apparently james cameron told fox “imagine there’s a book series like the lord of the rings, and we’re making adaptations of them” when pitching the four avatar sequels. which sounds great to me considering the deja vu of pairing an obsessive filmmaker with weta workshop & weta digital probably has an awful lot to do with me loving this franchise as i do. my only thought is “i’d love to read those books, then?” (then again, the lord of the rings comparison suggests maybe not since those made much better movies than books.)
so far despite a few separate instances of avatar novels being announced & quietly canceled, we haven’t gotten any avatar stories in that particular medium unless you count the junior novelization of the first movie. but as i think you’ll see in this compilation review, it would be hard to argue that we’ve been lacking for meaningful returns to pandora in the ramp up to the way of water.
pandora: the world of avatar (theme park attraction 2017)
this theme park land is literally responsible for me becoming an unironic fan of james cameron’s avatar. after seeing one of my favorite youtubers do an extremely (some would say unnecessarily) thorough video review of it, i found myself thinking, “what the heck? that looks awesome!” the thing is, said youtuber was like… at least mildly ironic in her enjoyment of it? and i’m completely incapable of irony, so i knew if i enjoyed it once i got to experience it, it was going to be wholeheartedly.
and holy shit did i ever enjoy it?
seriously, avatarland is unreasonably good. there is absolutely zero reason for it to go as hard as it does, but as much as i have an above average appreciation for the avatar movie this is far and away the best thing the franchise has ever produced. it’s one of the best things disney’s done in years, and all of it is in service to an ip that it seemed like very few people had strong feelings about at the time? it’s just truly kinda bizarre.
as far as rides, the big draw is flight of passage, and yeah it’s a flight simulator that truly does kick ass. especially if you get really into it and kind of lean into the turns with the ride vehicle. it does an incredible job of making you feel like you’re really flying, and there are so many awesome little touches like the fact that you can literally feel your “banshee” “breathing” between your legs. the queue for this one is also pretty fantastic, which is good because you’re probably going to be standing in it for quite some time.
but i’m a dumbass so i actually love the much-maligned na’vi river journey? i know a lot of people (including the youtuber i mentioned earlier) think it’s underwhelming, and maybe it helps that i went in with lowered expectations due to all the backlash, but now it is my child and i will defend it.
like okay part of the reason i’m so into it is that i just adore dark rides? i’m working on getting more comfortable on rollercoasters so i can enjoy theme park visits with my family more, but i just love a well-done dark ride. just take me on a chill trip and show me some cool scenery & animatronics. sign me the heck up.
i get it. this could use more than one animotronic. but i kind of just don’t care? it’s like a microcosm of the entire land in that there’s so much attention to detail in the scenery. i’ve been on it four times, but i feel like i’m still noticing something new every time.
so yeah, both rides are great, but i could just walk around looking at the scenery for hours. i took so many pictures, and they all look incredible. the only thing i haven’t gotten to do yet is walk around at night when everything is lit up with fake bioluminescence, and i desperately want to do that because i bet it’s gorgeous, but yeah this whole area is just unbelievable. s-rank
avatar: tsu’tey’s path (comic 2019)
writer: sherri l. smith
artists: jan duursema & dan parsons
this is basically a slightly better version of the movie with stunningly gorgeous art. like, some of the best art i’ve ever seen in a comic. and i get that the movie probably had to be what it was to be the colossal blockbuster it was, but heck i like this so much better.
it even has a much, much better version of jake becoming the leader of the omatikaya. i mean, i still think it’s a bad idea, and jake is still toruk makto which is still pretty infuriating. like, why does this dumbass who was one of the sky people literally yesterday have to be the Best Na’vi Ever?
but i’m going to have to get past that eventually, right? i’m really just complaining about avatar (2009) at this point. and just, again, this comic is a huge improvement on that specific aspect. given that it’s a retelling of the events of the film from a different perspective, it can’t escape that big, obvious glaring problem with the movie, but it does at least mitigate it somewhat.
