A Spoiler-Filled Review of Avatar: The Way of Water

I initially thought Avatar: The Way of Water wasn’t that bad of a movie. Possibly even a B- to B rating. But the more and more I think about it (I am writing this in the afternoon the day after I saw the movie,) the worse and worse the movie gets. I probably have to give it an F at this point. As you may recall, I think James Cameron’s Avatar is the worst movie I’ve ever sat through. The issues with this installment? Legion. The core one is the plot. It is stupidly awful. Beyond that, the script and dialogue are otherworldly terrible. The new characters are all mostly pointless to the plot and have names I just can’t recall for the life of me. The new characters that do matter end up contributing to the plot only because the script made it that way. The worldbuilding merely creates more questions than it ever answers. The humans, as the always enemy of this franchise that is all about anti-colonialism and environmentalism, make the dumbest possible decisions considering what their goals are meant to be.

But let me walk you through the entire plot. As the title of the article makes clear, lots of spoilers will follow. I don’t recommend you see this movie outside of the visuals if eye candy is worth the $15 or so a ticket to this movie in 3-D will cost you. I will say it is technically better than the first movie. But that isn’t really saying much.

To start things off, the movie has a lot of Sam Worthington narration sprinkled throughout, especially in the first half hour. We get filled in on what he’s been doing. He’s been made chief or whatever of the forest Na’vi. There are lots and lots of Na’vi tribes, apparently, but we only really meet one additional one this time. I assume there will be a mountain tribe and a desert tribe in future movies because of something I’ll get into shortly. He has three kids with Zoe Saldaña, two sons and a girl, plus an adopted daughter and a random human named Spider. The adopted girl was somehow born from the corpse of Sigourney Weaver’s Na’vi avatar. It is heavily implied but never explicitly stated that she is almost surely an immaculate conception. They tease that without ever saying it outright, but the Jesus allegory is incredibly obvious, which I’ll get to later.

Spider, the only new character’s name I remember because it happens to be a normal English word, was a baby at the time of the first conflict. He could not leave because babies cannot be put in cryosleep for some reason they never explain, which means he was born on the planet. I want to guess nearly two decades have passed since the first movie, but I have no idea since the ages of no one are stated and even if they were, I have no idea if years on Pandora are the same as Earth years or if the Na’vi age faster or slower than humans do. I have no idea. But it is revealed that Spider is somehow Papa Dragon’s son. When that dude got down and knocked up a woman on Pandora is never mentioned. Because we also don’t really know how long he was on the planet by the events of the first movie. All we know is the humans were on the planet about thirty years before they were forced to leave following the events of the first movie. How long Jake Sully was with the Na’vi before the final conflict? I don’t remember or care enough to look it up.

Smash cut, humans return around the time his third kid, a girl, is a toddler. I would take a stab and say she’s about five after the time skip. For whatever reason, the humans come down and burn a good chunk of the forest down. But don’t burn all of it down. And then a year goes by with a time skip “ONE YEAR LATER” on screen. The humans have now established a base in some desert locale, starting a major problem. Geography is a complete mess in this movie. We never know how far anything is from anything else. The water Na’vi and the forest Na’vi might be close together, but what distance they’re apart can only be seen as “range of a future helicopter roundtrip,” which I’ll get into later. The wife from The Sopranos seems to be in charge of this U.S. military something encampment. She states in the most ham-handed way that the humans there have managed to progress more in that year than they did in the entire previous thirty years they were on the planet somehow… It is never explained how or why. James Cameron just wants us to go with it like the horrible writer he is. As it turns out, strip mining the planet (which they have managed to do at least somewhat successfully during the time skip) isn’t the goal as much anymore. It turns out Earth is now dying and Pandora is, for whatever reason, the planet with which humans wish to start a new permanent settlement on. None of this was brought up in the first movie, so James Cameron is again a terrible writer. This explains only one plothole from the first movie. That being why didn’t they just gas the planet instead of trying to convince the Na’vi to move peacefully and then forcefully over those thirty years. I doubt the Earth just started dying in the less than twenty years that went by before they returned. Nor why they continue to use ships incredibly weak to spears and arrows thrown by presumably only modestly stronger humanoids than humans.

Jake Sully and the forest Na’vi are now running regular raids on human ships and trains. Yes, the humans somehow built train infrastructure in the forest without really chopping much of the forest down. It makes as little sense as you think it does. The Na’vi have guns and RPGs and grenades and stuff now from raiding the humans. They don’t use them much, to my chagrin, but they have them. I’ll get to that in a bit.

