Director: James Cameron
Writers: James Cameron, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver
Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang
At a time when millionaires are channelling their fortunes into space travel and Marvel superheroes are looking to explore new universes, director James Cameron is going a different route. He’s staying put on Pandora, the fictional planet that he introduced us to in Avatar (2009). With the sequel Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) — which has been 13 years in the making — the director doesn’t just take us back to Pandora, but also puts down roots for the next three films that will (in all probability) be set in this world. Considering how beautifully it’s been rendered, you can see why Cameron wants to stay here and why much of Avatar: The Way of Water feels like the director was making his version of The Blue Planet documentary series. Although the nature we see is imaginary — it’s staggering to think this intricately-imagined planet is entirely digital art — Pandora is very much a love letter to Earth and its natural inhabitants. So much so that one could argue that the real hero of the film is a whale-like creature who gets the best action sequence when he goes from the Pandora equivalent of a fail whale to the hero who saves the day.
Much of Avatar: The Way of Water is a hunt, although the film has little sense of urgency. This is a film you watch not for story or tension, but for spectacle. However, since there are three people who wrote the screenplay and five people who developed the story, it seems only fair to pay some attention to the plot. The snarling Colonel Miles Quadritch (Stephen Lang) has been resurrected into a Na’vi avatar and dropped back on Pandora to deal with Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who is now a respected Na’vi leader. While Miles was dead, humans and Jake have been busy. Jake and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) have a brood of kids who are blue-skinned and topaz-eyed like their Na’vi mother, but five-fingered like their alien hybrid father. Their idyllic life in the forests of Pandora is rudely interrupted when humans, or Sky People, return to Pandora — this time to colonise the planet by force. As Miles is told when he meets the new commanding officer, things are very different from how they were when Miles was in charge. The Sky People have built their own fortified city, they are systematically stripping Pandora of its natural riches; and Jake, who leads raiding parties and lives in a secret hideout that the humans can’t breach, is a thorn in the colonial side.