Half-Assed Review: Avatar - The Way of Water

Woah. So, I saw this last night, and I have to say, I’m a huge fan of this film, right off. Avatar was cool, but it was a long time ago. I don’t think I saw it in a theater, and it didn’t have nearly the impact on me that this one did.

Let me start off by saying that I hear some people bagging on this movie, in typical fashion. “Ugh, just more of that noble savage bullshit”, in essence. But that is a judgment on you, not the film. If that’s your takeaway, now, 2022, you’re the problem. You are the mechanized killing society the film speaks against. Not in deeds, but in essence.

We should be living closer to the earth. Technology is dehumanizing. If you have so little awareness as to scoff at that entire notion, it’s clear what side you’re on. You’re no better than a machine yourself. You’re a cop, a soldier, a captain of industry. Not in reality. You’re just some dink that works at Home Depot or some shit. But in your heart, you side with the destroyers.

But those groups identified above are obvious garbage. So obvious to some of us that a movie like Avatar is entirely unneeded. At the same time, the military jock police-supporting types are clearly the majority of the world, whether they explicitly say so or not. Even if they claim otherwise. We’re living in the proof of that.

But let’s talk about the visuals before we get into all the socio-political ramifications.

I’m from a privileged time in which I have been able to watch the change in computer graphics as we came from green and amber monochrome monitors to today, where graphics are becoming indistinguishable from reality. Not only have I been witness to it, I’ve been immersed in it the entire time. I can tell you how to remap the character set on a Commodore 8-bit machine into 8 x 8 bitmaps. I have modeled and laid out scenes in 3D that I then deleted a day later, because rendering a single field (two fields to a frame…) took three days. I played Dactyl Nightmare back when virtual reality wasn’t even a buzzword yet. I remember when you had to hand select outlines of images in Photoshop. Better yet, I’ve gotten to know some of the major players in the field of graphics and video, back in the days.

So, I know a tiny bit about all this stuff.

There was not a single moment in this entire (crushingly) long masterpiece that looked unnatural or out of place. None of the jerky, rushed movements of old, which always jumped out at you when watching early CGI. I’m looking at you, stupid Yoda with a lightsaber… The immersion in this film is real and compelling.

There’s an endless richness to the details that you can feel. You can’t take it all in at once, even. But it’s there. Much as was said about the introduction to Amazing Stories, a very long time ago. There’s a richness there that you can feel, even if you don’t consciously take in all the detail. It’s there, and it helps to suspend disbelief.

For that matter, this goes way beyond mere 3D graphics as most people understand them. This isn’t purely rendered animation. It’s very much a blend of real actors and practical effects married to CGI. But the takeaway here is that it is finally seamless.

Graphics guys generally can’t just sit back and enjoy a movie like this. Usually we’re focusing on CGI hair, which was always the barometer of state of the art, or to a lesser degree, water. Even those stumbling blocks aren’t present. That’s a particularly impressive achievement considering the movie is largely an aquatic one. Instead of marveling at the way water is rendered, it’s no longer even noticed, because it looks and behaves exactly as water does. Beautiful, but nothing to really goggle at.

That’s an important achievement, in my mind. A balance was achieved there that finally just made CGI water into water. It’s no longer important, from a technical standpoint, because it now is indistinguishable from the real thing. And that is very important, from a technical standpoint.

But that extends to every element of the film. The Na’vi (or N’avi or Nav’I or N’a’v’I’ or whatever, I don’t know. It’s not like half-assed reviews merit any research) *do* look unnatural… by design. They’re aliens. They have elongated torsos entirely unlike our own, and it stands out like a sore thumb. But that’s intentional. It’s not an artifact of computer graphics. So even there, it works. They’ve managed to make humans seem entirely inhuman, but it’s flawlessly done.

I don’t think many of us know exactly how much work goes into something like this. This movie has to be 50% custom code and processes, because it’s a new paradigm of filmmaking. You know it wasn’t filmed in a primordial forest or in the ocean, but when you’re watching, it’s impossible to feel that way. Whatever techniques they’ve developed to make this happen, it works, and better than anything I’ve ever seen before.

I have no problem with the fact that it cost a billion dollars. With inflation being what it is, that’s probably about right. You’re talking about tens of thousands of people working overtime for five years or something. I’ve worked on industrial projects that had triple that budget, and we didn’t build anything nearly this impressive in the same timeframe.

But, with something like this, once you get past the visuals, it’s the overall message that needs to be examined. A three-hour piece of utter fluff with no redeeming values simply would not do, and could never be made up for by looking pretty. There has to be meaning there.

