Avatar: The Way of Building a Franchise

Avatar: The Way of Water Review Building a Franchise

 

I didn’t feel compelled to write a full review of Avatar: The Way of Water after I initially saw it for a couple reasons. One, I knew it would be heavily talked about and don’t always like talking about a new movie simply because it’s new and popular in order to get more views. I only talk about big new movies upon their release when I have a substantial amount of opinions, observations, and reactions (the last two big examples of this would be Jurassic World Dominion and Prey), and two, I didn’t have all that much unique to say about it, because I was a little let down by it.

But then, I saw it again, and I started thinking about it in relation to the original Avatar and its place in the context of the budding Avatar franchise, and I realized I now had more to say. This isn’t going to be a conventional review of either movie, but I am going to reference Avatar: The Way of Water freely, so if you haven’t seen it and don’t want it to be spoiled, you’ll have to read past this point at a later time after you’ve seen it. But, if you aren’t worried about a few spoilers (here’s one: the sequel is basically the same story as the first one) then read on.

 

Part One: The Franchise Begins

Let’s start with Avatar (2009). I don’t believe there was actually ever any kind of mass revolt against this movie after it made over 2 billion dollars the way the internet often depicts. I remember how massively popular it was all throughout 2010. I saw it for a second time in the theater in 3D in January, and I got the DVD at some point in April/May. I was a huge fan at the time and must have watched it two or three times before I finally got the three-disc extended edition blu ray set released in November. I stayed up extra late on a school night just to watch the nearly-three-hour cut that reinstated deleted scenes with fully completed visual effects, and it wasn’t until 2011 that I started picking up on the Avatar hate, and that hate train certainly did build up some steam.

I never got on that hate train, but once it started chugging along it was hard to ignore, especially the whole “It’S jUsT dAnCeS WiTh WoLvEs In SpAcE” whining that became a simplistic solution for haters to use as a catch-all explanation for why it supposedly sucked. As you might be able to tell by my tone and silly spelling, I don’t agree with all the pure hatred, but I’m certainly not wearing blinders when it comes to my defense of Avatar. I recognize the lesser aspects of the film, and I don’t deny that it is very comparable to Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, Fern Gully, and myriad other arguably better films/stories. Instead of picking it apart and making my long-gestating Avatar analysis into something negative, I want this to be a positive look at the movie(s) and an optimistic take on the whole thing, so I’m going to explain why I actually still really enjoy the original film all these years later, though not as much as when I was fifteen years old. 

Avatar has all the familiar themes and content that I’ve enjoyed since I was a kid and still enjoy seeing done in new ways: the creatures, plants, environments, and the technology are all thrilling. People in cryogenic sleep on a space ship on their way to another planet? Sure, it had been done before, even by writer/director James Cameron himself, but it’s treated as something you’ve never seen quite like this before, and the movie gets its hooks in the audience right away. We wake up with Jake Sully and are introduced to the world of Pandora along with him. He isn’t quite as amazed as Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler are when they first see a living dinosaur in Jurassic Park, but it’s a similar approach to pulling the audience into the world along with the characters and making everything seem completely authentic, even though it’s all outlandish. This happens multiple times throughout the movie—Jake Sully gets in his avatar body for the first time, he encounters the creatures of the forest for the first time, he meets Neytiri for the first time—and it creates this sense of wonder throughout. Obviously the visual effects are astounding, but I really love the designs for nearly everything on Pandora. I had never seen an alien world so completely brought to life in such a consistent visual tapestry before. Everything looks like it belongs in the jungle, there is so much colour, bioluminescence, and variety that it never for a second gets dull, and the motion capture characters inhabit the world in an equally flawless fashion.

James Cameron knows how to direct action sequences, and Avatar has some of his finest work in this regard. It has the largest scale action set pieces he’s ever created, even larger than Titanic or The Abyss, and the action seems to know no bounds. In spite of the familiar narrative, weak characterization, and uninspired dialogue, Avatar is a pleasing, easy-to-enjoy sci-fi epic. Even though it told a complete story that had a perfectly satisfying ending, it did seem to beg to be expanded upon in a sequel. But what would a sequel to something this groundbreaking (visually) be like? I had far too many years to wonder, and James Cameron had far too much investment in outdoing the exhibition of technology he put on in the first one.

