The Way of Water is the Way of the Future
How James Cameron fixed his own flawed ecological fantasy and showed the rest of us how it's done
The original Avatar wasn’t a particularly sophisticated piece of ecological fiction. The premise, cribbed in large part from Ursula Le Guin’s mediocre 1972 novel The Word for World is Forest, is an enthusiastic, uncritical manifestation of a subgenre I’ll call “hippy eco-fantasy.” If you’ve seen Avatar, you don’t need me to define it. Nature is a quasi-divine entity in which all creatures play a necessary role. Industrial humans threaten the perfect harmony and balance of nature to fulfill selfish and ultimately short-sighted desires.
Hippy eco-fantasy is based on a paradoxical combination of love for nature and willful ignorance of how it really works. Pandora’s biosphere makes explicit everything already implicit in the hippy environmentalist ideology. Eywa, the living spirit of Pandora, is the Gaia hypothesis and the mycelial “wood wide web” rolled into a single conscious deity that also confers an afterlife to its loyal guardians. Pandora is a complete, developed organism which can be harmed, and within it, any sort of predation or parasitism or suffering is sad but justified by its necessary role in maintaining the balance of the whole system. The audience is clearly meant to marvel at the exquisite intricacy of Pandoran ecology, delight in the bioluminescent plants, and enthuse about the badass creature designs created by speculative evolution artist Wayne Barlowe.
But within the story of Avatar, the period of creation on Pandora (and for avatars, for that matter) is over.1 The organisms and ecosystems it created exist now as a perfected treasure, something we loathe the human villains for threatening to destroy. Above all, hippy eco-fantasy emphasizes homeostasis as the most precious aspect of nature.2
The environmental attitude underlying hippy eco-fantasy mindset has had tragic consequences in the real world. It fosters a cringing fear that human health, happiness, and prosperity are an apocalyptic force. For old-school hippy environmentalists like the recently-resuscitated overpopulationist Paul Ehrlich, human culture is inherently incapable of producing an energy-rich, globally transformative civilization that sustainably supports 10 billion people. This is simply not our role in the planetary ecosystem, and sooner or later Gaia will crush our hubris.
The starting point of Avatar 2: The Way of Water is that Ehrlich was right. Human industrial civilization is a planet-killer that has already driven Earth to the brink of lifelessness, and now it has arrived to repeat their murderous habits on Pandora. And unlike Earth, Pandora has the strength to resist.
With that introduction, there’s not much reason to think that Avatar 2 is doing anything more than extending the problems of the original film. Industrial humans are back and indigenous hunter-gatherers have to fight to keep them away from yet another icon of hippy environmentalism (first giant trees, now whales). It’s not surprising that Way of Water hasn’t been lauded for its approach to ecology.
If you’re a pundit, or a housing developer, or a nuclear power company, the problem with hippy eco-fantasy is that it perpetuates this toxic and ignorant attitude. But if you’re a writer or a reader of ecological fantasy, it poses a very different problem.
The Vault
Heist movies have a simple structure: early in the film, they introduce the Vault. It’s not just any vault, of course. It’s got some special trick that makes it impossible to enter unseen. The robbers sit around a table and study blueprints, craft bespoke tools, and recruit skilled teammates to come up with a one-in-a-million plan that will crack the uncrackable Vault. Heist films are a perennial classic because love to watch people solving complicated problems. And what we love even more is watching them improvise as their carefully crafted plan falls apart.
Avatar is a heist film with an identity crisis. It introduces a treasure worth more than gold, protected by six-legged giant panthers, guards with “carbon-fiber bones,” and a planetary consciousness. It even sends Jake Sully in to case the joint. But it doesn’t follow through. The environmentalist moral gets in the way of the ecological story.
