How The Way Of Water answers criticisms of the first Avatar
Unobtanium? Dances With Wolves comparisons? The Trinity syndrome? James Cameron seems to address those concerns, and more, with his new sequel
Film Features Avatar
Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for Avatar: The Way Of Water.
“Unobtainium.” To critics of the original Avatar, that word is tantamount to “checkmate.” It’s a surefire argument winner; how could a guy as supposedly smart as James Cameron exert so little effort in naming a made-up mineral? Sure, unobtainium may be a real concept, akin to a widget or saying “mineral TBD,” but couldn’t Cameron have come up with a more impressive sounding name?
Good news haters: he almost certainly heard you. Unobtainium is mentioned nowhere during the entire run time of Avatar: The Way Of Water. It still exists—it’s the reason the floating mountains float, after all. But the greedheads of the RDA now have different goals than mere mineral rights. First, the military is here to build permanent homes for folks escaping the dying planet Earth. And second, private profiteers are here to harvest the seas, killing intelligent, whale-like Tulkuns to extract a substance called amaretum from their heads. This amber-like gel, we’re told, can stop human aging—not that that will help if the planet’s about to go boom. But humans being humans, we tend to think short-term, as whale-killing also proves.
Short-term thinking also explains the most tedious criticism of the first film: that it’s just Dances With Wolves in space, complete with all the problematic “going native” and “white savior” aspects of the narrative. Put aside for a moment the fact that Cameron’s actual credited inspiration is Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter Of Mars novels, which line up much more closely with the Avatar story and predate Kevin Costner’s Western by more than 75 years.
The Dances comparisons seem simply based on the fact that both involve a military man “going native,” or eschewing their former culture and assimilating to a new one while retaining all the privileges of their former status. It often goes hand in hand with the “white savior” trope, where a white person muscles their way into another culture and “fixes” everything.
In Dances With Wolves, Kevin Costner plays a Union soldier during the Civil War who transfers to a station on the Western frontier and falls for a white woman raised Sioux by the tribe’s medicine man. He eventually leaves his position in the Army to live with the Sioux, though in the end, he doesn’t save them—he’s actually a liability, and he goes off to live on his own outside of the Army and the Sioux.
There’s another complication, as Jake Sully isn’t merely a human Marine assimilating into a new culture, but one taking on a new body altogether. In The Way Of Water, Cameron subtly addresses the Dances With Wolves element as he shows us what an actual white person who has spent significant time with the Na’vi looks like on Pandora, in the form of Spider (Jack Champion). A human child unable to travel home, Spider grows up among Na’vi children because he has nobody else to play with. And while he certainly learns Tarzan-like skills, he’s not better than the locals at anything. He does, however, navigate the jungle better than most humans, as most kids who grow up learning a skill will do better than adults starting later in life.
So what about the “white savior” narrative? Burroughs and Tarzan suggest such influences, obviously, with Tarzan the classic example of a white kid growing up in the jungle to become superior to the locals at everything. But it’s less that than it is a pure “savior” narrative—the term “avatar” as originally coined in Sanskrit refers to a god incarnated in flesh. The humans in this story, who name their cloned bodies avatars, are pointedly playing god, with all the hubris that implies. And like a prophesied Messiah, fully human and fully divine, they come off as both Na’vi and “sky person” at once. Yet there’s an actual deity in play too: the planetary consciousness Eywa, who essentially baptizes Jake Sully as a savior with the Woodsprite seeds, long before he’s capable of being one.
The white savior criticism suggests that a white protagonist comes into a native population and becomes better than them at everything. A corollary, the Trinity syndrome, named for The Matrix, suggests an expert local woman will train him only to have him become inexplicably better than her, and her subservient to him as a love interest, never again being as badass as she is in her opening scene. Superficially, Avatar feels like it might fit easily into those categories.
The way The Way Of Water undercuts this is to suggest that Jake isn’t so special after all. He became great in the first one because he was the first human in an avatar body to have military training, something the program had eschewed, but couldn’t avoid once Jake’s more intellectual twin brother died, and only Jake could replace him. The combination of Earth and Na’vi military training made him the most adaptable warrior, but there’s a third factor, too: as far as we can tell, avatar pilots don’t die if their avatar bodies do. Thus, when Jake takes a leap of faith onto the back of the mighty Toruk, he can afford to be more reckless than any Na’vi would. If it doesn’t work, he’ll still at least be alive.