Ackshually… This movie stands on its own as a very impressive action movie. If you could somehow drain all of the message and meaning from it, and replace it with general mindlessness, it would still be a very watchable, decent film. It’s that good.

Luckily, that’s not the case.

On one hand, it just extends the message of the original movie, and improves upon it. A people out of touch with nature and their environment are a doomed people. Much as we are today. If you live in or near a major metropolitan area, you are on borrowed time. Your entire lifestyle is coming to an end, and it will be a violent, bloody end, at that. Even if you live in the suburbs, you’re almost definitely slated for elimination. Only the handful of people living at the fringes of civilization and beyond, already capable of raising their own food and purifying their own water, have a chance at survival. And even then, it’s just a chance. But a far better chance than the rest of us have.

I realize this statement will have zero impact on the world. The few who do read it will scoff.

Anyway…

There’s a lot of sociological, historical, and anthropological knowledge that goes into writing a film like this. Not the bad sort of pseudo, feels-based science that some of us have come to detest, but the real shit.

Technology is our undoing. This extends to even before the industrial revolution. How’s that? Why? Because advancements in medicine and agriculture are what allowed societal units to grow the population into the numbers needed to do real damage, in the long run.

There are plateaus to technology. Rungs. They are based on sheer numbers of people, for the most part. At, say, one thousand people, there will be contained within those numbers a certain amount of people able to, for instance, understand the importance of water purification, and the skills to bring it to the fore.

At one hundred thousand (I’m pulling every bit of this out of my ass to give you some examples, so don’t go bothering to look up these specifics), you will have the people who can conceptualize harnessing the power of moving water to generate energy.

And so on. At one billion people, let’s say, we begin to have the collective brainpower (the number of brains able to conceive, comprehend, and foster these things. Not everyone in the world.) to develop atomic science and weapons.

Around ten billion, I would estimate, and now you’ve got the heavy lifters who will go on to develop space travel and propulsion systems to take us to other planets.

We’re stuck between those two levels, currently. We have the tech to destroy ourselves, but not the next level that could save us. More to the point, we don’t have the emotional maturity, the ethics and morals, the underlying creeds, that will allow us to survival for long beyond this current stage. Even if and when we do hit the next population plateau, it’s obvious that it will only be perverted and used to our detriment as a whole.

We see this happening now, in real-time. A tiny slice of the world’s population has the tools needed to survive just about any upcoming cataclysm, and they are very near being able to escape off planet, if need be.

But that’s just for them.

In another sense, really, mother nature doesn’t care. If we turn this planet into a smoldering husk, lifeless, reduced to ruins, nature remains. She’ll be back. We won’t, and there won’t be anyone or anything who cares.

So maybe some of this is just worthless human sentiment. An archaic artifact, our humanity. Nature’s just as content fiddling about with single cells and amoeba, or perhaps just crude amino acids, saline, and electricity. Given enough time and events, something will grow out of our destroyed earth again.

That’s the most extreme case imaginable (short of the sun just erasing the entire planet off the celestial map). In reality, some plants and animals will survive us, and that’s plenty. We will probably see the rise of a roach-based culture another few billion years hence.

But, goddamn it, some of us like trees. Birds. Dirt. The sun on our faces. We like being humans. Mammals. We like our ability to laugh, and cry. To feel joy and pain. If nature’s ultimate end is that we are to evolve past feelings and become cold and unemotional aliens with big eyes, no mouth, and zero sentiment, then maybe nature is wrong, too.

But the supply chains that enabled our stratospheric growth will end one day soon. Some of your last meals may be each other. I don’t see that as a loss at all, at this point. We are, collectively, not worth saving, our own foolish, personal pretentions aside.

And frankly, I don’t feel like expanding on this at all. You won’t be swayed, or convinced, or changed. Who feels it knows it, one draw. (Rita Marley. Gotta attribute it so she doesn’t sue me, I guess. One love, my ass…) At this point, nothing anyone can say or do will bring you back closer to nature. It’s either in you or it’s not.

Well, I guess my own pessimism (pessimism is realism…) has taken the wind out of my own sails for this review, now. Because it is at the social-political level, and the personal, that this film truly shines. That’s what I intended to spend most of this review on, and now I don’t really care enough to elaborate very much. It’s all fabulously interesting, though.

The layers and layers of commentary here are amazing. The space colonists are the ‘white people’ in all of this. The Navi are sort of the Indians, in relation to them. But when the Navi meet the aquatic Navi (spoiler, bitches), they are sort of the white people to them. It’s all relative. As the movie says, we focus far too much on our differences at the expense of noticing our similarities and commonalities.

