Avatar: The Way of Water - A Review - Blue is the Dullest Color

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An underwhelming, unneeded sequel that is just as forgettable as the original. It’s time to close Pandora’s box.

One need to look no further than the box office and Oscar ballot to understand why we are doomed as a nation, a civilization, and a species.

In the last year, two movies dominated that speak volumes about the monumental moronity of the masses. First there was Top Gun: Maverick, a hellaciously stupid, completely unnecessary, thirty-five years too late, second-rate sequel to the gay-themed, feature film Pentagon commercial that was the original Top Gun (1986). Maverick has made over a billion dollars since it premiered in May of 2022 and just got nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.  

And there’s also Avatar: The Way of Water, a ten-years too late sequel to a movie everyone saw but nobody remembers – Avatar (2011). The Way of Water is a three-hour and fifteen-minute middling monstrosity that has made over two billion dollars at the box office and also been nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.

After going to the movie theatre to see Maverick like a sucker, I promised myself I wouldn’t do the same for The Way of Water. I figured if writer/director James Cameron wanted to vomit out retreads of his immensely uninteresting Avatar world onto to audiences for the rest of his career, he could do it without my twenty bucks.

But since I am a tremendous big shot in Hollywood, I recently got a screener of The Way of Water and in service to you dear reader, I decided to watch it and review it.

To give context to my thoughts on The Way of Water, let me just briefly recap my feelings on the original Avatar. Basically, I thought it was an instantly forgettable, painfully dull venture that was dreadfully written and looked like a high-end videogame. I never watched it again after seeing it in the theatre, and never thought about it and never had any interest in a sequel.

Which brings us to…the sequel.

Avatar: The Way of Water is even more dreadfully written, even more forgettable and an even more dull movie than the original. It is a putrid and puerile piece of pissant moviemaking that serves no purpose whatsoever.

Unlike say the money printing machines that are the Star Wars or Marvel movies, Avatar has no compelling underlying mythology that can enrich and elevate its pedestrian story. Instead the film franchise attempts to satiate the viewer’s need for psychologically rich archetypes and mythology with vapid, vacuous, trite and insipid American cultural politics.

Speaking of the story, the plot of The Way of Water is as flaccid as the one in the original Avatar. On the planet Pandora (not to be confused with the music streaming service), Jake Sully, a former disabled human Marine and current Na’vi leader, husband and father, must protect his Na’vi family from the evil of human militarism and colonialism.

Sully’s old Marine unit was wiped out in the original Avatar – don’t worry I didn’t remember that either, but all are back now with their consciousness implanted into newly lab-grown Na’vi. So all those old, completely forgettable characters you didn’t remember from the original are back!!

In order to protect his family, which consists of his wife, two teenage boys, one teenage girl, and a younger kid whose gender I cannot for the life of me remember, Sully takes them away from the Omatikaya - forest Na’vi, and to the Metkayina - water Na’vi.

The movie is mostly a teen angst drama revolving around the struggles of the Sully kids to fit in with the water Na’vi, surrounded by predictable battle scenes between good guys and bad guys.

Here’s the thing, The Way of Water is like every bad teenage angst movie ever made, but cliched characters speaking bad dialogue don’t magically become interesting just because their skin is blue. And make no mistake, teenagers are no less annoying when they’re blue either.

The movie at one point feels like Blue Rebel Without a Cause, with Sully’s middle son Lo’ak as bargain basement James Dean and a four eyed whale as Sal Mineo’s Plato.

The movie has lots of scenes of laughing at people trying to learn new skills, like when the Metkayina teens mock the Sully kids for struggling to learn how-to-live in water, and when Spider – a human child raised by the Na’vi, laughs at the reincarnated Marine Colonel now trying to live in his new Na’vi body. Everybody laughs except for those watching.

Speaking of Spider, he’s like every dreadlock wearing white kid who thinks he’s black, as well as every skateboarding douchebag who thinks he’s interesting and tough. To say that Spider is the most annoying and embarrassing character to hit the big screen in ages would be a massive understatement.

As for the women in The Way of Water…they are all Na’vi and they are all repellant, hyper-emotionalist shrews of the highest order. If I wanted to spend hours on end with grating hags, I would’ve stayed married to my first, second or fourth wife (FYI…my third wife, Barbarella, was an angel…who unfortunately died from injuries sustained in a freak pole dancing accident - RIP).

The cast of The Way of Water, which include Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Winslet and Stephen Lang are tough to judge because they’re basically animated blue beings. No one sounds very believable or anything, but acting in CGI isn’t exactly easy.

Edie Falco, plays General Ardmore, one of the few actual human characters, and as much as I love Edie Falco and respect her as an actress, she is actively awful in this movie.

