Perhaps for this reason alone, one could consider excusing James Cameron for taking a decade between movies — movies that have now been burdened with the responsibility of providing a much-needed cultural reset every 10 years, just when the industry needs it the most.
Like clockwork — or like a well-timed Biblical plague, depending on whether or not you’re Kevin Feige — Cameron sailed up to shore this week with Avatar: The Way of Water, the long-awaited sequel to his similarly industry-altering 2009 original. That film re-introduced audiences to the wonders of big screen entertainment, almost preempting the existential threat that theatre-going would soon be under in a matter of years. But instead of recognising why the first Avatar really worked, studios learned all the wrong lessons from its success; hearing only the cha-ching of cash registers, they discovered that they could demand a surcharge for movies by lazily slapping them with a 3D sticker.
This was a sham. The Way of Water, on the other hand, feels like a response to everything that has happened over the last decade, a decade that has been dominated by the rise of the MCU and the arrival of streaming. Neither, however, has provided audiences with what Cameron has to offer — pure sincerity that can only be experienced at the cinema.
The Way of Water combines cutting-edge technology with themes as old as the Hollywood Hills themselves. It also finds Cameron operating on god-level confidence — that’s what delivering two of the top three hits of all time can do for a guy, I suppose. His films are often criticised for a lack of originality, but this is a superficial reading of his work. Because even though the themes in his movies are universal and the story beats familiar, you can feel the disruptor in him pushing against narrative confines with refreshing regularity. And Cameron’s disregard for conventional storytelling can be felt most strongly in the movie’s second act.
After a breathless opening hour in which the filmmaker dutifully fills the audience in on backstory — this is a laborious but unavoidable task, considering the time that has passed between the first and second movies — he pauses, and does something that not a single studio suit would’ve probably condoned. He allows the movie to — and there’s no better way to describe this — sit back, relax, and vibe out. The plot, which seconds ago felt rather urgent, takes a back seat as Cameron momentarily forgets that an entire army is in pursuit of our protagonists, and sends them for a dip in the ocean instead. A sense of impending peril is replaced, almost instantly, by pure bliss.
The visuals in these sequences, without exaggeration, are unlike anything that we’ve seen before. It’s the closest we’re going to come to watching David Attenborough’s Planet Pandora. This is all deliberate, of course. Cameron knows that these sequences are essentially a proof-of-concept for what he has been teasing, and promising, for close to a decade — immersive underwater photography, refined 3D, and fluctuating frame rates. All combined with the photo-realistic images and the ethereal score, the effect is nothing short of transcendental, like the moment Dorothy opens the door to Oz.
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I’m sure there’s progress still to be made, but the first time when Jake and Neytiri’s kids dive into the ocean along with Cameron’s camera, it’s impossible to tell that every square inch of the screen has been rendered on a computer. The imagery is so striking that I physically recoiled. Cameron achieves this not only with crystal clear 3D — no doubt aided by the projection at my screening — but also with the High Frame Rate technology that he has been touting for years. Watching the underwater sequences in 48 frames per second — twice the usual 24 fps — your brain rewires itself in real time, essentially learning a new way to perceive moving images.
You see, over the years, we’ve become accustomed to what is known as the motion blur effect while watching films. By rendering visuals in 48 fps, the blur is smoothened out to the point of becoming non-existent, thereby creating a sense of hyper-reality that some have uncharitably described as watching iPhone footage or a video game cutscene. In The Way of Water, the 48 fps footage makes it seem like you’re actually taking swimming lessons with the characters while on summer vacation from school, which is exactly the sensation that Cameron is going for. It’s a make-or-break sequence; you’re either going to take the plunge, or you’re going to be calling out for a safety line to pull you ashore.
And it’s quite incredible that he got away with it. This isn’t a short movie. Even Cameron couldn’t have avoided difficult conversations about bringing the run time down to a reasonable length. And common sense dictates that the first section of the film to be sent for slaughter, in every variation of this scenario, would be that languorous second act. On the one hand, it offers little plot development and could theoretically have been condensed to a 10-minute training montage, but on the other, it allows us to spend time with characters in moments that aren’t driven by plot. We watch them simply exist. When was the last time we experienced that in a movie of this size? It’s all a set-up for the third act, of course, when these characters, and their survival, becomes the emotional linchpin.
The climax of The Way of Water works on an emotional level primarily because of the groundwork that Cameron did two hours ago in this sequence. It’s a testament to his skills as an unfussy storyteller that you begin to take the immaculate visual effects for granted during the finale, and focus solely on Jake and Neytiri’s mission to rescue Kiri and Tuk from the clutches of Colonel Quaritch. It doesn’t even matter that Quaritch has been resurrected by cloud backup or something. None of it matters; all that you care about is the wellbeing of these CGI aliens and their children.
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It is my theory that this cut of The Way of Water would work almost as well with unfinished visual effects, such is the effectiveness of Cameron’s economical storytelling. You have to hand it to a filmmaker who is willing to devote an entire subplot to a computer-generated whale-like creature that communicates more with its eyes than any human in both Ant-Man movies combined. There’s an argument to be made that this creature, the tulkun Payakan, is the real protagonist of this movie. But we’ll save this argument for another day, when people inevitably start doubting Cameron again.
Post Credits Scene is a column in which we dissect new releases every week, with particular focus on context, craft, and characters. Because there’s always something to fixate about once the dust has settled.
Sam Worthington returns as Jake Sully in director James Cameron's Avatar: The Way of Water.