Avatar: The Way of Water is everything James Cameron wants movies to be

Then came the second hour, and then the third: each with very big, very different “Never bet against James Cameron” energy. Most distinctive and most essential is the stunning middle act, set in the island world of a reef clan led by Ronal (Kate Winslet) and Tonowari (Cliff Curtis). The joy of the first Avatar was the joy of discovery — the characters’ discoveries as well as the audience’s — and the scenes of Jake and Neytiri’s forest-dwelling family learning to adapt to marine life are full of a kind of joy that it seems Hollywood blockbusters have all but forgotten: that of seeing something unprecedented and wondrous.

At times this middle act is strikingly evocative of a lavish BBC Blue Planet–style oceanographic nature documentary — or, perhaps, a quasi-documentary like the Jon Favreau–produced Prehistoric Planet, with David Attenborough bringing his customary narratorial gravitas to vignettes in the lives of CGI dinosaurs. Those dinosaurs, of course, owed as much as possible to the most current paleontology, while the fantastic species and undersea formations in The Way of Water are entirely imaginary. Yet, between the film’s boundary-pushing visual virtuosity and Cameron’s enthusiasm for evolutionary biology and marine life in particular, these creatures feel biologically and anatomically persuasive in a way I’m not sure I’ve encountered in any other cinematic fantasy world.

One factor in this persuasiveness has to do with morphological commonalities running through Pandoran life forms. For example, although Pandora’s seas are a brand-new environment to us, it’s no surprise to find six-flippered, plesiosaur-like aquatic creatures ridden by seafaring Na’vi clans — since six limbs is a trait common to many of the land creatures introduced in Avatar, including the horse-like creatures ridden by the forest-dwelling Na’vi. Not only that, the new creature’s four powerful rear flippers are reminiscent of the familiar pterosaur-like creatures’ double wings. This is a biosphere that feels as carefully thought out as the languages of Middle Earth. (The Na’vi language, by contrast, gets short shrift: There’s a bit of subtitled dialogue, but most of the dialogue is in English that we’re meant to understand is “really” Na’vi.)

At the same time, most of the creatures are also obviously reminiscent of real terrestrial species (as suggested by the very terms “horse-like,” “pterosaur-like,” etc.). Thus, for example, the Pandoran seas include both fishlike creatures with vertical tails, bespeaking an entirely aquatic evolutionary history, and also marine mammal–like creatures with horizontal limbs indicative of a history like our cetaceans and pinnipeds: descendants, clearly, of land animals who returned to the sea. Such convergent evolution reminds me of the question that the protagonist of C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet eventually asks himself on Mars after discovering that the boats made by the otter-like hrossa are a lot like terrestrial boats: “What else could a boat be like?”

For some viewers, I understand, all of this boils down to “There are pretty pictures.” Forgive me another Lewis reference, but I immediately think of Lewis’s account in The Abolition of Man of the story of Coleridge at the waterfall, and of the inadequacy of the word pretty for what is more accurately termed sublime. I’m reminded, too, of something that Tolkien wrote in his essay “On Fairy Stories” on the relationship of fantasy to reality. For Tolkien, fantasy offered a defamiliarizing way of re-enchanting reality, of “cleaning our windows” and helping us to see the world anew:

Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood which only the art of making can give. By the forging of Gram cold iron was revealed; by the making of Pegasus horses were ennobled; in the Trees of the Sun and Moon root and stock, flower and fruit are manifested in glory.

A “glorified South America” indeed! Tolkien’s idea of fantasy helping us to see with new eyes resonates with Cameron’s “seeing” motif. “Sky People cannot learn. You do not see,” Neytiri berated Jake in the 2009 movie, adding, in response to Jake’s request that she teach him, “No one can teach you to see.” Cameron sees the natural world, particularly the ocean, and his love of whales and fish and coral and water itself animates the transmuted natural beauty of the Pandoran seas. This is even clearer in the sequel than in the land-based original, which already drew on marine life forms that felt more otherworldly on land than the aquatic species in the new film.

The quasi-documentary quality is part of an overall pattern throughout The Way of Water of recapitulating Cameron’s entire cinematic history, from The Abyss and Titanic to his IMAX submarine documentaries Ghosts of the Abyss and Aliens of the Deep. The first Avatar was the whole Hollywood zeitgeist in one mythology, with distinct echoes of Aliens in particular, from the tough Latina soldier to the mecha suits allowing humans to fight above their weight class. The Way of Water goes deeper into Cameron’s filmography, from a skull-crushing shot evoking the first Terminator to characters scrambling about on the hull of a slowly sinking vessel à la Titanic.

That filmography includes, of course, a lot of large-scale action — and that’s the other thing The Way of Water does superlatively, particularly in the gonzo third hour. It’s melancholy to say it in the era of superhero overload, but lucid, thrilling action is vanishingly rare in Hollywood “action movies” today. A single underwater sequence, with the children trying to evade pursuers in micro-submarines, is masterfully orchestrated and gripping in a way dwarfing anything the Marvel Cinematic Universe has put onscreen in at least the last five years. In fact, other than Tom Cruise’s last two extravaganzas (Top Gun: Maverick and Mission: Impossible – Fallout), I can’t think of a single Hollywood action movie in the last five years with set pieces that hold a candle to The Way of Water.

There’s more to unpack, from developing religious themes (e.g., intercessory prayer to the planetary goddess Eywa, discouraged by Neytiri in the original movie, but recurring in this one) to complexities of Na’vi culture that emerge in the interaction of different tribes (turns out even Noble Savages are capable of bullying and racism) to the centrality of family and competing models of masculinity represented by the swaggering, domineering Quaritch and the responsible, protective father Jake. If Cameron goes on to make the additional sequels he wants, these themes may eventually develop into a pop mythology worth talking about — for good, for ill, or both — along with the likes of Star Wars and the MCU. In the meantime, Cameron’s matchless track record of creating must-see big-screen spectacle continues. If it takes another 13 years to return to Pandora again, I’ll be here for it.