The Way Of Water shows what happens when humans with even better military experience than Jake take avatar bodies. Arch-villain Quaritch (Stephen Lang) tames a Banshee much more quickly than Jake did, and he hasn’t even had any Na’vi training. The only major disadvantage he has is that his team doesn’t know the terrain as well as the Sully kids. Aside from that, as a hybrid human/Na’vi with the abilities of both, a Recom—which Jake technically is now too, perma-bonded in the blue body—is going to be superior to either. Jake may have seemed like a savior because he was the only one last time, but now there’s a whole gang of them, and as saviors go, they’re more like Negan’s gang of that same name in The Walking Dead.
As for Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) being Trinity, both films take pains to keep her equal—recall that she saved Jake, in the end, last time. Now a mother of four, she responds a bit differently and more emotionally in the sequel, but when the time comes, she and Jake save their kids equally … only to both need their kids to save them in the end. Plus she’s philosophically vindicated: as great as it is that they made new allies among the Mekkayina, she was right all along that they couldn’t avoid the fight and shouldn’t run. Meanwhile, it seems Eywa has baptized a new chosen one in the form of Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), so maybe Jake was never the real savior after all—just the guy chosen to help raise the one coming after. Jake the Baptist, as it were.
Not everyone may agree that these are adequate responses to criticisms, of course—James Cameron has lately, and correctly, been dragged for some older tone-deaf remarks he’d made in the course of some well-intentioned activism. It’s clear, however, that his story is playing a long game, and in the end, some of the plot points may not be what they first seemed.
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Not everyone may agree that these are adequate responses to criticisms,
of course—James Cameron has lately, and correctly, been dragged for some older tone-deaf remarks
he’d made in the course of some well-intentioned activism. It’s clear,
however, that his story is playing a long game, and in the end, some of
the plot points may not be what they first seemed.
It feels somewhat unique in that previous concerns are being addressed at all. The director/producer being invested like this is a good sign after all else is considered.
There are few things more painful than reading AV Club’s takes on dealing with ‘problematic’ issues.
Lazy ass script writing is lazy ass script writing.
I don’t know if I’d call it lazy. “Not that good” is what I would call it. I’m sure Cameron put a lot of effort into it but the results where just surface level when it comes to any real meaning. He sure knows spectacle, but maybe he should get someone else to help him with substance.
The script does not appear to be where he put his effort.
Short-term thinking also explains the most tedious criticism of the first film: that it’s just Dances With Wolves in space, complete with all the problematic “going native” and “white savior” aspects of the narrative. Put aside for a moment the fact that Cameron’s actual credited inspiration is Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter Of Mars novels, which line up much more closely with the Avatar story and predate Kevin Costner’s Western by more than 75 years.And which are just as if not more white savour-y.
“white savour-y”You mean like a good alfredo?
It is so hard to find good alfredo. Somehow, pasta is everywhere, but most of it is really mediocre…
Good alfredo requires good ingredients. Sure, you can just get the same old, store-bought pasta and open up a can of pre-made alfredo sauce, but it’s not the same as fresh ingredients. The result will taste generally like alfredo should, but it will be missing something. It will be a little bland and forgettable, no matter what kind of bright, shiny packaging it came in.
Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh right, the Avatar sequel. I’m sure it’s great!
Apparently authentic Alfredo doesn’t have any cream or anything like that. https://devourtours.com/blog/fettuccine-alfredo/?cnt=USDear GOD I want to try that. (My wife’s a chef, maybe I’ll ask her.)
or a spicy Dejah Thoris
or a spicy Dejah Thoris?
Maybe I was hungry when I wrote this, maybe I wasn’t. Who can say?
A good alfredo doesn’t actually have any cream in it, just cheese, butter and pasta water.
Yeah arguing that it’s not a white savior movie because it’s not based on a 30 year old white savior movie but even older white savior material is not the winning argument that Luke seems to think it is.
That’s kind of like Cameron denying Avatar’s lack of cultural impact, without disputing that no one remembers the names of any of the characters or what exactly the plot was.
