Avatar: The Way of Water, Frank Herbert’s classic Dune, and why Hollywood needs more storytellers, less technical wizardry

James Cameron substitutes plot points for story and character, and visual detail for worldbuilding, failing to achieve his narrative goals or deliver on the underlying promise.  Sadly, this trend is not unique to him and is a plague on Hollywood in general. 

The best I can say about Avatar: The Way of Water is there might have been a good movie in there somewhere if James Cameron had the necessary storytelling skills to bring it to life.  Beneath the technical extravagance and the extravagantly detailed computer generated special effects, there lies the skeleton of a science fiction action adventure with some potential.  The set up was intriguing:  The enemy from the first movie, Colonel Miles Qauritch, is reincarnated as a Na’vi and is charged with hunting down the original protagonist, Jake Sully, who has lived as a Na’vi for the past sixteen years  and now has a family to protect.  Complicating matters further, Qauritch’s son, now known as Spider, was left behind on Pandora and has grown up as a human among aliens, replete with the potential for conflicting loyalties.  Additionally, Grace Augustine’s unconscious avatar has had a child, Kiri, in something of an immaculate conception.  Raised by Jake and Neyteri, Kiri is a member of the family, but different, obviously touched by something unclear, more on that in a moment.  The family lives in the Pandora equivalent of domestic bliss while leading an insurgency against the sky people until Qauritch arrives and sends them running to other side of the planet. Alas, this is all sounds better in the synopsis than the execution, which can perhaps best be described as a sequence of scenes James Cameron wanted to film, connected by various absurdities and inconsistencies without any real rhyme, reason, or character driven development, much less coherent worldbuilding.  Mr. Cameron is a known lover of the ocean and an experienced deep sea diver having made dozens of trips to the Titanic.  It is not surprising that he wanted to expand the world of Pandora to a seaside location and in principle at least, this expansion allowed him to build on what we learned in the first film without repeating it.  What is surprising is how ridiculously silly Jake’s reason is for relocating his family there:  Qauritch is after him and will not stop until he burns the villages in the trees.  In that case, why would he stop at the water’s edge?  It’s not as if the sky people don’t know of the existence of these islands, or have the means to travel there.  The journey itself takes less than a day, Jake himself does it with his family mounted on their flying dinosaurs, but for some reason a trained soldier and the leader of the insurgency believes, what precisely?  The baddest man on the planet can’t possibly track him down on a beach?  Thus, no one is surprised when that’s what Qauritch in Na’vi form proceeds to do, not even Jake himself, leading at least this observer to believe that the primary goal was to introduce the seafaring Na’vi regardless of whether doing so actually made sense in the context of the story or the characters.

Likewise, the second half of the film centers around the equivalent of whales on Pandora, known as Tulkuns, both their bond with the seafaring Na’vi and the human’s desire to hunt them, the same as we did whales on Earth in the early industrial era.  The first hunting sequence is among the best in the film, offering a science fiction take on something out of Moby Dick, and resulting in visuals that we have not seen before in a futuristic setting.  Here, Cameron, who remains an adept action shooter in general, manages to both capture the thrill of the chase and the suffering of the Tulkun as the sky people harpoon the poor creature with buoys to bring it to the surface and ultimately kill it with a more powerful explosive.  The knowledge, previously established, that these Tulkun are intelligent and have relationships with the Na’vi makes the sequence even more poignant until we learn why they are being hunted.  For reasons that are completely unexplained, the Tulkun’s brain contains a golden liquid that stops the aging process and the acquisition of this substance is funding the entire mission to Pandora.  This makes no sense for any number of reasons.  First, we’re supposed to believe that the sky people have the technology to clone Na’vi, implant their consciousness in the clone, and in the case of Quaritch and his team, store their memories and effectively bring them back from the dead, but for some reason they can’t simply clone this substance and need to engage in 19th century style whale hunts, only their target is even more intelligent to the point where they are brothers and sisters to the natives?   No reason how this could possibly be the case is offered, nor is any reason why humans are completely immune to any sense of the destruction they are causing.  Apparently, Mr. Cameron is sensitive enough about environmental and moral concerns to make this movie today, but hundreds of years in the future, humanity will have descended into barbarism with no explanation.  Second, the first film established that Pandora is one of the few, if not the only places in the galaxy where the rare mineral, unobtanium can be found.  We also learned that the entire planet is alive, and consciousness can be stored in a tree of all places.  This trifecta would be quite the accomplishment for any moon, but suddenly Pandora is now also home to the Fountain of Youth of all things.  On top of that, the Earth itself is dying and Pandora is the only place humans can go and survive.  Pandora, therefore, is home to the rarest mineral, an organic computer that can store millions of minds, an elixir that grants immortality, and the only hope of the entire human race.  Not bad for a simple moon, right?  Endor should’ve been so lucky in Return of the Jedi. 

