“Avatar: The Way of Water” (dir. James Cameron, 2022)

 This isn’t a review of Cameron’s second Avatar movie: Avatar: the Way of Water. You don’t need another review of this film, I know. I will just briefly note that it’s basically the same movie as the first one but with added water, that its story is strung together from a series of statements, hard to disagree with but not in themselves inherently dramatic (‘white settlers persecuting Native Americans was bad!’ ‘The Vietnam war was bad!’ ‘Whaling is bad!’ ‘Family is good!’)—and that the storylines are all refried from elsewhere: Moby Dick plus Androcles and the Lion, Apocalypse Now plus Titanic and so on. I will add that the alien-world visuals are very colourful and detailed without being especially immersive or moving or remarkable, that the actions sequences are lively without being in the least bit tense or exhilarating, and that everything in this movie is too long, way too long, way way too long. This movie is too long.

Instead of a review, I am going to notate an annoyance I had concerning the movie’s worldbuilding and the logic of its representation. You are free to dismiss me as a crank, a pedant and a killjoy, for I am, it is true, all three of those things. But I think there’s a larger point here.

So: the ‘avatars’ themselves. As we learned in the first movie, the aboriginal population of the planet Pandora are the Na’vi, 9-ft-tall blue-skinned humanoid aliens, with elf-ears, tails and a mystic-electrical dreadlock with which they can plug-in to other mystical-electrical aspects of their natural world, mind-melding with dragons in order to ride them through the sky and so on. Earthlings have come to this planet to extract its valuable mineral ‘unobtanium’, an element that makes huge chunks of landscape float in the sky. But humans cannot breathe the Pandoran atmosphere. So humanity has developed ‘avatars’, cloned (one assumes) organic bodies shaped like native Pandorans, which human pilots remotely control by lying in special immersive VR tanks.

There’s lots that is handwavy about all this, especially towards the end of the first movie where the human protagonist Jake Sully not only remote-controls his avatar but mystically unifies his consciousness absolutely with it (via the mystic-electricity of Pandora’s world-tree). Thereafter he is not remote-controlling his avatar, his avatar has become his body.

Now, you might well say that there’s no point in objecting to the industrial-grade Cartesian pineal-gland bollocks of this. It’s the set-up for everything, and without it the whole film series couldn’t exist. So let us swallow that camel, for I have a gnat I wish to strain at. 

Avatar 1 pitches heroic Sully against a savagely violent human military officer, played by Stephen Lang, who is set on extirpating the Na’vi and destroying Pandora’s ecosystem. In a review of the first film Nick Mamatas called this character ‘Sergeant McRapeTheEarth, and that’s the name by which I’ve thought of him ever since. He dies at the end of Avatar but rather than gussy-up a new villain for episode 2 Cameron has him resurrected at the beginning of Avatar: the Way of Water. The shift is this: Sgt McRapeTheEarth’s consciousness and memories were previously downloaded onto a flash drive, which means they can be uploaded into a specially grown avatar body.

This is the main dynamic of this second film: McRapeTheEarth’s avatar, not remote-controlled but literally containing the we-might-as-well-say soul of the dead soldier, pursuing Sully’s avatar from forest to seashore, with lots of fighting and explosions and whatnot. At one point McRapeTheEarth, in Na’vi avatar form, goes to the site of the battle from the end of the first Avatar movie and discovers his own corpse, a Na’vi arrow still sticking out of it. He picks up his own skull in his gigantic blue hand in what looks like is going to be a Hamlet moment; but instead of discoursing on mortality he crushes it to dust with one mighty squeeze. Hah!

The camel I have swallowed is: that we have souls (souls which, moreover, can be recorded onto flash drives and uploaded into other bodies) and that the ‘avatar’ bodies are not just fleshy robot suits but actual bodies—in this film Sully has married his Na’vi girlfriend and fathered multiple children upon her, which means his avatar produces sperm and is able to pass on its DNA. Pretty sophisticated tech! But alright, I swallow all that. Here’s what I can’t swallow:

Sam Worthington’s avatar sounds exactly like Sam Worthington did when he was a human, just as McRapeTheEarth returns in Na’vi form with exactly the same voice as he had before. But his voice-box must, surely, be a different shape now, and is certain of much larger dimensions, and his new chest is perhaps twice the capacity of his human one. He ought to speak with a really deep and booming voice. He doesn’t. We can take this as a convention of representation: alright, the Na’vi are our p.o.v. characters, so have them speak ‘like us’. But in that case the least Cameron could do is have the human characters communicate in high-pitched, squeaky, pinky-perky Tiny Tim voices. I honestly feel cheated that he didn’t do this.

Part of my problem is that the movies make such ostentatious show of attending to questions of ‘verisimilitude’. All the helicopters and giant boats and submarines are scrupulously designed to work just as such machines would work if they were real. All that hyper-highdef SFX, all these intricately interlocking thought-through ecologies, and yet no squeaky-voiced homo sapiens? Pff.

The more I thought about this, the more it irked me. It’s the pea underneath the hundreds of Cameronian mattresses that prevents me from getting a good night’s sleep—and how I wanted to sleep, sitting through the three hundred straight hours of this interminable movie. It leads to other problems. So, the reason humans have returned to Pandora for Film 2 is no longer to mine floaty unobtainium, but to hunt the whales, or the alien whale equivalents, which they do ruthlessly and cruelly, even though they know the ET-whales are highly intelligent, sensitive and emotional beings. The reason for the hunting is that the spacewhales produce an amber liquid inside their giant brains that, we are vouchsafed in a gobsmacking aside, reverses human aging.

This means that Earth has (a) the technology to keep our bodies endlessly young, and (b) the technology, as per Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon books, to download human consciousness and then upload it into new bodies, combined with (c) the ability to grow cloned bodies so close to the original that they generate their own sperm and, one presumes, eggs. Add these together and Earth has solved death and created immortality. That’s the story, right there. If there’s something ‘in’ the spacewhale’s brainjuice that reverses aging, then find out what it is, synthesise it, and give it to everyone, keeping a store of cloned bodies and downloaded consciousnesses to cover occasional deaths by accident and so on: everyone’s immortal. Why are we piddling around in these lagoons spearing sushi with a stick? We’re gods now!

This, though it seems to me a major worldbuilding hole, doesn’t irritate me so much as the voice thing.