i was hoping for more of the same in the movies, and frankly the way of water largely let me down on that score, but here’s hoping. granted i don’t really see them pivoting away from jake being the main character. maybe they’ll at least do more comics like this from various na’vi people’s povs. that would be nice. a-rank
avatar: the next shadow (comic 2021)
writer: jeremy barlow
artist: josh hood
i kinda hate that they introduced and just immediately wasted arvok, he’s such a good character. and honestly i still really hate jake being the leader of the omatikaya. this story does at least show that he has some good ideas about what leadership entails, which isn’t something he showed at all in either the first movie or the way of water.
in a way i can’t just keep holding this one thing against every iteration of the franchise for the rest of time (but also i totally can, fuck you).
it’s also great seeing jake consistently side with his adopted people over the sky people, and seeing the sky people get salty about it. stay mad about it! the more jake separates from the sky people, the more i like him. shocker, i know.
i love, love, love mo’at in this. she has some absolutely incredible lines. and it was great to see jake communing with tsu’tey’s spirit, and the advice his late comrade had for him. the best way to make people like me buy into jake at least a little is to continue to double down on the love he has for his adopted people, and the love they have for him. and having him continually defer to other people with more knowledge. which, again, the movies have consistently failed to do, but at least it happens a little here.
this is a good story told well. there’s pretty much always going to be the “yes, but” racism/appropriation hitch with any avatar media, but that’s just how that goes. and for what it’s worth, flawed anti-imperialist entertainment is still measurably better than pro-imperialist entertainment. b-rank
the world of avatar: a visual exploration by joshua izzo (book 2022)
i mentioned in my review of the activist survival guide that i’m a sucker for “nonfiction”-style books about fictional worlds like the star wars essential guides and roleplaying game reference manuals and the like, but the world of avatar: a visual exploration actually goes even further by being published by actual education titan dk books, and published in the same format as their visual guides that i grew up absolutely devouring on my (frequent) trips to the library.
this book covers a lot of the same ground as the activist survival guide, but with the addition of a single paragraph about alpha centauri expeditions and the valley of mo’ara (the lore from the pandora: the world of avatar attraction at disney world) and a two-page spread and other references sprinkled in here and there that seem to relate to things we might expect in avatar: the way of water.
the activist survival guide definitely has a lot more in terms of total and density of information given its more text-heavy format and larger page count, but what sets the world of avatar apart is the format. while the activist survival guide did include a lot of pictures, the world of avatar is designed to just be absolutely gorgeous to look at.
it also lacks, either due to its brevity or due to the mainstreaming of more progressive ideas, references to rigid gender essentialism or the racist malthusian myth of “overpopulation.” so that’s a drastic improvement from my perspective, obviously. but moreover, i just found it a more pleasant read on the whole. the framing narrative of the activist survival guide frequently felt a bit forced, and for me that interrupted the flow of its “nonfiction”-style presentation. in the world of pandora, there’s something undeniably satisfying about seeing pandora and the na’vi presented in a format from which i spent a lot of my childhood learning about real-world wonders like space and ancient cultures and the like.
part of it is certainly nostalgia, but i think a bigger part of it is that there’s a reason i gravitated towards books like these as a child. they just do such a great job of presenting information in a way that’s both easily-digestible and genuinely informative. and having that applied to a fictional world like pandora is just such a treat. a-rank
avatar: adapt or die (comic 2022)
writer: corrina bechko
artists: beni r. lobel
a clear-cut case of prequelitis if i’ve ever seen one. this isn’t terrible or anything, but like… what did it really add? dr. augustine arguing with selfridge some more? i knew as much as i needed to know about that relationship within the first 10 minutes or so of the movie.
the parts of this miniseries i actually liked were pretty front-loaded. like, surprising information alert, but i was way more interested in the na’vi stuff than the human stuff, so as the narrative shifted to be more focused on the humans i just found myself losing interest very quickly. i know, shocking.
i do approve of the idea of giving dr. augustine a starring role in a comic series, but it just doesn’t feel like it was executed very effectively here? again, i didn’t hate this or anything, i looked forward to each new issue, it’s just that it feels a bit lackluster compared to previous offerings. c-rank
avatar: the high ground (comic 2022)
writer: sherri l. smith
artists: various
it’s weird that i keep having to talk about star wars in my avatar reviews, but there are a lot of truly bizarre connections between the two considering i don’t think there’s any real cross-pollination between them aside from disney having a stake in both of them? but, yeah.