Mr. Cameron was at least partially inspired by Frank Herbert’s masterpiece Dune, where a feudal society in the distant future relies upon the mineral, spice, found only on the desert planet, Arrakis, to power their interstellar ships.  A continued supply of spice requires them to subjugate the native Fremen, who rebel against their invaders.  Sound familiar?  The difference between the two will help illustrate the overall point of this post.  Mr. Cameron is a filmmaker and technical wizard.  He combines a near pathological attention to detail with an eye for action scenes, having crafted two of my personal favorites Terminator and Aliens.  When these elements are front and center, Avatar: The Way of Water works.  Mr. Cameron, however, even with a team of underlings, is not a science fiction writer and his failure to appreciate the finer points of the story, character, and consistent world building rapidly overwhelm the entire work.  Mr. Herbert, meanwhile, never made a movie in his life, but he could tell a story and every aspect of Dune is well considered, a part of a coherent whole.  The economy of the future depends on a steady supply of spice, and therefore the government in power has no choice except to mine the mineral from Arrakis or risk a galaxy wide collapse.  Their interest in the planet is entirely economic, and they would likely have left the Fremen alone were it not for the unfortunate fact they are native to the spice producing world.  The fate of the galaxy, however, trumps moral concerns and they have little choice except to keep mining the mineral.  This allows us to sympathize with humans, especially when the varying houses are depicted quite differently.  The Atreides, for example, are perceived as noble and just, fulfilling their duty to the empire with as little footprint as possible.  The Harkonnens are far more bloodthirsty and ruthless.  We side with one, but not the other, setting up an important contrast and dividing our own loyalties.  In principle, we would prefer the Fremen be left alone to live in peace.  In practice, however, we also support the Atreides because of their finer qualities, even if the two groups have conflicting ends at first.  This is made more real by our distaste for the Harkonnens.  It’s simple, but effective, coherently framing the story while being inspired by both the oil-driven economy of the 1960s and the political organization of the middle ages.  We can see our own world in theirs’ however different it is on the surface. Mr. Cameron on the other hand depicts human civilization as almost universally evil, literally killing every planet we touch.  There is no one to root for on the human side, no reason to believe humanity is worth saving, and no redeemable qualities on display. There are some exceptions for individuals like Jake and a scientist we meet in the film, but the RDA that runs the show on Earth is a military dictatorship that does not care who or what they destroy in the quest for power.  There is no balance between Dune’s different families here.  The humans might as well be orcs, and are reduced to cannon fodder. The only contrast is with Na’vi, who are equally universal in their wisdom and justice.  Pandora, therefore, might as well be the Garden of Eden, replete with every possible wonder until humanity comes to conquer it.