Papa Dragon, in an incredibly ham-fisted way, is somehow the villain again after dying. His memories were conveniently copied to a techno-rectangle the size of a human palm before the battle at the end of the last movie. This rectangle was then sent back to Earth and put in the body of a Na’vi avatar, as well as presumably his entire crew who were killed during that fight, although I couldn’t for the life of me recognize any of them in their new avatar forms. I don’t remember any of his crew outside of the actors I already knew, most of which joined up with Jake Sully anyway. Sneaky Pete/Boiler Room dude/medic from Saving Private Ryan does not return outside of a video exposition dump where the memory thing gets explained. These new avatars need to be around because humans cause the forest to attack them after an arbitrary ten-minute span in said forest. Humans are a virus. How unique, James Cameron. The ships that are clearly not from Pandora don’t cause the same reaction, nor do guns or clothes. The new enemy avatars are not naked is what I’m saying. The new avatars don’t try a ruse to be taken seriously as non-outsiders, probably because of the five fingers thing all human-made Na’vi have. For reasons that still don’t make any sense. They find Papa Dragon’s corpse and steal the body cam footage that his weird mech thing had apparently. Those mech things from the first movie show up in the opening and vanishingly little ever again for reasons I still don’t understand. They have these weird more spindly and less protective mechs instead. The human wearing it is just completely exposed to the elements. Makes no sense. But looks sort of cool, I guess.

So, by coincidence of coincidences, most of Jake Sully’s kids and Spider just happened to be near these new avatars when that was going down. They get easily captured. Jake rallies the troops as the human transport flies in to extract the avatars. Why they didn’t leave the ship that dropped them off, I’ll never know. As I said, the ships don’t cause any real reaction with the forest, only humans. They couldn’t build a ship the avatars could pilot by themselves? Of course not. Eventually, they all get away except Spider, who gets captured because of course he does.

Now, this is where the plot just completely derails. I feel like this movie had a much longer cut, as many things feel left out they didn’t fix with a sentence of exposition (and there’s so much exposition in this movie.) This movie is about three hours and fifteen minutes long. James Cameron has already admitted that the initial cut of the third movie is a measly nine hours long. This should probably just be a TV show at this point. Maybe release three movie length episodes a year, in theaters if you want to. I don’t know.

Because Spider knows where the base of operations of the forest Na’vi is, Jake Sully decides that his family has to flee instead of staying and fighting. That’s because there’s over two hours of this movie left, and the final fight has to be in the third act not the first or second. In a narration scene over no dialogue, Jake Sully (I keep writing it out in full because Papa Dragon does this every single time he says Jake Sully’s name, which is about a dozen or more times throughout the film) hands over the chieftain role to some new guy who doesn’t even get a word in edgewise. His name is said once, and I forget it. Spider is conveniently quickly turned by Papa Dragon, but what they do in the forest is never seen outside of some hair link bonding with flying lizards. I would assume they killed all the forest Na’vi or burned their base of operations to the ground because once Jake Sully and his family leave, we never see any forest Na’vi again for the rest of the movie. The two human scientists from the first movie, one of which is Owen from Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, do pop in later, but I’ll get to that when I get to that. Those forest Na’vi would have been very useful during the final confrontation, what with their giant flying lizards and guns and RPGs and stuff, but no. Never seen again for the rest of this movie.

So, they flee. Not knowing how far they’ve gotten; they end up with some Na’vi who have evolved to swim better. They are more teal, a greenish blue, than forest Na’vi blue for reasons that are never mentioned. But they have thicker forearms and longer tails, which presumably help them swim better than the piddly spindly arms and short tails of the forest Na’vi. Cliff Curtis, the dude from Fear the Walking Dead and Jesus in Risen, is the chieftain of this tribe. We never really find out how big this tribe is, but they seem to have at least fifty villages in an island group that has at least a hundred islands, apparently. So, thousands, probably. We never really get to the scale of it as they conveniently disappear from the plot about five minutes into the final battle, which I’ll get to in my own time. They, for whatever reason, accept Jake Sully and his family into the tribe, even though they know the humans are out to kill them. I just don’t get why the chieftain didn’t tell them to pound sand and become hermits somewhere where no other Na’vi are.