 

Part Two: The Sequel Anticipation Problem

Avatar: The Way of Water is my least favourite sequel James Cameron has ever made, but that’s a funny statement to make, and here’s why: it’s only his third. The first time he made a sequel was Aliens (1986) which wasn’t even a sequel to his own original movie. 20^th Century Fox hired him to write and direct the follow-up to Alien (1979) based on the success he had with The Terminator and his intriguing pitch for how to bring the xenomorph back and multiply the threat. It was a huge success, and he would later go on to make Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), which allowed him to finally execute an idea he’d had back when he made the first movie but wasn’t able to do on such a low budget with inadequate moviemaking technology: a cyborg made of liquid metal. The T-1000 was just one of many additions, improvements, and expansions Cameron made to his Terminator sequel that made it superior to the original in many ways (but maybe not all ways). After T2, he went back to making original films—True Lies, Titanic, and Avatar—but after the success of Avatar, a sequel was announced, and James Cameron would be coming back to make it…only, he didn’t want to just make one sequel, he had an entire multi-film saga in mind.

This is what I mean when I say I had too much time to think about what the second Avatar would be: the anticipation for a new James Cameron sequel to a film that could have been improved upon was too great. The few teases we were given over the many intervening years—it’s going to be like The Godfather in terms of being about the Sully family and the family’s legacy and ongoing conflict, it’s going to feature new aquatic environments and a new Na’vi tribe, it’s going to have motion capture performances in the water—were simultaneously too much, hyping me up into believing it would be more story-driven and more character-driven than the first movie, and not enough, not giving me a clear insight into what, precisely, I should be excited about seeing in the sequel. Instead of the second movie being about another epic conflict like the first movie, it’s about a smaller scale conflict, and instead of being a story that moves along at a good pace and is structured rather soundly (despite being long and action-packed), it’s a bloated story that takes too long to get to where it is obviously going. Perhaps it’s not fair to compare it to Aliens and T2, but it is a far cry from how great those sequels were.

Avatar: The Way of Water feels like a highly unconstrained sequel, but at the same time it’s also not a very satisfying one in terms of appeasing those who found the first one lacking or those who were in love with the blue alien forest tribe. James Cameron clearly had these big ideas he wanted to achieve, like creating a new set of creatures that are the ocean equivalents to those he introduced in the jungle, or having a harrowing sequence of humans hunting the whale-like creature in a futuristic Moby Dick re-enactment, or bringing back the main human villain as an avatar with implanted memories so he could bring back the same actor again and do something that had never been done before, but he wasn’t that concerned with how to get to those concepts and sequences, narratively speaking. And so, this is another big reason why I was initially disappointed with it. But, there’s a key factor involved here that makes this sequel totally different from the other two sequels he made decades prior, and that’s his giant Avatar franchise plan.

Marvel really changed the game when they started putting out multiple superhero movies between 2008 and 2011 and then brought them all together in The Avengers in 2012. That had never been done before, and another thing that had never been done before was promising audiences an entire slate of films that would follow it up. Sure, such things had been planned behind-the-scenes before, but never had a film “phase” been advertised to the public the way Marvel’s Phase Two was, and they lived up to their promise. We got a slew of superhero flicks between when Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water came out, including Avengers: Endgame which beat Avatar at the box office—a feat that had seemed nearly impossible. Why was James Cameron sleeping on his sequel for so long? Why wait over a decade to put out the next movie? Well, he didn’t wait.

James Cameron started developing the first Avatar right after Titanic came out. Think about that for a second. He was working on the movie in the late 90’s and it didn’t even come out until 2009! In fact, the TV series Avatar: The Last Airbender, which started airing in 2005, had to be called that because Cameron already had the rights to the title Avatar. One of the main reasons it took him so long to make it was the technology hadn’t yet reached the level of sophistication he needed it to be at to fully realize his vision. After Avatar’s huge box office success he started working on the sequel right away, but a number of factors caused the production to be long and the release to be delayed multiple times—not the least of which was the pandemic. Cameron wasn’t just planning one sequel, though. The news that eventually came out was a whole franchise was being planned, and he had recruited some pretty good screenwriters to help him—a move that I found surprising. Giving his filmography a quick look, of the eight movies he has directed (this is excluding Way of Water) he has sole screenplay credit on five of them.