Look just because you don’t remember Jack Skully doesn’t mean you don’t write Jack Skully/Spock slashfic.It was Jack Skully, right? Or Martin Blando? Something like that, anyhow.
I’m going to have to take your word for it. That movie was like a temporary lobotomy. Pretty, though.
Hey, I remember the plot for Fern Gully. So I basically remember the plot for Avatar.
Oh yeah! Thanks.
The “Avatar has no cultural impact” meme suspiscously sound like it was created by the ‘anti-woke’ crowd to counter the criticisms about its white savior elements. After all, how can you discuss the cultural aspects of a movie with no influence on culture, according to MAGA chud logic.
That seems like a lot of work to accomplish something that seemingly took care of itself. I’m not part of the anti-woke crowd (well, most of the time. Performative outrage does get old) and managed to find the movie forgettable all by myself.
It’s entirely possible that the anti-woke crowd arrived at the same conclusion as woke people because Avatar in fact left no lasting cultural impact.
Now now, Avatar steals from a lot more stuff than just Tarzan and Dances with Wolves. Google “Call me Joe” some time.If you steal from enough things something something…. its amazing!
It’s not like stealing from older properties is even a bad thing, you just have to do it well enough that nobody cares it’s stolen.That’s not what happened with Avatar.
It’ll be interesting to see how Cameron continues to develop Spider. He’s basically set the kid up to be somewhat like Natty Bumppo (AKA Hawkeye) in the Leatherstocking Tales—a white child adopted by indigenous people who lives in both cultures.
Also the article suggests Jake isn’t a white savior because it’s actually his daughter…who you’ll recall is this person reborn in a Na’vi body.
Yeah, I also thought it was weird that the counterpoint to “Dances With Wolves” in space was Edgar Rice Burroughs. Like, literally the only things ERB did of any note whatsoever were a “going native” narrative and a “white savior” narrative.
“December has provided James Cameron with the unexpected boon of invoking Avatar in the same conversations as Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens, if only to remind everyone that his Dances With Wolves companion piece still holds the record for highest-grossing film of all time.”
https://www.avclub.com/james-cameron-reminds-everyone-he-s-still-working-on-th-1798287522
“But apparently Cameron—who’s plotting four sequels to Avatar, his sci-fi-infused Dances With Wolves retelling—thinks “there are other stories to tell besides hyper-gonadal males without families doing death-defying things for two hours and wrecking cities in the process.” https://www.avclub.com/james-cameron-hopes-avengers-fatigue-sets-in-soon-be-1825467259“Avatar, after all, is a Dances With Wolves riff about giant blue shamanistic aliens on a magical psychedelic forest moon and the humans who go to war against them to mine something called unobtanium.”
https://www.avclub.com/avatar-a-strange-dream-that-became-the-biggest-movie-o-1846631100
And so the second act of The Way Of Water picks up where the former installment’s Dances With Wolves-adjacent plot ends, with the Sullys traveling across picturesque mountains, isles, and high seas to foreign lands they haven’t known before.
https://www.avclub.com/avatar-the-way-of-water-film-review-james-cameron-1849882442
I laughed out loud at using Edgar Rice Burroughs as a defense against the white savior narrative. Wither the author is straight up trolling or it’s a massive self own.
To be fair, John Carter, Dances w/Wolves, and Avatar are ALL three about a military man later ‘going native’.I’m okay with thinking that Dances with Wolves was inspired by A Princess of Mars, lol.
Cameron says Way of Water needs to make 2 billion to break even, and the reason is all the money spent paying for these articles.
Sure. Keep running these PR-vetted, bottom-feeding attempts at criticism, AVClub. Watch what happens to your visitation metrics. You think they can’t get any lower? Ha.
James Cameron taking criticism of any kind to heart? HA
I’m old, so I actually read the covers off of the John Carter books as a kid. Avatar didn’t resemble them in the slightest. In fact, a straight up adaptation, cultural issues and all would have been far better than what we got.
Abstractly they are similar, and inspiration here is meant that way I think.
Weirdly, the really old story about the Confederate soldier is way less paternalistic and racist than all of its modern children.