We are then treated to probably an hour (it felt like forever) with the family dynamics getting beaten over the audience’s heads. The second son, who we spend most of this part of the movie with, is clearly shaping up to be the new main character, along with adopted female Na’vi Jesus, which I’ll get to. I have a feeling she isn’t related to Jake Sully mainly so that her and his second son can get down between films and have kids of their own. The eldest son and oldest offspring barely gets used at all, so the audience should not be surprised at all when he gets unceremoniously killed off in the middle of the final fight. But I’ll get to that. Training montages and massive, massive exposition dumps happen during this. The chieftain’s wife really doesn’t like Jake Sully and his family and is visibly pregnant during most of the movie, although I’m not sure if she was initially. Again, we have no idea how much time passes during these training montages, so your guess is as good as mine. I don’t even know if the Na’vi gestation period is at all comparable to the human one. Your guess is as good as mine. The chieftain’s daughter is clearly gonna bone someone, the most likely candidate being the second son, so maybe the adopted daughter finds her own love interest not introduced in this movie at some point in the third movie. I don’t know. I could write a better movie in my sleep. And probably have. This paracosm is dumb as Hell.

In cuts to the humans, we find out Unobtanium has been replaced as the MacGuffin, although almost surely the fuel source for all the human vehicles. In a blatantly obvious dig at whaling, humans have discovered that this weird space whale species, which is also beaten into the audience’s heads as smarter than humans (they do nothing to truly prove that in this movie, naturally,) have some weird brain fluid. How the humans discovered this as they don’t seem to strip these space whale carcasses down once they kill them; I will never know. I remind you that James Cameron is a terrible writer. This weird pee-colored brain fluid apparently completely stops human aging, and one Ooze canister of it is worth $80 million. How much that means in today’s dollars is never said as this takes place in the future. That could be the equivalent of five bucks in the future, but it is implied that $80 million is an impressive amount of money. The anti-aging thing will almost surely be used in a future movie for a surprise anyone with a third-grade education will see coming a country mile away but that movie will treat as shocking.

The only new character I liked at all is the whaler dude, played by the most working-class Australian man ever. Jemaine Clement of Flight of the Conchords fame plays the scientist working with the whalers that is clearly the least evil of them all. He never turns on them and is yeeted out of the movie once the Australian mate gets one of his arms shorn off by a metal cable and flung into the ocean. No blood when that happened, by the way. Gotta keep that PG-13 rating! His death is also never confirmed, so maybe he shows up in the sequel with a cool mech arm. Or he gets his own avatar body! Death is completely meaningless in this franchise. Yeah, the female Na’vi Jesus? She might just become Sigourney Weaver in a later movie, as if the life tree impregnated her. Because she is seemingly voiced by Sigourney Weaver in a very distracting way. So many characters just disappear from the plot for no explained reason. We don’t know if they died off screen or why they don’t show up later when it would be useful for them to. They’re just gone, although the water Na’vi come back in the epilogue, which I’ll get to.

The second son manages to bond with one of the space whales, who ends up being a loner who was exiled from its space whale pod for killing (the space whales never kill, verboten for some unexplained reason even though the Na’vi kill so many people in this movie) or something stupid the movie retcons a half hour after learning that. It means this space whale can be alone for the second son to bond with sometime before the final conflict and can be the reason the final conflict happens. (The whalers start whaling in the water Na’vi territory to draw Jake Sully out.) The stupid humans have a massive hate boner for Jake Sully and want him dead, no matter how many of them have to die and how many billions of dollars in resources they have to waste to do it. Bonding with the space whales is, for whatever reason, strictly prohibited, probably because the linking hair thing is in the space whales’ mouths for some inexplicable reason and makes that weird trance the Na’vi go into very likely to drown whoever does it. Oh, the drowning. The amount of drowning death fake-outs in this movie is so numerous, I lost count.

After an admittedly cool whaling sequence (sort of the opposite of what James Cameron should have done since he is clearly anti-whaling,) the final fight chess pieces are all assembled, but back to female space Jesus for a minute. At some point during the training montage, we discover some weird reddish fish that if the Na’vi hair link with them, the Na’vi can breath underwater. This is promptly forgotten for like five or more drowning death fake-outs before space Jesus gets only one (so more drowning fake-outs can happen) in the last like half an hour of the movie. If I were the water Na’vi, I’d have brought like fifty of those things to the final battle, but that’s just me. Well, like the life tree or whatever in the first movie, there’s some weird underwater spindly coral plant thing that allows the Na’vi to connect to the same life energy afterlife thing or whatever. Space Jesus does that and has a weird meeting with Sigourney Weaver in Na’vi form that eventually fades into her human form. Good de-aging tech there.

