Control Review: Avatar and the Water

I, Dalton Lewis, saw Avatar: The Way of Water three times. I never finished the first Avatar movie, but I saw this one. I can only guess what happened in the first one based on what happens in the second one. I watched the second one on my birthday recently — I had a good birthday. I finished reading a good book, A Court of Thorns and Roses, and I ate filet mignon at a steakhouse, and I saw the movie. It was an excellent birthday. I turned forty-five. I received a new winter coat as a gift from my parents. That was an excellent and thoughtful gift. It’s warm! My parents bought me that gift. They still care for me, at forty-five years of age, their mentally-ill son.

I watched Avatar 2.

There was lots of water.

There were lots of half-naked blue teenagers.

It showed a family in full. The movie starts with the birth of the children of Jack Sully and Neytiri. They have four children. The eldest son has the responsibility of taking care of everyone and being the mature one. The younger son is the rash risk-taker who tries to get into trouble as often as possible. The elder daughter is an adopted daughter of someone else who is a strange young woman who talks to the planet and investigates her mother’s situation. The littlest daughter gets kidnapped a lot.

The story is again a straightforward one: the sky people, the humans, show up to destroy the natural landscape of the alien land of Pandora which is the homeland of the people known as the Navi. The Navi fight back against the sky people and try to save their homeland. In this story the sky people’s plan once again involves attacking an ecological problem: this is about the whales. There is, as my friend says, an hour of the three hour movie about the whales. I didn’t mind. I appreciated a longer movie with more character development and better characters than the normal two hour movies in which the characters are paper-thin.

The sky people turn some of their best soldiers into part-human, part-Navi clones and send them after Jake Sully, and they spend the movie going after the main characters. The bad guys are portrayed with sympathy and grace even as the main characters fight them. They are not merely the worst villains of all time, but they aren’t innocent either. They do horrible things but do those things in order to accomplish objectives that seem reasonable to us.

The Sully clan leaves their home with the forest people in order to hide with the water people on an island. They have to ask for sanctuary and then learn to acclimate with the water people. They need to learn to get along with the children of the leaders of the water people — and bullying happens, and people initially don’t trust each other.

They develop their characters. One of the teenagers befriends a whale that stands up for himself. The bad guys go whaling. A human boy has to decide which side he is on. Eventually everything leads to a climax.

The finale is an hour-long titanic action sequence which has a lot of things going on, lots of thrills, heartache, and dramatic beats for all the characters. The characters face the worst possible situations and have to prove themselves.

Does this kind of movie have anything to do with reality? A little, I think. The reality is that we are hunting animals and it is a problem and we shouldn’t probably do it. The family unit is important and this is a positive representation of a family unit. That’s a plus.

To try to emulate James Cameron’s storytelling is intimidating. I want to write like he writes and tell stories like he tells, but I have no idea how to do that. He seems to create characters that people love and respect and want to spend time with. He creates villains that we love to hate and understand and sympathize with. I want to do all of that in my stories, and I’m writing a novel called The Dark Gods in which I want many of those elements to be involved in my story.

How does one create people who do unconscionable things and make people love and care for them? That’s the question I’m facing in my story. I need to write about slavery and show the audience why the slavers are doing what they are doing. I have to show the evils of slavery while showing why these characters do the things that they do. It’s a difficult balance.

I also need to include elements from my own life in the story. That’s difficult — I’m a forty-five year old man trying to make it as a writer, not a soldier in a civil war trying to free people from slavery. I have to create characters based on elements from my own life and experiences. I also have to create characters based on real-life stories from the American Civil War. I need to synthesize all of these elements to make an interesting and effective story — to entertain the audience.

Oh, and Avatar 2 is good. You should go see it, if you haven’t. James Cameron is an excellent writer/director and he puts his all into the tale of a family and its struggles. Check it out.

Thanks, and take care, friends.