I guess I’m in the minority, but I thought the John Carter movie we got was really good, in spite of the title character being horrifically miscast.I also liked the Tarzan movie that came out around the same time.
I liked that movie, too, with the same caveat. It was about a million times better than Avatar.
John Carter is a perfectly fun movie that suffered from the dullest title of all time when it came to release.
Yes. This is when Disney decided that people simply hated movies about Mars, so it couldn’t be in the title.
And a dull trailer… and a dull leading man. In the movie’s defense, I’ve never seen it, but it wasn’t just the title that was dull. In fact, I knew that the title omitted “from Mars,” and I still had no desire to see it.
I thought it was pretty dull. Lots of good visuals, but the characters and narrative were just inert. By the end of the movie I didn’t care what happened to any of them, and I usually find something to like in big schlocky action movies.
It’s also way too fucking long, has a mostly pointless framing sequence and my god the language in it is impenetrable at times.
the problem with the first avatar being dances with wolves wasn’t necessarily just about the political undertones, but rather being a hackjob of cliches from movies such as dances with wolves
I would really like to know cleanly and clearly one way or another if any money exchanged hands to lead to these articles as my goodness this reads like a shill piece.
And I’ll say it again:
What is so suspicious about a pop culture website running pieces on the sequel to the biggest film of all time? Does this really confound your comprehension?
It’s not unusual for them to write articles about the film, nor is it even that weird for the insanely positive reviews (that are out of step with the consensus. But this article in particular does not read like it has journalistic origins. It’s a point-by-labored-point attempt to refute all of the legit criticisms of the first film that clearly did not make any attempt at balance, and that also conveniently doesn’t mention any of the problematic aspects of the sequel.
The site can be fans of the film, but it shouldn’t be acting like its attorney.This is weird as hell.
Weirdly, the tone of drooling positivity wouldn’t bother me if it were for some obscure piece of media with a limited fanbase that most people have never heard of. I honestly enjoy reading articles like, “The world once again has a reason to go on spinning, now that the next volume of [random indie comic based on a boardgame inspired by a fanfic of a TV show] has been released! As a society, we’ve all been on the edge of our seats waiting for the next instalment of this universally adored piece of media! And it’s UTTER PERFECTION!”That just strikes me as adorable geeky enthusiasm, even if (because) it’s blatantly false.Somehow, the fact that everyone actually did watch the first Avatar makes it ring false that everybody’s been waiting with bated breath to see the next one. Even though logically, that should be true.
I agree with your general distinction between obscure and inescapable media, but I think I’d probably find any article whitesplaining that the legitimate criticisms indigenous people and others had about the retrograde portrayals of indigenous cultures in some media were off-base or totally taken care of now, you guys.
Good point, I agree totally! Probably a bad choice of article for me to make my point on. The one which breathlessly described the film as a masterpiece was probably the spot for that.
100%
You said it a lot better than I did. Thank you.
This article is carrying more water for the movie than fucking movie ITSELF. It feels suspicious.
There’s a sequel to Gone with the Wind coming out?
That’s a pretty severe allegation to make. Also totally unnecessary, given this content is basically rage-bait that likely gooses some engagement metric.
Meanwhile, it seems Eywa has baptized a new chosen one in the form of
Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), so maybe Jake was never the real savior after
all—just the guy chosen to help raise the one coming after.“It’s not a white savior trope because Jake’s not the hero…” isn’t a great argument when the follow up is “because he’s raising the actual white savior.”
answers criticismsAlways and universally a bad idea for any piece of entertainment to try to do. There are two appropriate responses to criticism:
1) recognize that it is an invalid criticism (if it is) and ignore it
2) accept it as a valid criticism (if it is) and learn from itThe mentality that says “I really need to answer that” is inherently tied to either an oversensitive ego or a misunderstanding of the criticism or, in most such cases, both. To paraphrase Sterling Archer: “Do you want Kanye West? Because this is how you get Kanye West.”
“Unobtainium is mentioned nowhere during the entire run time of Avatar: The Way Of Water”
It’s replaced by “immortaly whale brain juice”, and I’m not sure if your think that’s any better…
I never got the unobtanium backlash anyway – it’s a nickname used offhandedly by the Marines, who don’t care why they’re on Pandora. They just want to kick ass.