That’s the fundamental problem with hippy eco-fantasy. Ecology is the ideal context for storytelling precisely because it isn’t homeostatic. It’s an infinite dynamo of intricate, multi-faceted conflicts and games and problems to solve. Nature is worth telling stories about because the essence of nature is adaptation. The frustrating thing about hippy eco-fantasy is that it copies everything about nature except for this one all-important element. It comes so close. If it would just stop imposing its preconceived notions about balance and harmony and let the stories play out, it could be something really incredible.
That was something I’ve believed for years. I’ve believed it strongly enough to spend years writing a novel on that assumption. But to be honest, there are not as much clear proofs of concept out there as I would like. To make my case, I have to argue that anything from The Florida Project to Showgirls should count as ecological because humans are animals and survival in social settings is still ecological problem-solving. I am happy to die on that hill, but it would be nice if there were a story that showed the potential of this idea in a way that required no caveats. And it wouldn’t hurt if that story was also so popular that it made like a billion dollars.
There’s never a moment in The Way of Water that steps forward and announces that anything has really changed. If you go in expecting more of the same, it’s not hard to find it. The change is subtle but significant. Avatar invited us to cheer as a beautiful living planet successfully fought off a nasty parasite. Avatar 2 understands that the parasite is the story. The ecologically interesting part of Avatar was never Pandora. It was always the human invaders. Pandora is the most lush and expansive treasure vault ever conceived, and this time around, James Cameron actually lets the robbers take a fair crack at it.
Early on in the film, General Ardmore gives an abbreviated heist briefing. She tells us that this time around, the prize in Pandora’s vault is nothing less than complete human settlement. She and her army are here to “tame the frontier.” When they first arrive, they burn and bulldoze and hunt and kill and generally use brute force to eliminate the existing system and replace it with their own. But these blunt instruments don’t get them very far. In order to survive on Pandora, they have to adapt themselves to it in the same ways that Pandora’s inhabitants have. And as a tool-making species, that means reshaping their extended bodies through prosthetics.
Of course, making prosthetics to adapt to Pandora was already the premise of the first film. Avatar is less a battle between humans and Pandora than between two approaches to human adaptation: avatars, organic prosthetics that let humans interface with Pandoran creatures and with Eywa, and technological mech-suits and helicopters, which are spiritually inert. Despite the incredible biotechnological prowess implicit in the mere creation of the avatar in the first place, in the film this plays out as an insipid dichotomy between the natural and artificial. A flat-footed sequel might have had humans look at the cost of Jake Sully’s betrayal and think “we can’t risk that happening again” and stick with the mechanical strategy. Fortunately, Cameron goes hard in the opposite direction, hybridizing the two approaches in every way he can think of.
The Hunt
The contradiction between hippy eco-fantasy and ecological fiction crests and breaks in Way of Water’s Tulkun whaling sequence. In the dialogue surrounding this sequence, Cameron’s hippy instincts still show through. On top of the basic cruelty of murdering sentient mothers and children, Cameron piles on cliches and platitudes. The Tulkun aren’t just sentient; they’re writers of songs. They’re not just gentle giants; they’ve culturally transcended their impulse to seek revenge. Humans aren’t just killing them to get rich. They’re only using one part and leaving the rest to rot.
Beyond that familiar front, though, the movie shows us something very different: a triumphant hunting sequence of an exquisitely adapted predator. Where Avatar’s mech suits and helicopters were blunt instruments for manual labor, shooting guns, and dropping bombs, in Avatar 2, humanity’s mechanical prosthetics diversify and adapt to animal-like niches. Within a year back on Pandora, humans have created a multispecies biomechanical pack predator capable of killing and digesting the largest and most intelligent creature on the planet. Just as they made Na’vi avatars to interface with the Na’vi, they hunt whales using a ship that is itself a kind of biomechanical whale. The kill is made by harpoon boats and fishlike submarines and completed by crabs. It is a carefully orchestrated cooperative hunt that precisely exploits behavioral, anatomical, and sensory vulnerabilities. It’s a majestic feat of human ecology and it’s also profoundly tragic.
