When he’s in between films, it does always feel like we’ve lost James Cameron to his infatuations. His submarine expeditions to explore the wreckage of the Titanic is still one of his great obsessions all these decades later. So is developing the technology to produce the visual effects for the sequels to Avatar, films that we’ve been promised for over a decade but were beginning to feel like wishful thinking. Cameron had been aloft in Pandora for so long it began to feel like the cinematic version of George R.R. Martin work on his Game of Thrones books: stasis by action, continuing to work so you never have to finish. So here we are once again, on the cusp of the latest James Cameron film, where the stakes are sky high and the expectations feel impossible to meet. He thrives in this atmosphere and The Way of Water is just his latest triumph in the face of skepticism.

I want to specify about Cameron’s development for the technology for Avatar, because that same maniacal work ethic is seldom spent on developing the story, and that’s because narrative has always been more of a formality for Cameron than a necessity. The persistent criticism of Cameron’s shallow approach to storytelling can occasionally feel like missing the forest for the trees, but it’s still a bit stupefying when you see how derivative his stories are. He had sole screenwriting credit on the 2009 Avatar, where The Way of Water is co-written by the married tandem of Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver. The script here has a little more heft but there’s still the hearty dose of eye-rolling cringe, including Jake Sully’s noirish narration (not framed by video journals this time around) and a pretty inexplicable (as in, literally not explained) communication between Na’vi and their native whale species.

The film’s 192-minute runtime is daunting to behold (still a mere three minutes shorter than Cameron’s Titanic), and it will be  a test of modern day audiences who seldom will seek a movie that long if it doesn’t have the Marvel logo playing ahead of it. Perhaps more surprising in a film of this length is that it still carries a standard three-act structure. While its first hour is a night-before-the-exam cram of exposition and reintroduction (Stephen Lang is back!), and its last hour is a T2: Judgment Day-level montage of non-stop action, it’s middle third is a dazed-out luxuriation of its breathtaking visual palette. A lot of the last thirteen years in between the two Avatars has been spent trying to perfect the CGI; a Kubrick-ian approach that has tested the stamina of audiences (and, I would guess, studio heads) and Avatar‘s sustained relevance. The second hour of The Way of Water pays off for those who kept the faith that Cameron still has the ability to leave you stunned by what you see.

Sam Worthington returns as Jake Sully, the former marine-turned-Na’vi rebellion leader. Avatar ended with his soul being permanently transported into his Na’vi avatar, and at the beginning of The Way of Water, he has made a family with Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) in the forests of the floating mountains.  Jake is now chief of the Omaticaya, and his village has gotten so good at snuffing out human attempts at colonization that the military has taken for granted that it’s impossible. That is until the return of Miles Quaritch (Lang), the first film’s main villain, a jingoist war hawk who preferred mass murder to negotiation and (you may remember) definitively died at the end of the movie. I’ll resist explaining how he returns – not because it’s a major plot spoiler, but because the filmsy nature of his resurrection is actually too ingenious in its overconfidence to not witness firsthand on the screen – but his continued hunt of Jake means the Sullys must find a new a home to protect the Omaticaya village.

Jake and Neytiri take their five children to the reef of the Metkayina tribe, a species of Na’vi that live in the water. The initial culture clash causes tension between the Sullys and the family of the Metkayina leader, Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and his wife, Ronal (Kate Winslet). Desperate to assimilate and avoid danger, Jake begs his sons to behave. That’s not a problem for their oldest, Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), who plays the role model well. It’s the second son, Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), who’s spirit leans toward rebellion, and who doesn’t respond well to the teasing from the Metkayina boys. Lo’ak is the closest thing that The Way of Water has to a singular protagonist, and his arc from disappointment to triumph is the film’s most concrete. When he develops a relationship with an outcasted tulkun (basically a Na’vi whale) named Payakan, a true Cameron-ian metaphor arises as the two characters must prove their worth to the skeptics.

There is a degree to which Jaffa and Silver polish Cameron’s uglier narrative impulses, but they are helpless in trying to reel in his manic ambition. The characters throughout Avatar have a palatable simplicity that falls apart under the slightest scrutiny. In another head-scratching return, seventy-three year-old Sigourney Weaver is cast as Kiri, the Sullys’ adopted teenage daughter born from the avatar of Grace Augustine, Weaver’s character from the original movie (who, I cannot stress this enough, definitively dies in Avatar without any mention of pregnancy). Weaver’s performance is surprisingly effective, giving Kiri – the film’s most mysterious, mercurial figure – a hearty emotional component that makes up for the fact that so much explanation is still required; perhaps this is what we’ll get in the next sequel. There’s also a human boy character named Spider (Jack Champion) whose lineage brings a big surprise and seems more of a platform for later movies.

There is so much story in The Way of Water (an amount of whale lore that would make Herman Melville blush) that it’s a bit of a miracle that it still makes time to allow you to zen out with its wondrous visual constructions. And this is the real reason you’re here. You’re almost grateful to have rushed through so much exposition to get to the beautiful sequences of Lo’ak and Payakan drifting through the sea or Kiri connecting with the Na’vi god Eywa as she makes her spiritual bond with life underwater. There is a lot of talk today about the visual innovation of filmmakers like Denis Villeneuve or Guillermo Del Toro, two masters of the medium; but only Cameron can re-envision what you thought was possible on such a high scale. His instincts have made him into a commercial filmmaker, but Cameron is also a visionary, an auteur in the surest sense, working on a different level from anyone else. A true artist with complete control of his instrument.

This is all to say that The Way of Water can and should be forgiven for its screenwriting sins, because what it gives us as a spectacle is so completely awesome that expecting anything more feels almost selfish. By the film’s end, Cameron fully floors it with pathos after just giving you the most action-packed hour of your life. Even if you think it’s shabbily put together, you can’t argue that he doesn’t pull it off, giving you a film that truly earns the moniker “epic”. That The Way of Water is more pensive than any of his previous films might be a testament to Cameron’s own reflectiveness on his career of unparalleled box office success. His nautical obsessions have been well-noted in the press, and here he allows us to join him in his excursions under the water. This is probably what passes for a “personal” James Cameron film, and the effect is no less moving than Spielberg’s Fablemans. Cameron will never beat the corny allegations – he doesn’t even seem to want to, and I love him all the more for it.

 

Directed by James Cameron