Avatar: The Way of Water and the sorcery of spectacle

In the furor ahead of Avatar: The Way of Water’s release, two questions loomed large over me. First—did we need the sequel, on which director James Cameron spent 13 years and a reported half a billion dollars? Second—was it worth the wait? As much as I was curious to know what Jake Sully and Neytiri were doing over a decade later, I primarily went to the theatre to find the answers to these two big questions.

Turns out, true to life, there aren’t any easy answers. Avatar’s world has expanded gloriously since we first set eyes on Pandora. If the original had four key characters—Jake, Neytiri, Colonel Miles Quaritch, and Dr Grace Augustine, the sequel has about twice as many. Jake and Neytiri return, older and more grounded. Accompanying them is a motley group of four children. Two biological sons Neteyam and Lo’ak, a daughter Tuk, and an adopted older daughter Kiri, who is Grace’s offspring. Quaritch, although killed at end of the first part, returns too, albeit in his avatar form. He also has a teen son, Spider, who, left behind on Pandora, grows up with the Sully children as one of them. Finally, there’s an outcast tulkun—a giant marine creature that Lo’ak befriends during one of his many adventures at sea after the Sully family is forced to migrate and find refuge in the gorgeous Pandoran reef.

The Way of Water is the story of not Jake or Neytiri but the Sully children, the way Game of Thrones was about the Stark siblings. Mercifully, the younger Sullys have as much game, vivacity, and chutzpah as their parents. Their expeditions, therefore, are just as exciting. One of The Way of Water’s crucial wins is how, despite so much going on, it still manages to give each child a distinct personality. Neteyam is the dutiful, ideal older brother—skilled, protective, and obedient. Lo’ak is the classic second child—spirited, wayward, trying to live up to the expectations set by his elder sibling, and hungering for his parents’ admiration. He sets the dice rolling, much like Harry’s second son, Albus Severus Potter, did in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Then there is Grace’s daughter Kiri, who gets epileptic fits and has a strange, mysterious connection with Eywa—the guiding force of all Pandoran flora and fauna. Tuk is too young to fly or swim on her own but is brave enough to fight back.

But the spotlight is so focused on the children that the parents recede in the background. Neytiri and Jake, who made the first installment what it became, are reduced to cardboard characters in the sequel. She is mournful and grieving, first at having to leave her forest home, then at losing a dear one. He, once a warrior hero, now determined to protect his family from another human invasion, is made to mouth corny dialogue like “A father protects.” In fact, when he says “I see you” to Lo’ak at the end, it should have melted my heart. But the way he says it, with zero feeling, putting to dust one of the most iconic dialogues of the Avatar-verse, made my heart sink instead.

The Way of Water could have been an intimate family portrait, the coming together of two firebrands and how they navigate interpersonal and external turbulences. But Cameron sacrifices intimacy for spectacle. The result is beauty that feels hollow and grandeur that’s devoid of any meaning.

One of the major reasons for Avatar’s blockbuster success was Cameron beautifully rooting each of its "aha!" moments in emotion. But The Way of Water has only two such stand-out sequences that make you feel anything at all. First, when the tulkun gives it back to the plundering, greedy human villains. The second comes in the overlong climactic sequence (that is sure to remind you of Titanic’s end), when gear shifts and power changes hands from the parents to the children, who, from being fawned and fussed upon all through the film, transform into protectors and rescuers.

What I also loved about the film is how wonderfully it highlights the fluidity and transience of margins and the politics of who and what makes an outsider. Jake, by the virtue of once having been a human, is the OG outsider among the Na’vi. But he is not the only one. Though adopted by Jake and Neytiri and raised as their own, Kiri constantly laments over how she feels different and is teased about her inexplicable, mysterious parentage. Lo’ak feels isolated within his own brood. Spider is the only human child among the Na’vi wishing he wasn’t born to the man he was. He paints blue stripes all over himself hoping it would hide his humanness. Individual identity crises aside, the entire Sully family becomes the quintessential outsider in the coral reef, trying to adapt and survive among the Metkayina natives. Then there’s the tulkun, the ultimate outcast among a species known to huddle close with their kind.

It’s not just Jake and Neytiri’s blueness, their appearance, belonging to different species, or the way they came together that has strong parallels with Shiva and Parvati. The heterogeneity of their family and how it comes to be is eerily similar to the story of the Hindu deities too. Each member incongruent, struggling with their own battles, trying to fight the best they can, and each just as important.

There is no denying that The Way of Water makes for an enchanting movie-watching experience. The Pandoran reefs are as magical as the forests—full of color, wonder, and kaleidoscopic iridescence. Some of the underwater sequences are so magnificent, that they will take your breath away. But if only the story was as emotionally resonant and resplendent. In an age marked by acute franchise fatigue, am I looking forward to the next installment? I don’t know.