake to assimilate into it. They were the ones who knew what to do, how to fight, and what they were fighting for. Avatar 2 turns that on its head, making Jake the linchpin to everything and the Na’vi the ones who should be integrating into his worldview—never mind that he’s the one who’s a transplant here.
The ending, in which Jake realizes he can’t run and has to fight, only serves to convince us of Jake’s importance. Apparently the entire fate of Pandora and the war hinges on Jake, and his decision to run/hide/fight is extremely important and will probably change the outcome of the whole situation. It’s never brought up that he’s only one person, his family only one family, and ultimately what happens (in a realistic situation) will not depend solely on him.
Avatar 2 is about a Great Man, which is completely contrary to Avatar 1, which is about community and integration and biodiversity. Avatar 1 is about living in harmony with your surroundings, with the dangers of greed and wanting too much for an individual. Avatar 2 throws these ideas out the window with White Savior Man Jake Sully and his Most Important Family.
I know a lot of people liked Avatar and Avatar 2, and I can understand that. I know that Avatar is about the effects and they were really cool. However, it would be literally impossible for me to watch a three hour film and only be impressed by the effects. I wish Avatar had more in terms of story and narrative and lessons. I wish Avatar were deeper than it looked, that if you peeled away the special effects and CGI you would get something interesting.
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