There have been many attempts to film Herman Melville's Moby-Dick; or, the Whale. Some, like the 1998 tv miniseries with Patrick Stewart, have made a more earnest effort to stay faithful to the source material, but they all are ultimately disappointing because the task itself is a fool's errand. Moby-Dick was a novel written in 1851 American English; a movie--and try to look beyond the obviousness of what I'm saying--can never be a novel written in 1851 American English. A movie made in 2022 can only ever be a movie made in 2022, and so Avatar: The Way of Water--stay with me--may be the closest will we ever get to a spiritual adaptation of Moby-Dick to film that can speak to us in the same way that Melville hoped to speak to his contemporaries.
By saying this, I don't mean that this sequel to Avatar is an attempt to adapt Moby-Dick to the big screen, although clearly the mid-film scenes of hunting "tulkuns" in order to harvest the extremely valuable liquid inside of them were directly inspired by scenes from that book. What I mean more than that is that The Way of Water has the same feeling, the same composition, and overall some of the same messages as Melville's novel. In crafting Moby-Dick, Melville was able to pull together all the influences that his audience would have been very familiar with: Biblical scripture and Great Awakening oratory, the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare, protoevolutionary scientific literature, bloody adventure tales mythologizing the lucrative whaling industry, anthropological ethnologies, and so on. The chapters are written differently to reflect these different discourses, and often his keen observation treats them with satirical distance, albeit a biting satire that one can easily mistake for sincerity. Cameron would be a fool to incorporate the same influences into his twenty-first century film, so instead he draws from the sources that we are more familiar with: the nature documentary, the ecological disaster film, the militaristic action blockbuster, the coming-of-age, star-crossed romance, and the outsiders/outcasts-banning-together sci-fi parable. In many cases, Cameron has already made masterpieces in these genres, so he's also evoking his own oeuvre. He knows the language of cinema just like Melville knew the language of literature, and he can distill each form to the essences that make them endure. The averted glance of a teenager in love, the horror of a destroyed environment, the thrill of a battle between high-tech machines and oppressed freedom fighters--Cameron has been filming all that for years, and he does so extremely well.
Cameron's reckless disregard for conventional storytelling structure also parallels Melville's. Moby-Dick will end a chapter with two gossiping sailors ending their secret conversation because they see the villain approaching with "something bloody on his mind," only to begin the next chapter with thirty pages of taxonomic classification of whale species. Cameron's 192-minute movie likewise will juxtapose an intimate family scene against an abrupt battle sequence; will show us that the villains are inching closer toward having the upper hand only to then linger on children admiring the seascape for fifteen minutes. This was very jarring and off-putting to me at first, but once I learned to embrace the experience as being something beyond my complete comprehension and control, I surrendered to a feeling akin to believing the stories in the Book of Genesis. This was mythic storytelling that was going to place me in vivid moments of an imaginary realm. Unlike the original Avatar, there are no exposition dumps nor any carefully choreographed structure signposting how one scene leads to the next. Instead, when you learn that there is a human fishing crew operating in the oceans of Pandora, you are simply supposed to expect that this world is much larger and more complicated than you initially assumed. The original Avatar seemed small and artificial to me, but this version of Pandora comes across as a vast, immersive, fully realized world with many different people in it.
Melville faced technological progress with wonder yet also fear, questioned the power of authority to dangerously oversimplify while nevertheless succumbing to the awe that authority and prowess evokes, and celebrated the differences among individuals, species, and cultures while also embracing their potential to bond together over their similar interests. Melville showed masculinity in all its dangerous, fragile, and inspiring forms. Avatar: The Way of Water does many of the same things in a way that speaks to modern filmgoers.
Cameron has made a film that greatly surpasses the original. Just like Melville took the nineteenth-century American novel to its most experimental and essential form, Cameron has given us a film that showcases twenty-first-century filmmaking in its highest and most consummate capacity. This is more of an experience than a mere movie, and it should be experienced under the best possible conditions, i.e. 3D IMAX, by anyone interested in seeing a sci-fi master using cutting edge technology to transcend reality and take us deep into his imaginative dreams.
By saying this, I don't mean that this sequel to Avatar is an attempt to adapt Moby-Dick to the big screen, although clearly the mid-film scenes of hunting "tulkuns" in order to harvest the extremely valuable liquid inside of them were directly inspired by scenes from that book. What I mean more than that is that The Way of Water has the same feeling, the same composition, and overall some of the same messages as Melville's novel. In crafting Moby-Dick, Melville was able to pull together all the influences that his audience would have been very familiar with: Biblical scripture and Great Awakening oratory, the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare, protoevolutionary scientific literature, bloody adventure tales mythologizing the lucrative whaling industry, anthropological ethnologies, and so on. The chapters are written differently to reflect these different discourses, and often his keen observation treats them with satirical distance, albeit a biting satire that one can easily mistake for sincerity. Cameron would be a fool to incorporate the same influences into his twenty-first century film, so instead he draws from the sources that we are more familiar with: the nature documentary, the ecological disaster film, the militaristic action blockbuster, the coming-of-age, star-crossed romance, and the outsiders/outcasts-banning-together sci-fi parable. In many cases, Cameron has already made masterpieces in these genres, so he's also evoking his own oeuvre. He knows the language of cinema just like Melville knew the language of literature, and he can distill each form to the essences that make them endure. The averted glance of a teenager in love, the horror of a destroyed environment, the thrill of a battle between high-tech machines and oppressed freedom fighters--Cameron has been filming all that for years, and he does so extremely well.
Cameron's reckless disregard for conventional storytelling structure also parallels Melville's. Moby-Dick will end a chapter with two gossiping sailors ending their secret conversation because they see the villain approaching with "something bloody on his mind," only to begin the next chapter with thirty pages of taxonomic classification of whale species. Cameron's 192-minute movie likewise will juxtapose an intimate family scene against an abrupt battle sequence; will show us that the villains are inching closer toward having the upper hand only to then linger on children admiring the seascape for fifteen minutes. This was very jarring and off-putting to me at first, but once I learned to embrace the experience as being something beyond my complete comprehension and control, I surrendered to a feeling akin to believing the stories in the Book of Genesis. This was mythic storytelling that was going to place me in vivid moments of an imaginary realm. Unlike the original Avatar, there are no exposition dumps nor any carefully choreographed structure signposting how one scene leads to the next. Instead, when you learn that there is a human fishing crew operating in the oceans of Pandora, you are simply supposed to expect that this world is much larger and more complicated than you initially assumed. The original Avatar seemed small and artificial to me, but this version of Pandora comes across as a vast, immersive, fully realized world with many different people in it.
Melville faced technological progress with wonder yet also fear, questioned the power of authority to dangerously oversimplify while nevertheless succumbing to the awe that authority and prowess evokes, and celebrated the differences among individuals, species, and cultures while also embracing their potential to bond together over their similar interests. Melville showed masculinity in all its dangerous, fragile, and inspiring forms. Avatar: The Way of Water does many of the same things in a way that speaks to modern filmgoers.
Cameron has made a film that greatly surpasses the original. Just like Melville took the nineteenth-century American novel to its most experimental and essential form, Cameron has given us a film that showcases twenty-first-century filmmaking in its highest and most consummate capacity. This is more of an experience than a mere movie, and it should be experienced under the best possible conditions, i.e. 3D IMAX, by anyone interested in seeing a sci-fi master using cutting edge technology to transcend reality and take us deep into his imaginative dreams.