Avatar: The Way of Water

In the wake of the events of the first film, which ended with the expulsion of humanity from the planet of Pandora, Jake Sully and Ney'tiri have made a family. Unfortunately, when the humans return with new plans to retake the resource-rich planet, they must take their family and leave their home, hoping to hide amongst the Na’vi along one of Pandora’s coastlines. Those hopes are soon dashed, as the human invaders continue to hunt them, bringing their war with them.

On paper, Avatar should be right up my alley.

It’s fun sci-fi goodness, and I love Cameron, but… it’s also overly-long, bombastic, melodramatic nonsense, all coming out of the dumbest-looking cartoon faces, saying shit that Cameron honestly seems to believe is a profound message within a clever metaphor. This isn’t usually a deal-breaker for me, I watch genre silliness all the time, even the bombastic self-serious bullshit, so it’s not a matter of being too ridiculous, or too po-faced, or even with my being able to connect with animated characters.

I just... don’t like it.

And in Avatar’s defense… it’s 100% sincere, and it treats its subject matter and its setting seriously, which I appreciate, and it’s nice to see a creator indulge their vision, so that’s cool too. It’s not that the film is bad, at least not overly or inexcusably, this is mostly just me, and my own personal preferences. Mostly.

I just hate the Na’vi’s stupid faces.

Also, the cliched “native” accents and speech patterns of the Na’vi bother me. Plus, Jake Sully’s children also speak English in somewhat of an AAVE accent. This is to be expected, of course, because Avatar is a shitty white savior narrative created by an old rich hippy-ish white guy, and so his depictions of native cultures, especially alien ones, is pretty unavoidably going to be set in some racist cliches. And to be fair, this isn’t always a deal breaker for me either. I mean, I live in America. I grew up on Hollywood movies. I'm a huge Star Wars fan. If there’s one thing that we have plenty of here, it’s shitty white savior narratives in all their various and sundry packaging. But the thing that sticks in my craw with Avatar specifically is that it’s a wholly made-up idea, an idea centered on a wholly made-up alien culture, and there's only two cultures–human and Na'vi–so it's not like it has to differentiate itself from a bunch of alien cultures either. It's just one alien culture, and yet, it’s up there on screen basically going: “Me Big Chief Wampum!”

What the fuck is that racist-ass bullshit?

Why do the Na’vi do the haka? Why does Jake say “sky people” when he’s actually from Earth? Yes, there are story-reasons, just like there are story reasons for why Kiri doesn’t speak with the same accent or speech patterns as the other Na’vi, or even like her brothers, despite her being raised in the same environment as them (because she has an "educated" white lady soul in her), and that's the whole thing… if you spend a little time examining those reasons, breaking them down a little and following where they lead, they turn pretty shitty pretty quickly. That’s the whole issue here, that these are all specific choices that were deliberately made by a white guy because “that’s how natives are.”

Yes, Cameron seems like a nice and sincere guy with good intentions, so the sharper implications to these decisions were probably unintentional, although I would be willing to bet that, mostly likely, if he did hear any of these objections during production, he probably rationalized them away with the usual kind of oh-so-reasonable “I’m not a racist, but…” justifications, which were then backed up by his ready and willing Yes Men, but that doesn't matter, because just like always, the truth is plainly apparent… the depictions of the Na'vi in these movies belongs in the same category with all the other racist portrayals of indigenous people and cultures by Hollywood.

And that sucks.

Then there’s Spider, the white kid with blonde dreadlocks…

In the end, there’s just a too strong and too fundamental layer of White Centering here to be avoided. Even if I didn’t want to root for the humans for no other reason than I hate the Na’vi’s stupid faces, I still wouldn’t be able to gel with this film, no matter how cool the effects are. It’s just too much like I’m watching some Disney cartoon from the 1950s about Native Americans.

But...

All that having been said, despite all of this, and with the full acknowledgement that I was maybe never going to be too into this film anyway, I’m also not calling it terrible. It’s fine, and it looks amazing, the effects truly are incredible, but the fact that they’re in service to a mostly mediocre and obvious story, that is based on some really shitty, and pretty racist, narrative choices is a deal-breaker for me.

Thumbs way, way down.