It’s objectively stupid, but no more so than a lot of the other worldbuilding.
Unobtanium is also a real scientific term from the late 1950s as I’m sure I’m easily well past the hundreth plus person to point out since 2009.
It’s a real scientific term but it’s not the name of a real, stable, existing, minable element.
Yeah I agree. I don’t really like Avatar very much but criticisms of the use of the word unobtanium seemed to me to reflect more on the ignorance of the critic. Especially after the explanations regarding the real use of the term came out. It makes perfect sense and is clearly not about Cameron being lazy or whatever. Again, I don’t really like Avatar and have only seen it once.
I always thought it was funny that people were essentially saying “James Cameron, the man behind several of the greatest SF movies of all time, and who has put a colossal amount of intense work into every movie he’s ever made… is lazy.”
Pretty sure both Ribisi’s and Weaver’s character – business and science – call it Unotbainium and nobody ever calls it anything else.
It’s pretty obvious how it happened – the writers looked at the periodic table, saw “Unobtainium” – which is used as a placeholder name for elements created in a participle accelerator that don’t have a name yet – and just didn’t bother to research the facts. Being that those elements are not stable, don’t exit in nature an eventually do get a proper name.
It’s obvious the term is used because Cameron is a science nerd, and the gawking about it reads the same as people mocking Jurassic Park for claiming the Earth is older than 6000 years.
I think you can pretty much give Cameron the benefit of the doubt that he isn’t an idiot and read it more as a story writing joke.Or a joke by the scientists in this world – they’re not always serious in the real one either as moronic acid and the Sonic Hedgehog gene.I laughed when I heard it. Whatever other issues I had with the movie, that one wasn’t it.
“Participle accelerator”Very on-point typo here.
Pandora, the McGuffin planet.
I guess I get the criticism of white savior, but I can’t help but think it’s a little silly in the case of a crazy movie like Avatar. I feel like that’s a term to be reserved for really egregious shit like The Blind Side.
I love that at the same time AV Club published this PR piece going to bat for Avatar 2, Gizmodo was publishing an analysis that tears down pretty much every argument in the article above. https://gizmodo.com/avatar-2-is-white-mans-fantasy-of-indigenous-resistance-1849918761
The Gizmodo/Grist piece was quite a bit better than this trash.
Lol “tears down”, I think you mean “interprets everything in the worst light possible.” It’s sad that you think this is real criticism.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with two sister blogs with different editorial teams coming to different conclusions; in fact it’s a lot more refreshing than when we get three articles from three blogs about the same thing, written in the same tone, and arriving at the same conclusion. But I wish they would call each other out. Get real catty about it. Pass out popcorn to the commenters. It would be great.
If dead people can be brought back in Na’vi bodies, why didn’t they just do that with Jake’s brother in the first place? There, I broke Avatar.
Good point. There could be an explanation. He didn’t do the ‘brain backup’ that Quaritch did. Why? Maybe the tech didn’t exist when he left earth. Takes roughly six light years to reach Pandora, although if traveling at relativistic speeds it would feel like less. And there is at least a decade gap between the first Avatar and the events of this one so conceivable it’s a 20 year difference between the time Jake’s brother died and Quaritch was reincarnated.
Although Quaritch’s brainscan was taken just before the final battle in the first movie, so what – six months after Jake arrived or something like that? It wouldn’t have been new tech unless the update arrived on the same ship that Jake did!
Either way, whatever – if they have the tech to put people’s consciousness into a different body wirelessly, I’m fine with the idea that they could keep a copy of that consciousness for backup. Two possible ideas for why they hadn’t done it with Jakes’ brother: 1) it’s cheaper to just have his identical twin do it; 2) the company might have been perfectly happy having someone they perceived they could better control.
I thought this was a very well-reasoned article, but snarky above-it-all AV Club commenters are clearly set in their ways.
You must have started with the same conclusions as Cameron’s PR guy.
Have you actually READ the John Carter novels? They’re nothing like Avatar. Like, at all.The John Carter novels are basically reverse Superman. A human from Earth travels to Mars, where he is the only human and, because Mars has lower gravity, is more muscular and powerful than all of the natives. The central theme is that humans are inherently better than the natives, which is kind of the direct opposite of Avatar, no?
