It’s been so many years since the first Avatar that not even James Cameron remembers what that movie was about. Perhaps that’s why it took the director thirteen years to make a sequel that tells the exact same story as the first film. That’s the only rational explanation I could think of for the existence of Avatar – The Way of Water: a return to the past, a reboot of itself, the continuation of a story no one remembers. Cameron is obviously obsessed with this story, a bit like Orson Welles was obsessed with Don Quixote and Sergio Leone was obsessed with the Siege of Leningrad. Cameron is so obsessed with this tale of green planets and blue aliens that he is willing to tell it over and over again, with every new technology and every new generation. In fact, the only real difference between the day I watched Avatar and the day I watched Avatar: Waterway is that in the first case, I was 19 and carried the excitement that age gave me allowed a pair of glasses – very useless, very annoying – to see the film in 3D, technology surrounded at the time by a hype comparable only to that surrounding the director’s new film of Terminator and Titanic. In the years that followed, too, 3D and avatar shared identical destinies: 3D glasses did not become a habit, avatar did not become a memory. The film that has grossed the most in the history of the world box office has left no trace of itself in the collective imagination: outside of this moment and that place thirteen years ago Avatar no longer existed, the vision never turned into passion , a Fandom is never born. Perhaps that’s why Cameron felt the need to start over and hastened to say that not all that time would elapse between the second and third chapters of the saga. In a way his way of saying forget-me-not this time.
Yet even Cameron seems to have forgotten the first voyage to Pandora, the first attempt to colonize the planet by the Skymen, the already victorious war of liberation by the indigenous Na’vi led by blue savior Jake Sully. This is the only rational explanation I could think of, as the same images from thirteen years ago played before my eyes, only this time without the hallucinogenic filter of the 3D glasses. Seeing Avatar means finding yourself in the same obsessive ouroboros that Cameron must have become over the past fifteen years (the director can’t seem to stop coming back to two stories: one is this one and the other that of Terminator). The second chapter of the saga begins where the first could have ended – Jake and Neytiri marry, raise a family, live happily in the shade of the tree house – and then continues where the first began, stitching the films together in a circle Story in which at a certain point it becomes impossible to distinguish the end from the beginning, the before from the after, the beginning and the sequel. This is to be taken literally: the narrative balance of Avatar – The Water Way, the Sully family idyll, is shaken when the spaceships of space colonists arrive on Pandora from Earth. Anew. Space colonists who, as soon as they land, begin incinerating acres of sacred forest and burning entire species of animals alive. Another time. An invasion that leads to war, on one side the humans in their combat exoskeletons and on the other the Na’vi guerrillas armed with bows and arrows. Yet.
The case of Belli? The discovery of a very valuable raw material on Pandora – once again – the Amrita, elixir of life only obtainable by hunting the Tulkun, highly intelligent space whale, spiritual animal of the Na’vi belonging to the Clans of the Seas that crossed the path of follow water. The déjà vu begins to create nausea when the villain of this no-sequel is introduced: it is the very villain of the other film, Colonel Miles Quaritch, played by Stephen Lang. But he wasn’t dead at the end of the first Avatar? Of course yes, dead and risen: Apparently, before his death, all of his memories and personality were downloaded onto an external hard drive and have now been loaded into the brain of a specially designed Na’vi avatar from the body of the United States Marines for the case that thirteen years is not long enough for a director to find a villain for his “new” film.
It is argued that all of this is secondary, that the point of Avatar is not the story it tells within itself, but the stories told about it. It is as if, in recent years, Cameron has become a sort of Dziga Vertov of our time and our part of the world, and Avatar his The Man with a Film Camera in constant updating and expansion: not a film but a performance, a stress test to measure the technological frontiers of contemporary cinema. It is the first film in history, “Avatar – The Water Route,” to fuse footage of underwater environments with those of actors in motion capture, a feat that alone took the thirteen staff a year and a half to complete the film. An achievement that certainly deserves recognition and celebration. A goal that perhaps doesn’t justify three hours of film. Sitting at the crossroads of cinema, video art and naturalistic documentary, the film’s second act, which shows us the waterway in all its aesthetic glory, deserves the wonder I’ve seen on the faces of many people who have been with me in the Cinemas were (perhaps the future of the franchise lies in a documentary spin-off dedicated to Pandorian biodiversity? There are three more films to decide, or maybe five or seven, I’ve lost count of the announced sequels).
The problem is that before and after this beautiful, very long journey to the bottom of the sea, there are 120 minutes above the water’s surface, which makes one doubt that Pandora is stuck in a time warp: everything that happens beyond the sea’s surface, we already have it that way experienced for thirteen years. And imagine, thirteen years ago we said we had seen this story back in 1995 in a Disney movie called Pocahontas. Then a double, triple déjà vu. Unfortunately, we live in the history of cinema at a moment when we must rejoice in every hit with the public: times are so dark that Avatar’s wealth means the survival of many others. Of course we should think about the point, even if it’s only commercial, of making a film that just has to top the box office of all time to cover the production subsidy costs. But it also has to be said that perhaps Avatar’s true legacy lies precisely in having pushed the line between hit and flop further and redefining the concept of blockbuster and success. Cameron himself said it: “Such a crazy thing would never have been possible if the first Avatar hadn’t raised so much money”. We’ll see if the possibility repeats itself this time around and how long it will be before we see it materialized in a third sequel. And we’ll see if we have time to forget everything before then. Another time.