The reason he put together the writing team was so he could focus more on directing and get the scripts completed faster. Unfortunately, this “team” didn’t demonstrate anything new or different in the screenplay for The Way of Water. Jake Sully and his family go to a new tribe and learn to live among them in a very similar manner to how Jake Sully originally learned to live among the forest tribe in the first movie, and they’re antagonized by the same antagonistic force. The dialogue is still generic and at times cringe-worthy, and the cast of characters is problematic in multiple ways. Jake Sully’s family is the focus, and his kids vary from annoying to boring, while his wife Neytiri gets criminally underused for most of the story, and Jake himself demonstrates how bad of a father he is from one scene to the next. Even though I found the story even less interesting than the original, I still have hope for the future of the Avatar franchise, and it’s not because I’m a James Cameron super fan, or because I’m an eternal optimist, or because I haven’t learned better.  

 

Part Three: The Potential of Part Three

I suspect The Way of Water has set a story in motion that will continue in the third film and beyond, and this is part of the reason I’m still hopeful. James Cameron has never made a sequel to a sequel before. To quote Sarah Connor from T2: “We were in uncharted territory now…making up history as we went along.” I realized after watching The Way of Water a second time that I’m actually more excited about the third movie than I was about the second one. As I had predicted, The Way of Water was a sequel that was also sort of a retelling of the same story again, just like Aliens and Terminator 2 were, but I had hoped it would find a greater focus on the characters like those sequels did, which it did not. That could still happen in the next one, though, and there will be far less time waiting to see it. The beginning of The Way of Water speeds through many years of the story (partially to account for how much time has passed in real life since the first movie), but I don’t think that will happen at the beginning of part three.

I see so much potential in the new characters who were introduced in The Way of Water—much more potential than the characters who carried over from the first movie. I thought Jake Sully was a fine protagonist in the first one, but he should not have been so prominent in the follow-up. Neytiri is a far more interesting character, and I sincerely hope next time she gets more of a story than just raging against the villain in the climax because her kid got killed. Kiri, the teenage daughter of Dr. Grace Augustine’s avatar (both characters played by Sigourney Weaver) has the most potential of all, I think. It was a little strange hearing such an old voice coming out of such a young character (with motion capture allowing her to perform as someone decades younger than she actually is), but Kiri seems like an old soul, and her connection to Eywa is definitely something that will be explored in future films and connect with some of the continuing themes.

Even the villain, who I didn’t care for in the first movie, has the potential to be more than he was/currently is. The idea of bringing back actor Stephen Lang in mo-cap to play an avatar made of the DNA of the colonel from the first movie who was killed, implanted with his memories and his hatred of Jake Sully, is an interesting idea, but it wasn’t executed as well as I’d hoped it would be. Still, this guy, who hated avatars and the Na’vi and basically everything about Pandora in the first movie, now has no choice but to adapt to his new reality in order to bring down Sully, and what will happen when he does? What will his purpose be once Sully is dead? The introduction of the colonel’s estranged human son adds another interesting layer to the potential with him as a villain, too. Whether or not any of these characters will reach their full potential is yet to be seen, but even though I didn’t find characters such as the avatar colonel or his human son or the new Na’vi water tribe particularly engaging in The Way of Water, I could imagine them becoming more endearing and compelling with further development.

I have no doubts about James Cameron’s imagination. I think he has had some brilliant ideas and probably has many more great ones in his brain, even more than he’ll be able to have realized in his life time, but I do question whether or not he has a really good idea for a cohesive narrative set on Pandora that needs to be told over the course of several films. Ideas are one thing, but stories are another, and whether or not his writing team can turn his great ideas into worthwhile stories has yet to be seen. Unlike the Marvel movies, there is no source material to work from. The world of Pandora is all out of Cameron’s imagination, for better and for worse. I think the world of Pandora has more than enough potential to sustain multiple concepts for sequels, that’s the easy part. What I am not so sure of is whether or not the Sully family has enough potential to sustain that many storylines (if they do remain the protagonists throughout all the sequels, as it currently seems they will).

The first Avatar took forever to make because of the technology and the level of special effects involved. The same issue is part of the reason The Way of Water took just as long—and why it came with an even heftier price tag than the first movie. But, the big difference between the two movies? Cameron was fully invested in making only one movie with the first one. The Way of Water is, currently, what audiences are focused on and talking about, but we need to remember something: it was shot at the same time as the third movie. Cameron is currently in post-production on Avatar 3, that’s where his focus is.