a lot of star wars fans are probably familiar with the story of splinter of the mind’s eye. this was a novel by alan dean foster (the ghostwriter of the first film’s novelization) that george lucas commissioned as a book that could be easily adapted into a low-budget sequel for star wars if the first movie didn’t make enough money to finance a sequel. of course, that was before the first movie totally redefined expectations for a summer blockbuster, so foster’s novel ended up not being needed for its original purpose, and it just sort of existed as a kind of awkward entry in the canon of the eu until disney nuked it. dark horse did a comic adaptation of the novel in the 90s with some of that gorgeous coverart that the dark horse star wars comics always had, which is the way i found out about it.
avatar: the high ground, on the other hand, was james cameron’s first pass at an avatar sequel script. it doesn’t appear that cameron altered the trajectory of the sequel for budgetary reasons, but rather due to a combination of just deciding to break the story differently and possibly technological breakthroughs in convincing underwater cgi? regardless, rather than wasting his first script idea, a decision was made to adapt it into a series of three hardcover graphic novels.
the resulting comis are… honestly not great, immo? i’d actually say this is my least favorite avatar comic i’ve read so far. like, even adapt or die which wasn’t great at least felt like it was something different? this felt like “avatar 2, but worse.” and repurposing it as a prequel is also kind of fraught because they obviously had a lot of the same storytelling goals in this version of the sequel so you end up with weird stuff like jake & meytiri’s kids running through what should’ve been their parents’ entire budget of “telling them to stay & wait in a place, them not listening & getting kidnapped” patience before the first movie? like, when the kids first get captured by blue!quatritch in the sequel, it’s this big shocking moment, but imagine if they had just been kidnapped & daringly rescued, like, last week? it would totally change how that would feel, right? there’s a very real feeling in the movie that this is the first time their innocence has been challenged like this.
… come to think of it, that’s actually another parallel with splinter of the mind’s eye? because towards the end of that book, luke has a lightsaber fight with darth vader, and when splinter of the mind’s eye was still considered canon that just made it really awkward that their confrontation in the empire strikes back was clearly supposed to be the first of its kind? i think this comic is just avatar’s splinter of the mind’s eye. i think it’s best to just pretend it doesn’t exist, because it’s definitely not going to impact the movies–i mean, no one’s really thinking “this is awkward becasue splinter of the mind’s eye got there first” when they watch empire, right? but it just makes the high ground pretty unsatisfying at the end of the day.
even ignoring those sorts of issues, it’s also just super obvious that this story wasn’t intended for a comic book format? it’s just a series of honestly pretty flat action scenes that don’t really translate all that well on the page. and it isn’t helped by the fact that the art, while pretty enough to look at, doesn’t actually do a great job of conveying the action in a way that’s painless to follow? it’s sometimes hard to tell characters apart except for in extreme closeup. so yeah, on the whole, really not a huge fan of this one, unfortunately. c-rank
avatar: the way of water (movie 2022)
“the way of water has no beginning and no end. our hearts beat in the womb of the world. water connects all things, life to death, darkness to light.”
pretty bold words from a movie that asks me to not pee for 3 hours & 15 minutes but also asks me to buy & drink a big soda in a ridiculous souvenir cup.
so, yeah. i’ve now seen this in both dolby & imax, and while i think imax was the better experience of the two, i can confirm that (as is usually the case in a james cameron venture) there just isn’t a bad way to see this movie. it’s funny, because most of the interesting things i can think of to say about it are criticisms but overall i definitely enjoyed it?
look, at a base level, the reason i liked this and i’m probably going to like all of the hopefully dozens of sequels this series keeps churning out is that the avatar franchise has become one of the few remaining standard bearers for high-effort filmmaking in blockbuster movies. like, basically every visual you see in this movie was probably created in a computer, but it does not look like it? at all? and i’ve said it before but i’ll say it again, it’s pretty clear that this is attributable to the absolute obsession that james cameron has for making movies look the way he wants them to look, and the fact that he seems to bring other people with that same obsession along for the ride.