Kiri, the daughter of Grace Augustine, also has an illustrative parallel in Dune.  Kiri is broadcast as the miracle child from the very opening sequence, where we learn that she had a mysterious if not immaculate conception in the comatose body of Ms. Augustine’s avatar.  No reason is presented for this occurrence, merely another plot point that screams to the audience something important will happen and sure enough, by the end of the film Kiri appears to possess extraordinary, rather undefined powers.  After suffering from an unexplained bout of epilepsy when connecting to the world tree, she recovers and goes onto saves her adopted siblings from an attacking submarine by controlling undersea life and then does the same again to rescue them from drowning at the end of the film (one in a series of bizarre repetitions as people get captured once, escape, and then get captured again for seemingly no reason).   There is no explanation how she can do this or why; the epilepsy obviously has something to do with it, but then suddenly she’s fine (of course, after human treatment failed yet Na’vi treatment miraculously worked). Overall, the underlying mechanism seems even less compelling than the Force in Star Wars.  It simply is because the plot demanded it, and we can be sure that the sequels will build on it in the same manner.  Dune, however, is also the story of a messiah-like figure who will lead the Fremen to victory, the Kwisatz Haderach, but Mr. Herbert, unlike Mr. Cameron, does not simply create this character out of thin air and grant them miraculous powers to save the plot whenever needed.  Rather, he cleverly embeds a story within a story.  This story begins with a mysterious group known as the Bene Gesserit who have conducted a generations long breeding program to create a superhuman that can “be in two places simultaneously.”  A part of this plan is to implant the idea that a superhuman is required to save the galaxy and the Bene Gesserit have been busy spreading this story everywhere, including to the Fremen.  Mr. Herbert does not spell out the nature of the savior’s powers specifically in the early going, but given the way spice allows a mind to manipulate time and space, we can assume that the Kwisatz Haderach would have related abilities.  The seed thus planted with the reader and the world itself, there is a sense of satisfaction when the Atreides heir, Paul, is proclaimed the savior by the Fremen.  The event is not unexpected given the backdrop, but the underlying complexity and competing narratives within narratives make it work on a level that Avatar: The Way of Water simply does not.

Ultimately, Mr. Cameron substitutes plot points for story and character, and visual detail for worldbuilding, failing to achieve his narrative goals or deliver on the underlying promise.  Sadly, this trend is not unique to Mr. Cameron.  Hollywood in general is stocked with technical wizards and few real story tellers.  Acclaimed director Christopher Nolan suffers from the same problem in many cases, that of not being a real science fiction writer, but pretending to be.  Interstellar, for example, tells a story of how gravity and acceleration can warp time, but does so in a way far less satisfactory than the classic of the genre, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, which takes these concepts to another level and would make a masterful film.  Similarly, Tenet is a time travel action film that fails as science fiction compared to the great works in the genre.  Steven Spielberg likewise muddled Kubrick’s last project, AI: Artificial Intelligence beyond the point of recognition.  All of these directors and others would be better off following the trend of Stanley Kubrick himself and choosing source material to adapt, rather than trying to create worlds out of whole cloth, worlds they are not really qualified or skilled enough to bring to life.  This is not necessarily a criticism of these or other directors that suffer from the same problem.  Directing and storytelling, especially in science and speculative fiction, are two different skills, rarely, if ever, found in the same individual.  J.R.R. Tolkien was perhaps the greatest creator of fictional worlds who ever lived, but no one would suggest he should be behind a camera.  I’m reminded of the great W.H. Auden’s review of the Fellowship of the Ring, the first of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.  As he put it in 1954 long before sci-fi and fantasy went mainstream, “The first thing that one asks is that the adventure should be various and exciting; in this respect Mr. Tolkien’s invention is unflagging, and, on the primitive level of wanting to know what happens next, The Fellowship of the Ring is at least as good as The Thirty-Nine Steps. Of any imaginary world the reader demands that it seem real, and the standard of realism demanded today is much stricter than in the time, say, of Malory. Mr. Tolkien is fortunate in possessing an amazing gift for naming and a wonderfully exact eye for description; by the time one has finished his book one knows the histories of Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves and the landscape they inhabit as well as one knows one’s own childhood.”  This is what Mr. Cameron and others in Hollywood aspire to, but will never achieve.  (On an interesting side note, The Thirty-Nine Steps was directed by Alfred Hitchcock, another master that relied upon source material for his films)  They should stick to technical wizardry and leave the underlying story to the professionals.