In The Abyss, his first Best Film Ever, James Cameron beautifully visualised intelligent creatures who had developed a subtle deep-sea civilisation based on, in and using the mysterious energetic substance that we have known for millennia as ‘water’ (see: Water: Life in Every Drop). In Avatar, his second Best Film Ever, he populated a tropical rainforest with fabulised forest creatures, indigenous Na’vi resisting a genocidal corporate land-grab, and the imaginative gleanings of coral reefs, such as giant Christmas-tree worms that vanish into their burrows among the trees as you approach.
In The Way of Water, his third Best Film Ever, Cameron returns to the forests of Pandora to pick up the story of the hybrid Na’vi-human family who defeated the ‘sky-people’ in Avatar. The same misty forest of giant trees, ferns, winged and spinning lizards, and the world-tree Eywa whose living mycelium embraces the whole forest and all who live and die within it. The family is deliciously happy, now with three natural children, one adopted daughter (Kiri, from Sigourney Weaver’s character in Avatar) and ‘Spider’ a half-adopted stray human who was left behind on Pandora as a baby when the sky-people were expelled.
Then a new star appears – the deceleration burn of a fleet of returning sky-people. They are coming not just for the rare mineral unobtanium but to settle Pandora as a refuge from the dying Earth. They arrive in characteristic human style, incinerating a swathe of paradise with their exhausts as they land, bulldozing the remnants, and using swarming robots to build a huge bridgehead fortress from which to spread their tendrils of exploitation. The Land of the Carrion Crow is set to replace the Land of Wonders.
Jake resumes his role as war-leader of the Na’vi, making for some spectacular action as a Na’vi war-party ambushes a freight train to loot weapons from the wreckage. It emerges that the invasion fleet has come equipped with a team of US Marines transplanted into Na’vi bodies for the sole purpose of finding and killing Jake. They are even blessed (Semper Fi[delis]!) by a video of the dreadful Colonel Quaritch to whom we had thought Neytiri had put paid in Avatar. Worse, his hideous restored soul now infests the leader of the Marine assassination squad.
In short order the Marines capture Jake’s and Neytiri’s children, including Kiri and Spider (who was sired by Quaritch). Having rescued all but Spider (who enters a sub-plot in which he helps and bonds with his ‘father’ the Quaritch-avatar), Jake realises that his presence endangers his people and decides to take his family far away. Riding winged lizards, they fly out over the ocean and settle among the Metkayina people, who are adapted to a semi-aquatic life with paddle-tails, finned forearms and a prodigious capacity to hold their breaths, aided sometimes by an oxygen-generating nudibranch worn on their backs.
The characters and with them the audience are returned to the home of all life: the ocean. The immersion is total, convincing, and entrancing. Thoroughly tweaked to comply with a different evolutionary heritage, the extraordinary creatures of Earth’s shallow tropical seas are visualised in dense and stunning detail. The intimate relationship between the Matkayina and the marine ecosystem and its inhabitants is explored in just enough detail to inspire, with the riding of flying-fish and plesiosaurs, and whale-like tulkun who are the spirit-siblings of the Matkayina.
The philosophy of the Matkayina is lived out before us. The way of water is one of origin and return, connectedness of all things back to the beginning, of mighty heart-beat and soft but inexorable power. And there is even a world-organism that is the marine outpost of Eywa and the sea of souls, to bind everything together into one sacred biosphere. Kiri reveals her own heritage as the daughter of the scientist who first sensed Eywa, by taking like a fish to the way of water and understanding (‘seeing’) the truth of the world-ocean.
The sky-people are doing their best to mess it all up. They’ve discovered that an oily extract drilled from the brains of freshly-killed tulkun can halt the human ageing process. So they have become whalers, complete with explosive harpoons and factory ships. The Marine squad, depleted by previous encounters with Jake and Neytiri but still led by the Quaritch-avatar, commandeer a whaler to continue their search for Jake. They raid villages to interrogate the natives, shoot their livestock and burn their ‘hooches’ as if they were in Vietnam. Then they start killing tulkun to lure they prey into the open.
The scene – barely imagined and never before filmed – is set for a magnificent showdown between mechanised death-systems controlled by sky-people and Pandoran life-systems cooperating with Jake, Neytiri, their various children and the Matkayina. A tulkun individual who has befriended the family does a particularly wonderful job of dodging explosive harpoons, flattening evildoers, and disposing of an awful Australian whaler in the Captain Ahab style. This is all glorious and riveting, and leads to repeated hair-raising episodes as the people we care about are cuffed to sinking ships, held at knife-point, and almost drowned in dark and foetid air pockets as Cameron channels the Titanic experience, but this time with Eywa helping.
The movie ends with life having triumphed, for now. Most of the Jake-Neytiri family and Matkayina survive and Kiri is well in tune with global life energies, but the Quaritch-avatar lives on (thanks to Spider) to cause havoc again, and the sky-people are still digging in. I can’t wait for Cameron’s next Best Film Ever. Maybe we’ll find out how to transmute the obsessive planet-killing behaviour of the human species into something more like peace with nature in the realm of the universal Earth Mother, our own Eywa. And just maybe, if billions of people see and understand The Way of Water, we can find peace with nature in real life.
© Julian Caldecott 2022