The very moment she’s about to spill whether space Jesus even has a father, the connection is broken because space Jesus has a seizure underwater. This is when the aforementioned scientists return, whose helicopter was tracked and is the entire reason Papa Dragon has any idea where Jake Sully and his family are. Spider’s whole ride along with the avatars is not really seen until that point, so we have no idea if the forest Na’vi got attacked at all. I assume they did because they just don’t show up in the final fight for some inexplicable reason. What was the entire point in fleeing if the forest Na’vi were never attacked? Outside of allowing James Cameron to indulge his underwater fetish. Almost none of that in the first movie, which I think is due to James Cameron’s humorous cameo in The Muse where he is told to avoid water for his next movie (The Muse came out after Titanic.) To drill his point home at how much better the Native American metaphor is than the metaphor for the American military, the scientists don’t manage to really do anything for space Jesus even with all their MRI technology and stuff. Seconds of prodding with weird medicine by the chieftain’s wife, and space Jesus wakes up and seems fine. Owen scientist implies linking with the life tree hivemind thing will kill space Jesus if she does it again. She does do it again to help her family near the end, and nothing happens to her at all. The tension just isn’t there. It’s a stupid Chekhov’s gun that has little real payoff. If doing it killed her but saved one or more of her family members, maybe I would have cared.

So, once it is clear the humans are whaling near the water Na’vi, the second son stupidly goes to warn his bonded space whale, who has a weird marker on it already meaning it is about to be hunted by the whalers. And then the final fight starts. Which is a lot of noise and spectacle that doesn’t mean much as death is meaningless here. Papa Dragon is not killed for some reason, probably so he can continue to be the villain for the next forty movies. Spider saves him for no apparent reason. He clearly hates Papa Dragon. He could have just let him drown. While Papa Dragon flies away on a flying lizard he way too easily mastered earlier in the movie that conveniently flies to him the second he’s on some kind of coral reef out of the water, who else survived on the human side is a complete mystery. And the movie doesn’t care to show that to us in any way. This is when the water breathing fish come back. Only one, worn by space Jesus. The Jesus allegory is really obvious because the fish is put on her back and it looks like angel wings. Space Jesus links with the life tree thing again and uses some bioluminescence fish (yellow, to hammer the angel point home further) to guide her family out of the ship as it sinks upside down.

Yes, that also happened. The loner space whale manages to severely damage the ship, again a problem the humans probably should have tried to fix between movies. Massive exposed turbines and engines seem like a bad idea against a tribe that can hurl penetrating spears and arrows really far. The glass seems to be thinner than tissue paper as well, making it very easy for spears and arrows to kill the humans operating various vehicles and mechs. Again, a problem that should have been fixed a long time ago. Humans involving themselves again in a ground war, this time on the water, with a force they don’t have to engage in that way is stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. The only named “good” Na’vi who dies (this excludes the pregnant chieftain’s wife who joins the fight for seemingly no sensible reason as she is very pregnant at this point and survives somehow) is the eldest son as I previously mentioned. It was obviously happening, especially after he grabs a gun from the second son and allows the second son and Spider to escape (they decide to rescue Spider from the ship at some point seemingly just to kill off the eldest son.) He gets shot through the chest and dies in like five minutes, allowing for the family to cry mourn him before Jake Sully fights Papa Dragon with big knives and fisticuffs.

Although the chieftain already accepted him and his family, Jake Sully is now accepted by everyone in the water Na’vi, and this is his new home. Which he’ll probably leave within an hour of the next movie for the mountain tribe or the desert tribe, who probably will attack the desert installation that the humans still have at the end of this movie. How far the time jumps, I don’t know, but I imagine the second son and space Jesus will be fully grown by that time. How long Na’vi naturally live is also never made clear, so I have no idea how long this plot will follow Jake Sully, but death is, again, meaningless. Maybe Jake Sully had his memories copied at some point during the first movie. Or maybe his twin brother did. So we’ll have evil Jake Sully, probably with a scar or other blemish to distinguish him, to look forward to in a future movie. God help us all. I see these movies as nerd homework at this point.

And that’s about it. This movie is not good. I woke up about an hour early this morning and just couldn’t get the movie out of my head, even thinking through it audibly as I showered. And I just had to write this all out. This isn’t the worst movie I saw this year, but it definitely earned that failure.