In the “Avatar” sequel, James Cameron’s contradictory instincts—on the one hand, a vegan who enjoys plumbing the mysteries of the deep, and on the other a hard-core weapons guy and tech fetishist—are on full display.
Another blue movie. Thirteen years after “Avatar,” we have a sequel. The director, as before, is James Cameron, who has promised further installments. The new film is subtitled “The Way of Water,” which sounds like the memoir of a celebrity urologist. Once again, the center of operations is a moon called Pandora, whose inhabitants, the Na’vi, have azure skin, luminescent freckles, and magic ponytails that they plug into plants and animals.
These early scenes of destruction recall the nuclear inferno that Cameron dramatized in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” , and they verify the strange—one might say pathological—contradictions in his instincts. On the one hand, we have Cameron the vegan, as green as the Na’vi are blue, who likes nothing better than to plumb the mysteries of the deep in a submersible.
Life by the shore is a shock. The local Na’vi are of a turquoise tint, with thick and finny tails, and they can swim as smoothly as they can run. Think of them as Na’vi seals.
There is a poem by William Empson, “This Last Pain,” in which the poet imagines that we could “learn a style from a despair.” Useful advice, I have always found, and it certainly comes to mind, crystallized in the glint of minor gestures, whenever Bill Nighy appears onscreen. His manners—the fidgety languor, the politesse, the way that he delivers a line of dialogue as if trying to cross a busy road—would be mannerisms, were it not for the pressure of feeling that gathers behind them.
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