James Cameron is finally ready to unveil the first of four plannedAvatarsequels,Avatar: The Way of Water. Moviegoers are excited to re-immerse themselves in Pandora, but it’s been a whopping 13 years since the first movie briefly dominated the cultural zeitgeist with Oscar debates and “Dances with Smurfs” jokes. In the lengthy interim, a lot of viewers have forgotten their experience ofAvataraltogether, while others just remember the pretty CG spectacle (and maybe the weird “hair bond” thing).
What audiences remember fromAvataris the immersive IMAX experience of seeing an alien world realized so vividly. The actual plot is an ultimately uninspired take on the well-wornPocahontas/Dances with Wolvesstoryline of a white colonizer helping a native culture fight back against the other white colonizers.Avatarbrings that storyline to a colorful alien world, but it doesn’t do anything to subvert the expectations of that narrative. As with pretty much any modern blockbuster, the third act culminates in an action-packed final battle. Marine-turned-avatar Jake Sully rallies the Na’vi against his fellow humans, who send in the cavalry to tear down the Tree of Souls for its wealthy bank of the rare and imaginatively named mineral “unobtanium.”
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Cameron recently toldEmpiremagazine, “The trolls will have it that nobody gives a s*** and they can’t remember the characters’ names or one damn thing that happened in the movie. Then, they see the movie again and go, ‘Oh, okay, excuse me, let me just shut the f*** up right now.’” It might be worth taking Cameron’s advice and givingAvatara rewatch beforeThe Way of Waterarrives in theaters, not just as a reminder of the characters and plotlines, but as a reminder that, in spite of its derivative plotting, it’s a mesmerizing viewing experience full of dazzling sci-fi visuals – andThe Way of Wateris shaping up to do the same.
But,like the sequel promises to be, the firstAvatarmovie is very, very long, so it might be tricky to find the time to sit through it all over again beforeThe Way of Water’s release date, so here’s a refresher. In the final battle, the Na’vi are outmatched by the humans until the environmentalist themes get a little heavy-handed and the Pandoran wildlife join the fight against the humans disrupting the natural order. Neytiri interprets this as a sign that her deity answered Jake’s prayer, so she decides to trust him once again. When the R. Lee Ermey-esque drill sergeant villain, Quaritch, is preparing to slit Jake’s throat, Neytiri swoops in at the last second to save him. In the movie, she seems to definitively kill Quaritch, but Stephen Lang has been confirmed to return in the sequels, so Cameron probably has some sort of resurrection storyline in store.Sigourney Weaver’s character, a human scientist who sides with the Na’vi, is also killed off in the climactic battle; Weaver is also set to return in the sequel, but unlike Lang, she’ll be playing a new character (interestingly, she’s playing the teenage daughter of Jake and Neytiri). In the final scene of the originalAvatarfilm, Jake is permanently transferred into his avatar body, so audiences probably won’t see any of Sam Worthington in human form inThe Way of Water. The ending of the firstAvatarmovie is really a new beginning. A new status quo is established on Pandora, with most of the humans being sent back to Earth by force and a select few being chosen to stay.The Way of Waterhas a lot of interesting setups to play with.
As it turns out, the ridiculously long wait forAvatar 2could be its greatest marketing tool. It’s been so longsince the firstAvatarmovie came outthat many audiences (especially young people) have nostalgia for the time that it dominated the culture. This putsAvatar 2in the unique position to pull off the same marketing trick aslegacy sequels likeJurassic World DominionandTop Gun: Maverick. The familiar imagery in the posters and trailers forThe Way of Wateris evoking nostalgia and drumming up excitement for a movie that was thought to be a sure-fire failure.
ButThe Way of Waterneeds to do more than just attract audiences to its own event; it needs to ensure repeat business. The newfangled CGI ofAvatarwas exciting enough to get butts in seats in 2009, but eye-popping visual effects won’t keep an audience coming back for five movies (especially in an age when the majority of big-budget studio movies are awash with CGI).The Way of Waterneeds to make the audience care so much about the characters and story arcs that they’ll turn up again and again and again to keep buying tickets forAvatarsequels for the rest of the decade. There’sa lot resting on this movie’s shoulders. After the first movie established the world and introduced the characters with a familiar narrative framework,The Way of Waterneeds to set up arcs for those characters that audiences will want to come back every couple of years to check in on.
Over a decade in the planning, Cameron’s ambitiousAvatarsaga has an advantage over Disney’sStar Warssequel trilogy: forethought. Cameron has been mulling over these sequel scripts for years now. While the underwater motion-capture technology necessary to makeThe Way of Waterwas being developed, Cameron was concurrently developing all four planned sequels with a team of writers. All five movies will both work on their own terms withtheir own standalone narratives and self-contained conclusionsand tie into the interconnected story arcs of the other movies. It’s one of the most ambitious experiments in the relatively brief history of blockbuster cinema. Cameron’s simultaneous development of four follow-ups to a revolutionary but mostly forgotten movie is an even bigger and bolder undertaking than Peter Jackson shooting threeLord of the Ringsmovies back-to-back, and this series is hinged on breaking new technological ground and has no existing source material to work from. It’ll be quite an impressive achievement if Cameron pulls it off, and if anybody can pull it off, it’sthe guy who madeAliensandTerminator 2.
Avatar: The Way of Wateris set to be released on December 16.
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