In the Flesh: Avatar: The Way of Water (Patreon)

“What if indigenous people ultimately won the long, degrading battle of colonialism?” is a pretty repulsive premise for a series of blockbuster films mostly made by and starring white guys, even cloaked in the plausible deniability of a nominally separate science fiction setting. James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water attempts to complicate the original film’s dirt-simple themes, introducing ideas like Jake Sully’s (Sam Worthington) colonization of the Na’vi family unit with his own rough-shod jarhead idea of fatherhood and reintroducing Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) as a “recombinant” Na’vi/human clone with a fraught attachment to his bastard son, but there’s no juice behind these half-assed investigations of ways of thinking and being. Instead the world director James Cameron presents is one in which oft-fetishized and bowdlerized Anglo conceptions of indigenous ideas of harmony with nature and communion with the earth are reimagined as a sort of good and virtuous mirror image of humanity’s rapacious technological imperialism, a path to power as direct and effective as black powder or slave labor, but completely morally unimpeachable. Just plug your head tentacle into the nearest alien whale or coral reef and your superior way of life provides you with unconquerable natural weapons on the spot. Sheesh.

As a movie the whole project is fairly indifferent. It tugs a few heart strings and boasts some truly astonishing visuals, but the script is undercooked and lumpy. Take Kiri’s (Sigourney Weaver) discovery of her unique ability to communicate with Eywa — first we see her suffer a seizure, there’s some brief discussion of epilepsy and/or divine attunement, then suddenly she’s turning giant anemones against human aggressors and summoning little golden fish to guide her family safely out of the wreck of a sinking ship. It’s not that it’s unbelievable stuff within the context of a film about ten-foot-tall blue people who can more or less consensually Grand Theft Auto animals with their cranially-mounted tentacle dicks, it’s that the script doesn’t bother to set it up properly or pace the payoff in a way that draws us into the fiction. There’s a point A and a point B, but no connective tissue. The movie’s at its best when it’s focused on plotless, meandering scenes of the Sully family exploring their new home among the sea-going Na’vi tribes of a remote island chain. Its lengthy underwater sequences are the ultimate “stoned and staring at the jellyfish tank” experience, pure visual pleasure tickling your hindbrain until it unclenches. In that respect it has a definite leg up on the stodginess of its predecessor.

As a longtime Edie Falco fan, it gives me no pleasure to report that she is grievously miscast and/or poorly directed as the hard-nosed General Ardmore, her performance oddly colorless and superficial. The same kind of indifferent acting plagues the entire film, and Stephen Lang’s translation from flesh and blood to CGI is a severe downgrade for the antagonist, who served as the first Avatar’s high water mark. The choice to have Sigourney Weaver voice her own immaculately conceived teenage offspring is also somewhat off-putting, as in spite of her considerable voice acting chops she most definitely does not have the ability to sound like a young girl. Perhaps the dissonance is intentional, meant to highlight the character’s otherworldliness, but it never quite gels. Cliff Curtis makes good use of his big, expressive features in the role of the sea people’s chieftain and Zoe Saldana digs a little bit of complexity out of the Hot-Blooded Native nothingness of Sully family matriarch Neytiri, but by and large even the film’s most exciting moments don’t amount to much more than watching a grown man play with his action figures. Fine way to spend three hours, if you like that sort of thing.