Yeah, the truth is that Avatar rips off a shitload of lousy films and books that themselves ripped off the Burroughs novels but added lots of really stupid colonial paternalism.
Nothing could possibly be further from being a white savior story than John Carter, am I right fellas?
I’ve noticed there is a certain kind of internet person that is probably over-represented in the comments here. I guess you could just call it a negativity bias. Over the last decade people who didn’t like the first Avatar had all those feelings justified and fed off of by other internet people who shared those opinions until it pretty much became the baseline opinion among these communities. Now we have a new Avatar and another chance for people with superiority complexes to call out how “bad” the movie is and how “dumb” audiences are for liking it. I know it is not as simple as “popular thing bad” because there are a lot of very legit criticisms to be made of Avatar. But I think the movie’s overwhelming popularity made the reaction against it so strong that these people now are completely unwilling to acknowledge the many things about Avatar that actually kinda rule. Any attempt to reasonably account for why so many people enjoy these movies is immediately accused of “shilling.” Like it’s so unbelievable that James Cameron, director of Aliens, T2, and fucking Titanic, could make a really entertaining action movie. I understand that it is annoying to feel like something you don’t particularly like is the most popular thing ever made… but that’s just life. Get over it. Watch it or watch something else. You don’t need to prove to anyone why your taste in entertainment is better. So the big expensive sci fi movie is dumb. You know what else is dumb? Probably everything you ever liked as a kid. Would you enjoy someone lecturing you about why A New Hope is dumb? Does dumb=bad? I am sincerely asking, because for me the answer is obviously “no.” Maybe for you the answer is “yes,” in which case you should probably think about the kinds of media you seek out and comment on.
*Weird Elon Avatar fans meme*
Very good description of most of the posters here.
Less quotes, more line breaks. Mocking the highs and lows of pop culture is inherently fun. No need to gatekeep.
Putting that English degree to “good use,” I see. Sorry if I gatekept anyone with my opinion that avatar is a flawed and very fun movie. I hope it is some small comfort to you that the vast majority of this comment section is gormlessly repeating the same 3 critiques about avatar we all heard 10 years ago. That’s inherently fun, I’m told.
Yeah, haters. If a sequel retroactively gives the first movie slightly more depth 13 years later, then all of your accurate criticisms of the original were just short-term thinking. You morons. You absolute dumb bastards.
Now we know what happened to the Feral Kid.
I mean my criticism of the first movie was that the story was was so bland I’d forgotten most of the plot before I’d even left the cinema . Looked great in 3D though.
Let’s not forget the most important thing, Jake Sully is a Feliz Na’vi Dad
uhh alright then, how about Kate Winslet (and many other characters played by white actors) doing these “native” accents? Still felt heap big uncomfortable to me
Yeah I noted how it seemed that Neytiri had a lot more emotional responses in the sequel compared to the original.In the first one she only cries when she loses her father and Hometree in the attack on the latter.The sequel has more than one overly emotional reaction that she wouldn’t have had, or at least seems like she wouldn’t have had, in the first.The first movie portrayed her as a more stoic warrior type. It felt a lot more like her role in the sequel was amped up to be more like the emotional mother/wife character trope. Jake even, at one point, feels he has to apologize to the Metkayina for her emotional behavior.
I always thought Trinity was a total badass all the way through. Shooting agents point blank in head, negotiating Neos return in Revolutions with the Merovingian using mutually assured destruction as a bargining chip. Neo only got better than her as he was designed to get better. Yeah yeah she fell in love (as did Neo) but how did that make her weak?
My criticism of the first Avatar is simple: it is one of the worst written, most cliched, so utterly predictable with its hoary plot that I could only suffer through it once. Such an awful, awful movie. Three hours+ long means I won’t bother with this animation exercise.
“This white dude with dreads is definitive proof that Avatar isn’t a Dances with Wolves ripoff!”Good lord, the only difference between an AV Club article and some random reddit post these days is the masthead.
I don’t think Eywa would choose for Pandora to have only one savior. Kiri and her mysterious origin will turn out to be stronger than Jake… in Part 4?