The glorious irony - Cameron's imagination earlier led to the creation of the new visual effects language (and VFX companies like Digital Domain, improving upon the earlier clunky motion capture technology, capturing the live and animation elements in frame and many such), and with the current feature, he took a creative holiday and simply went about his desk job sustaining on the software packages he created before, and subsisting on the fruits from his idea tree he planted long ago. In effect, earlier, he imagination spawned companies, and now, he simply worked for those companies. Buoyed by phenomenal success of "Avatar" worldwide, when he said he didn't want to leave the world of Pandora just yet, not just creatively but commercially too (wanting to employ and redeploy the wonderful digital worlds, technologies, ideas and software tools he created for the express purpose of the movie), announcing that there are lot other plots (water, space et al) on that planet meant for subsequent features, little did one realize that the plots he was talking about was really about real estate and nothing to do with the creative aspect. "The way of water" is by far Cameron's weakest and least creative endeavor in an oeuvre filled with such risk-tasking (The Terminator), mind-bending (The Terminator 2), technology-pushing (The Abyss), imagination-soaring (Avatar) features, among other dazzling eye-poppers like Titanic and Aliens and in the process fails to clear the high imaginative bar he himself set (and set for himself), climbing down from a position where every foray into the feature world of his was an "experience" that the entire world waited with bated breaths to take a dip in, to simply making another effects driven extravaganza that other movie studios keep churning out every other week. Which brings to the fore Tarantino's creative decision to leave the filmdom with just 10 movies, leaving the world begging "why" and not questioning "why not". Oh! how the mighty has fallen.... how the unthinkable has finally happened... James Cameron has finally made a movie that's plain unengaging...
One word sums up 'The way of water' - Rehash, every which way. There's nothing in here that Cameron has already dazzled the world with - plot, effects, worlds, NOTHING. If it is green conservation in the first, it is commercial whaling in this. The writing was so devoid of originality that they had brought back even the same villain character, who was dead, done and dusted in the earlier venture, through the magic of memory imprint/transplant, a move that befits an afternoon soap opera, and has no business being in a Cameron movie. Even the underwater action sequences in the (only and mildly redeeming) climax screams "The Abyss", down to the moon pools, families trying to survice in the ever closing air pockets in submerging vessels, and, HOLY GOD!, the last minute water tentacle (er... fluroscent fish) that swoops in at the last moment to give them breathing space, quite literally, the tulkun creature here taking the place of Non-Terrestrial intelligence in "The Abyss" and the comparisions don't just end there ! Has the writers' room plainly forgotten Cameron's earlier outing with water or was it simply presumed that all that was "water canon" (like superheroes' origin stories) that they could just reuse and repurpose for a new generation? The heart that the first Avatar had, the beauty, the wonder, the enchantment of flying mountains, the amazingly detailed rain forest, the magnificent creatures, the flora and the fauna, the giant Hometree, the eternal spirit that lives on, drew the audience into the magical world, and when greed comes in decimating their lands, the result is not just an action flick, it became an emotional feature.
Sadly, 'the way of water' had all the tools at its disposal but none of the heart of the predecessor. And its now obligatory nod to environmentalism is just a token one here, lacking none of the tug when the mighty Hometree comes crashing down in Avatar. The hard fought/earned victory at the end of the first Avatar doesn't amount to a hill of beans as the setup in this one, when it starts off with a sterile "The sky people simply returned" premise setting the Jake family on the run from them and their forest dwelling to distant waterways, for no other reason than for a change of scenery. And why would the sky people who were beaten black and blue by the Nav'i' in their pursuit of Unobtanium in the first one, send back a ragtag bunch of military washoffs headed by the same commander who was defeated earlier, just for the capture of deserter Jake Sully? The strong "Corporation vs Co-operation" theme that figures prominently in almost all of Cameron's movies finds its weakest footing in "The way of water", which probably explains the constant shifting of focus from family to activism to awe to adventure. And move aside Vin Diesel and his "family" meme from the "Fast and Furious" franchise, that reduced the "for the family" trope to a running joke, "the way of water" has crowned a new champion, Jake Sully! Even the water world that was created for the purpose was nothing to write home about, with "Finding Nemo" or even the "Life of Pi" doing a better job at striking wonder with their translucent, iridescent and fluroscent imagery, than the world of "the way of water" where size seems to have been the only critereon suited up to do the job, with its 'bigger', 'larger', 'more' visuals!
With what is planned as a 5 movie arc, the Avatar world has already threatened to go the way of another ambitious but ultimately muddled "The Matrix" franchise with a middling middle, and with the third feature already in the can and going through the lengthy and tedious post production process for the entirety of next year, one can only hope the writers' room did a better job than "the way of water" instead of leaving everything to the digital wizards and the brand of Cameron to do all the heavy lifting! Again, ironic it is that Jim chose the side of the corporation to rake in his cushy profits this time around!
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