But the aquatic Navi address what I was feeling about the jungle Navi. They gots no ass. No nothing. Androgynous bullshit. By contrast, the aquatic Navi… damn. But they’re not just thick, and the men look like men. It’s apparent in their hair, their attitudes. It’s a subtle treatise on racial differences. Two tribes, alike in stature, but entirely different. There’s no judgment made one way or another, of course. One culture and body type is more suited for one region than another.

One important thing this film shows is that you can be a lesbian and still be a huge piece of shit. You can be an Asian and still be a huge piece of shit.

The biggest pieces of shit, in charge of the whole mess, are white people, though. Though through that vague Avatar science, even that is obscured, which adds to the level of complexity. The piece of shit marine colonel stereotype trope has a native Navi body.

The white deadlock kid, to me, is the worst thing about the whole movie. He kinda sold out the Navi by falling in with the bad guys. He could have escaped. He could have killed at least some of them. He could have committed suicide.

Any of that would have been far more honorable. To make matters worse, he SAVES the fucking villain (fucking spoiler, bitches!). Yay for stupid sequels. I wish that kid had been killed, instead. I prefer the fucking irrational white people villains over his lack of character.

I guess I’m criticizing, at this point, so let me continue. The writing is good. Quite good, structurally. The dialogue is also good, with a mix of formal and Earthisms that works very well. The story overall is well thought-out.

Even when I was rolling my eyes at some deus ex machina stuff, for the first time conscious of what I felt was bad writing, my beliefs were upended less than a minute later. Wow. Now that sort of subverting expectations is GREAT writing. They set me up, then knocked me down.

But the movie is bloodless and sexless.

Or, more to the point, there is precious little realness, at the core of it all. It’s very PG. I want to see BLOOD. I was sitting in my seat with all the rage of my ancestors boiling up within me, and I was crying out for serious blood to be spilled. Instead, it’s very sparingly used. Almost never. Most of the deaths are like in G.I. Joe where a helicopter blows up, and the bad guys just fall to the ground.

Not quite that bad, but along those lines.

For a bunch of people running around almost completely naked, there is almost no sensuality present. Which is odd, for me to not be able to sexualize something. It’s not just in presentation, but there is no passion expressed by anyone toward anyone else along those lines. None. A few potential budding romances are indicated by smiles.

Instead, everyone behaves ‘perfectly’ all the time, however imperfect their actions are.

Also, this is an awkward segway, and let’s keep it more related to nakedness than sexuality, shall we? Can you possibly imagine what reaction this movie would get if everyone wasn’t painted blue? The country just watched three hours of topless ten year old girls, and no one batted an eye. Now, in an ideal society, that’s probably normal and healthy. France, I daresay, is far more comfortable about this stuff than the U.S., and also seems to be a lot more responsible with their attitudes and practices.

But the U.S. isn’t France. It isn’t healthy. Which makes this tiny detail of the film an important one, in some sense that I am unable or unwilling to define in this half-assed review. It’s low-key revolutionary, at a time when these issues are at an all-time high in the public consciousness.

So, getting back to racial analogies, where I am more comfortable being edgy, there are a number of interesting things at play, here. Just one of which involves being of ‘mixed’ heritage.

We’re all ‘mixed’. It’s just a matter of what the mix is composed of. In this case, though, it’s about being half-human and half-Navi. Or being a human in a Navi body. Or being a full human raised with Navi, and accepted as such, for the most part, despite the impossibility of ever fitting in entirely, for real.

All of that is given a lot of focus, and it’s all handed very well. Lots of food for thought there.

One of the subplots in this regard involves a ‘half-breed’ who I will call “Young Winona Ryder Catgirl”, who is pretty much the only cute female Navi, other than the very strong mother figure. She is weighed down by her differentness, even though it seems to have unlocked some power the rest of them don’t possess. It does speak to the value and power of merging our collective genes to create some new expression of ourselves that has the potential, at least, to surpass the current generations.

She is also complicated by the fact that her actual mother is Sigourney Weaver, the only person I recognized in the entire film. It’s wonderful to see her there, really. I love her so much, and she deserves that role. It’s also one she created all by herself since Alien first hit the silver screen.

It was only after the fact that I realized Kate Winslet was in it, and I couldn’t tell you off-hand who she played. The movie is better without any recognizable stars, I think that’s apparent. I don’t want to be distracted by fucking Joe Pesci or some shit, nam sayin’? (Is he dead? I have no idea…)

The last few criticisms I will level at the overall plot and writing (I still hate the Tarzan white kid, even though his dreadlocks were extremely accurate!) are as follows:

The Navi culture is way too perfect. Yes, okay, this is what people might be trying to say when they scoff at the noble savage trope. Real Indian culture wasn’t homogenous, or peaceful, or non-violent. The Navi all work together way too well, in a way humans cannot. And I guess that’s because they’re not human. Okay, fair cop. Nevertheless. If we tried to emulate that culture ourselves, it would fall apart at 100 people. If not less. It may be realistic for aliens who are deeply interconnected, but very much not realistic for us humans.

