Avatar sequel brings new and old ideas to Pandora

I’m late to the game on this one, as $2 billion worth of people have already seen Avatar: The Way of the Water. But I did finally have an opportunity to see it this weekend. Once one of the more highly anticipated sequels, when it finally came, it seems there were a lot of people wondering if it could duplicate the success of the first one (highest grossing film of all time, and adjusted for inflation, # 2 behind only Gone With the Wind). Those fears (by the studio, I’m sure, with its budget of $460 million, the highest for any film ever) have been put to rest; as of this writing, its total stands just over $2.1 billion, good for # 4 all time worldwide. But with all that money in the bank, does it live up to the hype? Mostly yes, but with some caveats.

The film takes place 16 years after Avatar, when the Na’vi, led by Jake Sully, repelled the Earthlings off their planet. In the intervening time, Jake and his wife Neytiri have raised a family, with two natural-born sons (Neteyam and Lo’ak) and a daughter (Tuk), and an adopted daughter (Kiri) born to Grace Augustine’s hibernating Avatar, left after she died. They’ve also taken in “a stray,” a human boy named Spider, who was left with the humans left the planet (babies cannot be put into hyper sleep for the trip back to earth). We soon learn that Spider was the late Colonel Miles Quaritch’s son, and he has been raised mostly unaware of the evil his father did.

Jake’s idyllic world comes to an end when the humans return. With Earth dying (its pollution was hinted at in the previous film), humans want to do more than just mine Pandora now, and they are looking to settle on it. And they brought new muscle to tame the Na’vi. They’ve grown new avatars, and implanted the memories of trained soldiers into those bodies, including Colonel Quaritch’s. Quaritch makes it his goal to capture Jake, seeing him as the key to taking the fight out of the Na’vi, since it was he who united the tribes to win the last war. After a close call, where Quaritch captures a couple of Jake’s kids and they barely escape, Jake decides to take his family far away, and relocates to an island village, inhabited by the Metkayina people. Despite still being Na’vi, the Metkayina are a different people. Living with the sea has brought evolutionary changes, and their entire way of life is strange to Jake and his family. While they are learning the new ways, Quaritch is not content to let his prize get away, and sets his brutal tactics to anyone who may give him information. Aided by his estranged and reluctant son Spider, Quaritch hunts Jake.

The film is long, at 192 minutes (a half hour longer than the first, which was already a long movie). Despite 3+ hours, it really didn’t feel long. That is in part to being such an incredibly beautiful film. In this day and age with every film chuck full of CGI, it’s hard to impress me, but this movie did. It is gorgeous throughout and creates a sense of wonder that you never lose. Having said that, the movie does suffer from, at times, being a bit too similar to the first entry. Jake (and this time, his whole family) has to learn the ways of the local people, in order to use those skills to fight off the bad guys. And at the end, director Cameron pulls out another old plot element from his past films (you’ll know when you see it), and it started to make me think that he only has a couple ideas floating around in his head. If, in the next sequel, Jake has to take his family to the volcano people and learn their way of life too, while a killer robot from the future travels back in time to hunt Jake Sully, I’ll really start to second guess this director’s bag of tricks. Still, looking at this film by itself, it’s solid, and worthy of more exploration. ★★★½