the things that were problematic about the first movie (and the expanded universe surrounding it) are still problematic, plus a few new problems that they decided to add on top just so we don’t get bored, but before i start really digging into those things i just want to pause and say that i really miss when this kind of approach in blockbuster filmmaking was… not the norm, exactly, but definitely not as uncommon as it is now? so yeah, at the end of the day if i’m going to be watching some shooty scifi bullshit, i’d love for it to keep looking this good and having this much of an imaginative (but also extremely thoroughly well-thought-out) approach to the creation of a genuinely alien world. because the real star of these movies isn’t jake, and it isn’t neytiri, and it isn’t their kids. it’s pandora.
the movie seems to understand this, too, because yeah we start with jake narrating but it’s over this fucking wonderful shot of the camera just rapidly zooming down to the surface of pandora and then through the trees, and just sort of bludgeoning you with the fact that yeah, we’re back. and what i’ve kind of been dancing around is the fact that it’s pretty clear that creating pandora & bringing it to life was a labor of love for everyone involved, and that’s something that’s been obvious to me since the first movie, and i think it’s why so many people found pandora so achingly beautiful. returning there weirdly feels a little like returning home, or at least returning somewhere you really like being. it carries an actual emotional weight with it.
and, again, this opening narration is trying to very quickly usher us through the last 15 years or so of the sullys’ life but the visuals of these little vignettes are always emphasizing how much the forests of pandora are a starring player in these experiences.
honestly these opening scenes are asking you for a lot, because the status quo has changed quite a bit, and they’re about to hit you with the whole weird clone soldier thing? which still to this day doesn’t really make a lot of logical sense to me, but i’m willing to roll with it because such an entertaining movie is wrung out of it. and also because it fits in great with the thematic thrust of these movies, that the sky people are trying to steal pandora out from under the na’vi, so the idea of them literally appropriating na’vi bodies and shoving their gross human capitalist/military brains in there is just viscerally horrifying.
(... which makes it pretty fucking awkward that one of my biggest problems with this movie/franchise is that it appropriates & profits off of gross tons of indigenous culture…)
yeah okay let’s go ahead & pivot.
the white savior stuff is less visually apparent here because jake spends the whole movie as a na’vi, so that’s nice & i do drastically prefer things this way, but it’s still totally there? but on top of that jake is just the fucking worst father in this? like, neytiri calls him out exactly once for treating his family like a squad he’s the commanding officer of instead of a family? but he just proceeds to continue doing this for the whole rest of the movie and it’s never again a source of conflict? and i’m sorry, that’s not just bad writing, it’s fucking abusive?
in the first movie jake at least realizes he’s kind of a piece of shit and gets his ass kicked constantly for it. this movie acts like he’s just a big damn hero whose only flaw is that he tries to hide & protect his family (the objectively correct thing to do) instead of singlehandedly defeating the sky people. and i just. cannot.
i want to print out flyers about neytiri & staple them to telephone poles like she’s a lost cat, because where the fuck was she in this movie? she’s barely in it, and the one actually kind of big thing she does in the movie (threaten spider’s life to save her get blue!quatritch to release her daughter) is terrible? i just. ugh.
this is mirrored by the fact that when we see jake & neytiri with the omatikaya we barely hear from mo’at, who is one of the fucking best characters in the first movie and is even more awesome in some of the expanded universe stuff so i had a lot of high hopes that we were gonna get to see more of her, but nah, she basically just patches up some wounded and apparently has zero opinions about jake & neytiri leaving. (i mean, obviously that’s not the case, my point is that we don’t hear from her about it at fucking all.)
for that matter, we don’t see jake & neytiri interacting with the omatikaya at all really? we literally just see the clan functioning as a resistance cell against the returning rda. it’s hard to feel the sense of loss that you should feel when they leave because you never get to see them just… being the people? you’re asked to feel the loss exclusively through neytiri getting mad about it for exactly thirty seconds, which is treated dismissively by jake, which by the way is also an awful character moment for him. just. yuck.
i also don’t feel like i got to know the metkayina well enough? i know this movie is a lot more plot-heavy than the first movie, but it just feels like there’s an entire dimension missing this time, and i’m sad about it.
i know i’m starting to sound like i hated this movie, and i didn’t, for all the reasons i stated earlier plus a few more that i’m about to pivot to, but i just need to be really clear that me enjoying this movie is not an endorsement of everything about it? like, i feel like this is less of a star trek situation where i’m like “this 90% aligns with my values but has some issues because sometimes the writers suck” and is more like when i used to like star wars and was like “this is an extremely well-designed universe that it’s fun to immerse myself in and the movies are damn entertaining even if i frequently don’t like the stories that are being told.”
