The action of the new movie takes place almost 15 years after the events of the first movie. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a former Marine who defended Pandora, is now the leader of the Na’vi people. With him is not only his beloved wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), but also four children: three relatives, as well as an adopted daughter Kiri, born to the hero Sigourney Weaver (who also voices her on-screen daughter in the second film , The Weaver).
Suddenly, the peaceful life of the Na’vi is threatened. Earthly businessmen-capitalists (they are beautifully called “heavenly people” in the picture) are again preparing an attack on Pandora. But this time, not for the sake of incredible local benefits, but simply out of the desire to turn it into his own colony.
The group is led by Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang). He died from Neytiri’s arrows in the first episode, but Cameron found a simple way to “resurrect” his beloved villain – it turns out that during his lifetime his consciousness was drained into a special disk that was implanted after death. avatar. Fleeing the persecution of the colonel and his bandit gang, the entire Sally family goes to the archipelago of a thousand islands, where the Metkayina clan lives (played by the leader’s wife, the unknown Kate Winslet), despite internal conflicts. Ready to protect the intruders and join forces to face the Quaritch army.
No other sequel in the world seems to have waited as long as the sequel to Avatar, a picture that broke several historical records at once. The most expensive movie ever (this title was briefly canceled by the last Avengers, but re-releases gave Avatar the crown back), the movie with the highest percentage of CGI usage (before the release of the new Lion King and The Jungle Book), and of course a project that truly revolutionized the world of special effects.
Despite the extraordinary success first “Avatar”Cameron was in no rush to release the long-awaited sequel. A director known for his meticulousness (he has made several documentaries, notably about the Titanic, where he has tried to analyze alternative options for saving passengers, and has recently raised the nestWith the help of a forensic scientist and stuntmen, he took a long hiatus and began developing three sequels in parallel at once, in which Leo DiCaprio’s portrayal of Jack proved to be doomed. At the same time, he and his team were working on improving the visual technology to make all subsequent Avatars even bigger and more amazing.
So, has Cameron finally achieved the desired technological progress in these 13 years? Even when watching a movie in IMAX 3D, no revolution is felt on the screen. Talking about the technical achievements while working on the second film, the director himself reports that he has developed his own Fusion Camera System to work exclusively with the 3D format. But this is where the promised technical progress ends.
The second “Avatar” actually looks the same as the first, except that it has even more effects than computer games: aggressive zooming, sharp angle change, blur effect. But we’ve seen it more than once on the big screen, so nothing to be surprised about here.
Avatar: The Path of Water is roughly three-and-a-half hours long, with a third devoted to disputes between Sally and the Metkayina clan, the second set underwater (in Cameron’s favorite element) – and it’s a truly fascinating sight. and nearly all of the last hour was spent on the final battle, the scale of which Aquaman writers would envy.
But the scenario of the tape where the ocean is an additional protagonist of the story, and he himself is 70 percent water. Pursuing vivid visual images, Cameron was completely indifferent to the plot of the sequel. The first film was also hardly praised for its strong script, but at least it was well developed, and the second emerged, albeit on the surface, a banal but important thought about the invaluable earth and planet. We don’t have and we never will. It was a poetic tribute to humanism, the ecological lifestyle, and empathy for all living things. It’s not original, but it’s a self-sufficient foundation for the film, where the audience’s heart is nonetheless stolen not by the text but by its visual editing.
In The Way of the Water, Cameron perceives the script as just a screen, a green background on which to draw all the special effects. Here, the primitive faceless confrontation between good and evil, the stereotypical dialogues and a complete lack of humor, without which the film would suffocate in its own stuffiness and hypersensitivity.
The director is more interested in the unlimited beauty of their outer environment than the inner worlds of the characters. The old heroes have not changed in any way in the last 15 years, and the new ones have nothing to open and prove themselves.
As a result, Cameron, who has always been not only a director but also a true artist, remains one of the best visualizers on the planet, capable of creating fantastic worlds on a universal scale. The second “Avatar” is a worthy successor to the older brother in the visual component, but falls short of even his most superficial ideas.
Still a grand celebration of visual effects, breathtaking fictional images come to life. But the triumph of painting comes at the expense of meaning. Is this a missed opportunity or a deliberate cold calculation? It seems that even Cameron himself does not care about this.