Jack Champion, who plays Spider, is just atrocious as well.

As for the most important part of The Way of Water…how it looks…I have to say that it looks…fine. Granted, I didn’t see it on the big screen and watched a digital screener on my rather big tv, so my opinion on the visuals is to be taken with a gigantic grain of salt. I will say this though, a movie having nothing going for it except that it looks like a fantastically high-end video game, is not a very strong argument that it’s a good movie.

The bottom line is that Avatar: The Way of Water is a very long, very boring and banal, very derivative and dull cinematic venture. James Cameron has made some great, and I mean great, movies. Both Terminator films are absolutely fantastic, and Aliens (1986), True Lies and even The Abyss, are flawed but exceedingly well-made, entertaining films. That said, Cameron will no doubt make a bazillion dollars with his Avatar franchise, but he won’t make anything artistically or cinematically worthwhile, which is a shame and feels like a waste of his talents.

Which brings me to my final point. Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water, are two movies that aren’t original and aren’t good, and yet they’ve dominated the culture for the last year. The fact that there are people out there who think these movies are awesome is a strong indicator that America is a country and empire is steep and steady decline.

Culture is the canary in the coalmine, and with Maverick and The Way of Water, that poor son of a bitch of a bird is down in the darkness, flat on his back in the muck and the mire, wheezing his last bitter breath.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

©2023

Hacksaw Ridge : A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!!****

ESTIMATED READING TIME: 5 Minutes 27 Seconds

My Rating : 1.35 out of 5 stars.

My Recommendation : Skip it.

Hacksaw Ridge is the story of Desmond Doss, a religious conscientious objector in World War II who enlisted in the army and became a medic. Doss served in the Pacific theatre and earned the Medal of Honor for saving scores of his wounded comrades at the battle of Okinawa. The film, directed by Academy Award winner Mel Gibson, stars Andrew Garfield as Doss, with supporting turns by Hugo Weaving, Rachel Griffiths, Teresa Palmer, Sam Worthington, Luke Bracey and Vince Vaughn.

The story of Desmond Doss is a fantastic story. Hacksaw Ridge is a bad film. I went to the theatre with high expectations for this movie, as the trailer and the background on Doss' story were pretty great. Sadly, Mel Gibson and his cast drop the ball in such a tremendous way that it is stunning how awful this film really is.

The problems with Hacksaw Ridge are numerous, so let's start at the beginning. The casting of this film is flawed right off the bat. The film is a joint Australian/American production, but the cast is almost entirely made up of either Australian or British actors. Aussie and British actors are a fine lot, of that there is no doubt, but when you cast them in the role of Americans the cracks sometimes start to show. Hugo Weaving is a great example. Weaving is a terrific Aussie actor, but in his role as Doss' father, he stumbles and staggers through the accent and the action like a newbie at the local community theatre. Weaving has one critical monologue and in it his accent goes in and out so often you think you are watching an exorcism. Sam Worthington is another glaring example of the lack of acting dexterity. Worthington blusters and poses his way through his role and does little more than mimic what he thinks an American accent sounds like. Obviously his ear is as bad as his acting. The accents and language of the foreign actors playing Americans feel so stilted they cause the performances to ring false throughout. Were there no American actors available for these roles?

The star of the film is Andrew Garfield, a fine British actor. Unlike his cast mates Garfield handles his American/Virginia accent well enough, but he too struggles to be believable in the film. Garfield has the right energy and physique to play Doss, a sort of slight and delicate man, but there are times when I literally though Garfield's Doss seemed mentally handicapped. Garfield made Doss into a dopey, doe-eyed simpleton. I don't know if Garfield did this intentionally or if it is just a habit, but he lets his tongue stick a little bit out of his mouth when he is trying to be sincere. It looks like a deformity where his tongue is too big for his mouth. And especially when he has lovey-dovey stars in his eyes with his tongue sticking out, he actually looks mentally disabled. It is bizarre to say the least.

I am not singling out Aussie and British actors alone for their sub-par work in Hacksaw Ridge, as the biggest casting error is unquestionably putting Vince Vaughn in the role of the Sgt. Howell. Vaughn is so mis-cast and  dreadful in the role that it physically hurt me to watch. I like Vince Vaughn a lot, he is a very talented guy, but he is so awful as Howell that it beggars belief. Vaughn's biggest problem is that he lacks any sort of menace, toughness or vocal prowess to be able to handle what should have been the easiest role to cast.  Vaughn also has a minor speech flaw where he swallows his "L's" which makes it difficult for him to project his voice with power. So vocally he is not grounded and instead gets his voice stuck up in his throat and upper chest cavity. This is why he has no gravitas in this role which desperately needed it. In comparison think of Lee Ermey in Kubrick's Vietnam masterpiece Full Metal Jacket. Ermey doesn't have to strain his voice to be domineering as his voice is grounded and resonates from deep in his belly (or, more specifically, his balls, if you want to get all Drill Sergeant about it).