 

Part Four: A Franchise like No Other

The usual Hollywood model is this: if a movie does well, the sequel gets developed and released. If that one does well, the next sequel goes into production. It’s usually one at a time. Avatar: The Way of Water is a completely different situation than most sub-par sequels, and I wouldn’t call The Way of Water sub-par by any means, nor would I compare it to the Marvel movies in terms of them planning out multiple interconnected films. This is closer to (but not exactly the same as) what Peter Jackson did with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The LOTR films were all in production at the same time, then post-production was completed on them one at a time and they were released one year apart (2001, 2002, 2003). Avatar 3 is set for release less than two years from now. James Cameron doesn’t have the excuse of technology holding back the release dates for these movies anymore, which begs the question: what is he going to do if he can’t rely on blowing everyone away with the special effects?

Avatar: The Way of Water really did push the envelope by having even more incredible motion capture (In the water, no less!), but the next movie isn’t going to have the same kind of new never-before-seen visual trick to wow us. Avatar 3 has to follow The Way of Water with a better story, and I have faith that it will. In James Cameron I trust. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if he has committed this much of his life to building Avatar into a multi-film franchise, there must be something there worth all this time and effort. He doesn’t need to be making them (although, as he’s said in interviews, he’d need to “train” someone how to direct an Avatar movie because it requires so much skill, so maybe he does need to make them all) and he doesn’t really need to appease fans who hold preconceived expectations, either.

Marvel movies will always be seen by that portion of the audience who are fans of the comic books, and be critiqued by them, too, but like I said earlier, there is no source material to compare the Avatar movies to. It’s not even like Star Wars where there’s a beloved original trilogy of films that anything else with the name Star Wars will always be compared to and held up against. Avatar as a franchise can still be anything, and that’s kind of exciting. I’m sure James Cameron knows his multi-film saga will have to start forming a more compelling long-form narrative if he’s going to get people to keep coming back to the movie theaters to see them. Visual effects, as we know, are only truly amazing when they’re in service of a story worth telling.

No, The Way of Water didn’t amaze me and thrill me and satisfy all my hopes and dreams of being one of the best sequels ever, but I think we might look back on it one day in the context of the franchise it will become part of and feel differently. Both this one and the original remind me why I love the science-fiction genre so much. There are so many possibilities, and even though I didn’t vibe with all the choices made in The Way of Water, they weren’t catastrophic choices that ruined my interest in the franchise. The colonel coming back as an avatar is rife with possibility—a character who could go down many interesting paths and have a far greater impact in the long term than he did in movie #2. Sigourney Weaver playing Kiri, the offspring of her character’s avatar from the first movie, was an interesting choice, and hearing an old woman’s voice coming from a teenage character took me out of the experience at times—yet even this creative choice could come around to have some kind of impact in the next movie or the one after it. What if she somehow has the spirit of Weaver’s human character within her because of her connection to Eywa? I don’t want to get too speculative here, but it’s hard not to when, as I said, there’s so much possibility.

There aren’t that many franchises currently running that I am all that invested in. Marvel has run its course for me and I now drag my feet going to most of the post-Endgame solo films instead of sprinting to all of them opening night. I still have Godzilla, King Kong, Alien, Predator, and some others, but Avatar is currently on-track to be the biggest franchise in terms of its production value and box office gross that I will be continuing to see when they get released in theaters. I’m over the 3D, I’m over the amazing visuals, but I am not over the fictional world these movies take place in. If the storyline dips even lower with the third one, though, in terms of creativity, intrigue, and compelling characters, I might change my tune a bit, but it’s almost like how I can’t fully decide how I feel about Dune: Part One until I see Dune: Part Two. Avatar: The Way of Water, despite being over three hours and a mostly self-contained narrative, still feels like part of a bigger story that’s (hopefully) going to get better with each new installment.

There has never been a franchise like Avatar before. There might never be another one quite like it ever again. For some people, more Avatar movies means nothing. The first one didn’t wow everyone, and the sequel has wowed even fewer viewers, I think. That’s fine; I think it has enough devoted fans to sustain being a franchise for at least five films, and I for one will at least enjoy taking another cinematic tour of Pandora every couple of years. Our world was a very different place when the first movie came out, but it won’t be quite so different in comparison to when the second movie was released and when the third one gets released. We are in a post-Covid world where theaters are still struggling to get people away from the ease of streaming movies and TV at home and give them reasons to come back to the cineplexes. If Avatar can continue to be one of the biggest reasons to keep going to the movies this decade, that’s okay with me.