(okay i have to go on a quick tangent here since i don’t talk about star wars much anymore to clarify what i mean. hilariously, the last jedi coming along and actually being a good movie with good things to say is what made it impossible for me to continue enjoying star wars when i realized it had never been that before and was never going to be that again, like, it actually “ruined” star wars for me, but not in the way most people mean when they say that? like it’s probably the only star wars movie i’d rewatch if you asked me to. and i used to rewatch all of them frequently, and write fanfiction & whatnot. i was one of those.)
like the first movie, the way of water is a deeply problematic movie with superficially anti-imperialist themes, but like… considering that the vast majority of tentpole blockbusters are imperialist propaganda with a very thin coat of paint over them, that’s clearly better, right?
like, i think we often do this thing where when something at least superficially aligns with our values we hold it to a higher standard, and i’m not about to lecture anyone (especially if they’re indigenous) if they do that with this movie, it certainly deserves it because wow does it ever not practice what it ineptly preaches, but i am going to say that for me personally i would prefer imperfectly anti-imperialist movies that are made this well over unabashedly pro-imperialist movies that were clearly filmed in empty rooms composed of green screens or that circular led thing that the mandalorian & star trek discovery popularized. (for the record, star trek discovery does a much better job with it, but it’s still pretty obvious at times.)
and the other reason i really enjoy this is because, as much as i’m starting to feel like i kind of genuinely hate jake (but i can still empathize with him and i think the lengths he goes to to throw his own life between the bad guys & his kids is genuinely heroic) and as much as i fucking hate the way neytiri is written in this movie, i fucking love their kids? this jumped out at me even more on rewatch when i was more familiar with the general shape of the movie. when i first saw it i loved lo’ak & kiri but i thought neteyam especially wasn’t characterized nearly as much? like, he was just the “good kid” to lo’ak’s “rebellious kid,” but the thing about cameron movies is that so much characterization happens in the margins and when i was able to pay more attention to the details the second time through is fucking loved & wanted to protecc neteyam?
but yeah, i totally get why we focus on lo’ak. he’s an extremely good boy and i’m super invested in his story going forward. (kiri also rules, but i feel like that’s more obvious.)
also like, this movie has na’vi bullying in it, so uh. yeah. that’s… nice. for me. (sorry not sorry.)
so, uh, yeah. at the end of the day you have a deeply problematic but wildly entertaining movie that is kind of the standard bearer of high-effort blockbuster filmmaking in an age dominated by “just film it in front of a greenscreen & redirect people to the disney+ series”? again i have no beef with anyone who cannot enjoy this movie because of its problematic elements. i’m not out here waving my embarrassing unironic avatar fandom like it’s something to be proud of, and i don’t think i’ll ever really be able to enjoy this franchise in an uncomplicated way, which could very well result in me burning out on it like i did star wars before it, but idk. for now i’m enjoying it. and for me at least, this movie had more than enough to enjoy about it to overcome the things that infuriated me about it. a-rank
avatar: the way of water: the visual dictionary
by joshua izzo (book 2022)
this is another dk book like the world of avatar: a visual exploration, but covering the second movie. it feels like there was proportionately a lot more about the rda & recoms than there was about the rda in the first one, but that could just be a cognitive bias on my part because that is (shockingly) the part i’m the least interested in.
there is definitely a lot less about geography in this one, though, and that’s a shame because i think that oceanography rules and i was really excited for some fictional oceanography because i’m a fucking nerd, but alas.
this is still a great overall concept for a book, and the execution is for the most part pretty fantastic. i just found myself overall less entranced by it than i was by its predecessor. b-rank