The rest of the cast are all the usual war film stereotypes that we have seen a thousand times before. The scene where we are introduced to Doss' squad could have been taken from over a hundred other films about the same war or any other war for that matter.  There's the tough guy, the good looking guy, the funny, guy, the dopey guy…you name it. Central casting got a workout filling all of these one dimensional roles. Which leads us to another major issue with Hacksaw Ridge…the script.

As I previously mentioned, Desmond Doss' story is a remarkable and fascinating one. The problem with Hacksaw Ridge is that it sticks Doss' story into the conventional Hollywood War movie cliche machine and mangles it beyond recognition and strips it of all its value. The reason Doss is a conscientious objector is because of his faith. This should have been a film about a man and his faith and his unwavering commitment to that faith. Instead Gibson, no stranger to stories about faith, spends the first half of the film never even mentioning Doss' religious affiliation (Seventh Day Adventist) except in passing and instead makes the film a love story. This love story, in addition to being standard, boring filmmaking fare, ends up being a distraction to Doss' actual story, not the focus of it. In fact the love story basically vanishes in the second half of the film when Doss finds himself in the meat grinder that is Okinawa. 

There are references to Doss' religion in the second half of the film, in fact, his religion becomes paramount to understanding why he is doing what he is doing, but since that element of the story hasn't been properly established and developed it lacks any impact on the viewer. It was shocking to me that Mel Gibson, the guy who made half a billion dollars telling the story of The Passion of the Christ, downplayed the religion of his main character, especially when it was so vital to the motivation of that character and the driving force of the entire story.

I was stunned as to how poorly this film was directed, written and acted. The first half of the film is so melodramatic and predictable that it was like watching a tele-novella on Spanish language tv…of course with actors who speak Spanish as a second or third language, instead of native speakers. The second half of the film when the film goes to war, is so unoriginal and cliche-ridden it felt like someone had spliced together second rate scenes from the cutting room floor of every war film made in the last 75 years. There are also flashbacks which do nothing to propel the story further or give any insight into Doss' character or beliefs. 

Visually the film is as flat and stale as the storytelling and acting. While the battle scenes have a certain intensity to them, it feels like you are watching someone else play a World War II video game over and over and over again. The fog of war and disarray of battle, mixed with a lack of a clear and specific geography, makes for battle scenes that are a more confusing experience than an exciting one. And Gibson's penchant for swelling music to trigger drama in his film and emotion in his audience, does little to lift the action, but rather makes it all feel manipulative and false.

Mel Gibson is well known for his embrace of violence in his films, and Hacksaw Ridge is no exception to that. There is a lot of human destruction and blood and guts in Hacksaw Ridge but because we have no genuine connection with any of the characters that carnage comes across as gratuitous. I certainly have no issue with extreme violence in a film, that is for sure, but in Hacksaw Ridge the violence is so cinematically dull and visually conventional that the it all rings as hollow as the rest of the film. 

I have never been much of a fan of Mel Gibson as an actor or as a filmmaker. My feelings about Gibson have nothing to do with his troubles a few years back where he got into all sorts of trouble for his personal life and beliefs. I am not judging the artist or his work on the struggles he has had as a man. Personally, I think The Passion of the Christ was very well done and is easily his best film as a director, but the rest of his directing, and acting work for that matter, always has a certain narcissistic, mawkish sensibility to them. As a first generation Scotsman and Irishman, I found his Academy Award winning film Braveheart to be mindless Hollywood shit and a prime example of the previously mentioned narcissistic mawkishness. Hacksaw Ridge is nowhere near the film Braveheart was, but like its Scottish counterpart, Hacksaw Ridge is also very poorly served by Mel Gibson's saccharine vision and maudlin instincts. 

In conclusion, my recommendation is to skip Hacksaw Ridge altogether. It certainly isn't worth seeing in the theatre, that is for damn sure. If you really want to see it then I tell you to wait to see it for free on cable of Netflix. It is a shame that a man like Desmond Doss, the type of man we need more of today, wasn't given a better platform from which to spread the word of his heroism and his commitment to his faith. Desmond Doss deserved much better than the dramatically cluttered, conventional and one dimensional film that Mel Gibson has made about him. I went into Hacksaw Ridge filled with anticipation, I left the film profoundly disappointed.

©2016