Furthermore, after all the shit they went through in the first movie, they made ZERO fucking preparations to fend off or shut down further encroachment. In fact, they tolerated colonies and bases on their own planet for the entire time since the first movie. Zero thought seems to have been given to fending off further invasions, which they clearly know are inevitable.

That… kinda supports them being wiped out, in the long run. Like I said, nature is a bitch. Tech without heart is terrible, but if you don’t have any, you will be subjugated by those who do. Instead of picking sides, we should be seeking a merger of the two. That would be balance. It’s not either/or. Or shouldn’t have to be. For that matter, the actions of the Earthlings are entirely irrational. Just going apeshit to get revenge on one person. It doesn’t make any sense at all, and… yeah, I guess that’s probably pretty accurate, also.

Three quick things here. What I just referenced above is an allusion to Moby Dick, and there is plenty in the film to support my assertion. So that’s really some clever writing and film-making. Add to that Cameron’s nod to Full Metal Jacket (“Outstanding!”) AND a return to The Titanic. Nice work bro, really. Very nice. Even though it’s as much “The Poseidon Adventure” as it is Titanic. That almost makes it even cooler.

I don’t think taking out ten minutes of gunplay really helped lessen the ‘fetishment’ of gun violence or whatever Cameron was talking about in the press, as there is still plenty, but yeah, the movie didn’t need ten more minutes of anything, so good call, there. Save the virtue signaling, though. There’s tons of gun violence.

More importantly, dude is in the press saying we need to eradicate masculinity. The movie itself shows the very necessary balance between the masculine and feminine. Those roles might have been perverted by modern life, but those paradigms exist. We are different. Both have good and bad points. To utterly downplay one over the other is fundamentally wrong. I’m calling bullshit. His movie is more informed than he himself is.

There’s a lot of stuff going on in regard to race/genders/cultures, and what have you, and each of us will take something different away from that.  No, we won’t all be in agreement, but we will all be considering the same issues when we watch it. That’s probably not a bad thing at all.

Deeper subtext? The extraction by brain drill scene harkens to some people’s (kinda bullshit) ‘adrenochrome’ stuff. I say kinda bullshit, because I don’t think that substance is the point at all, in those lurid ‘conspiracy’ tales. It’s more like the way King ALSO alluded to in Dr. Sleep, not just some extract. Some people are torturing and raping kids, sorry. If you refuse to believe that is even possible, somewhere, somehow, well, you don’t live in the real world. Please read a book on the Caesars.

Another subtext? This movie is telling YOU that YOU need to be ready to kill. If you can’t spill blood in your own defense, your blood will be spilled. And it is also saying that you’ll likely be on the side that doesn’t even have firearms. A lot of times, the guns are out of ammo or quit working, throughout this film. Rocks always work. Spears and arrows always work. And they are plentiful.

I could go on and on about this movie. Almost four thousand words are enough. Watch it or not, I don’t care. I enjoyed it.

I can’t *necessarily* say it’s one of my top five favorite movies, because that would mean kicking out something far closer to my own heart, like Repo Man. Do not fuck with my Repo Man. But I do think it’s easily one of the top five most IMPORTANT movies of the past 100 years. At least when we’re talking about pop culture and entertainment. It’s ambitious, and it succeeds.

When will it jump the shark? I imagine it’s hard as hell to do a threepeat, but I do wish Cameron and company luck. The world kinda needs it, if we even live that long.

One last thing, as I forgot to touch on this in the whole of this review. Are there any black people in this damn movie at all? It seems weird that I now can’t recall a single one. Huh. Also, the little bit about ‘the way of water’ as alluded to in the title was a very nice piece of writing.

Also, Cameron, ya dink. Put in a bathroom break. Intermissions were a thing at the movies. Since the theaters are living off of coke and candy sales, they would appreciate it. The length was right for this movie, but I peed before, twice during, and really had to go afterward… Drinking $14 worth of cokes (two) will do that to you.

Your thoughts in the comments would be very welcomed.

ADDENDUM: An empath who I respect entirely has asked me to reconsider the case of the young Tarzan kid. Okay, fine. I'll stop wishing death on him. At the same time, it's this excessive sentimentality that gets entire groups of people eradicated...