It’s not that fans of hippy eco-fantasy don’t appreciate adaptation. They certainly think they do. The problem is their yearning to believe that the beauty of the predator’s adaptation can be separated from the suffering of the prey. This is why the Na’vi always say a prayer over the bodies of any creatures they kill. It’s why Spider implies it would be more respectful if the humans at least “used the whole buffalo” when they kill the Tulkun. Within the hippy eco-fiction view of nature, predation can be good and beautiful to precisely the extent that it’s a “natural” part of the homeostatic balance of nature. For-profit whaling is very much not that, so all the suffering it causes is simply an atrocity. It has no role in the system, so it can be anathematized from the beauty that can or even must be admired in the rest of the natural world.
That separation isn’t tenable, but more importantly, it isn’t desirable. The BBC Natural History Unit, creators of eco-hippy-favorite Planet Earth, released a new series a couple months before Way of Water called Frozen Planet II. In the second episode, a pod of orca whales reenact the Tulkun whaling sequence almost beat for beat.3 They isolate a juvenile bowhead whale from its pod. Through repeating blunt force impacts to its chest, they break its ribs. They hold it underwater until it drowns, and then they eat its tongue and leave the rest to rot.
It’s not hard to see why someone committed to protecting orcas would feel the need to justify this cruelty.4 It feels right to appreciate the orca hunt as a natural wonder while solemnly recognizing the bowhead's death as a sad but necessary part of the circle of life. It's much harder to take that analogy in the other direction. If it's impressive for orcas to do this, in their element, how much more impressive is it for humans to do the same?5 And if it's an unmitigated, unjustifiable tragedy for humans to kill a whale, maybe we shouldn't be so quick to make excuses for orcas either.
This, for me, is what makes eco-fiction an endlessly rich vein of narrative power. Eco-systems are not harmonious and unchanging. They are unflinchingly cruel and endlessly creative. The Way of Water finds that vein. The Tulkun hunt is so incredible because it’s an awe-inspiring phenomenon AND an atrocity. The contradiction can’t and shouldn’t be rationalized away. The tension between the two feelings is the whole point. If you look closely enough, and care deeply enough, nature is always fascinating and heartbreaking. In the hands of a filmmaker like James Cameron, with a genuine mastery of looking and caring, that combination is pure gold6
The Big Picture
The Tulkun hunt is my favorite part of The Way of Water, but it’s a side show. The real meat of the story is Jake’s family. They represent the literal and metaphorical second generation of avatars: four avatar-Na’vi hybrids, one of whom was a mysterious virgin birth, and an adopted human orphan. Each of Jake’s children represents a different permutation of biology, loyalty, culture, and technology. Collectively, they’ve demonstrated a successful model of human settlement on Pandora. Their assimilation is one solution to the problem General Ardmore is trying to solve. Humans could simply come to Pandora and join the Na’vi through interbreeding and adoption, creating a hybrid society.
But of course Quaritch and his marines weren’t resurrected as avatars to pursue assimilation. They are hunters designed to target Jake’s family specifically. Their existence proves that there was nothing essentialist about avatars that made it inevitable that they would turn to Eywa’s side. The human faction just needed to outfit them with the right mentality. The corny oo-rah posturing these guys do makes it easy to overlook how alien they are—grown in a vat to adulthood, implanted with the memories of dead selves, neither human nor Na’vi but something intermediate, their goals and loyalty and personality not chosen but inherited. Like Jake and his children, their whole lives are a countermove in the dynamic playing out as humans attempt to make a place for themselves on Pandora.
This is what gets me really excited about the future of Avatar as a series. There are lots of settings that let us viscerally experience evolutionary change at the scale of a human life. I would consider films as varied as The Handmaiden, Master and Commander, and Uncut Gems to be obviously stories about adaptation. Through the lens of subjective selection, every up and down of our economic, creative, and personal lives is part of the evolutionary course of our species. Of course our stories are about it.
What we’re lacking is stories about evolution in a more-than-human context, stories about long-term dynamic relationships between human biology, culture, and technology, and complex non-human communities. There are a few examples. Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings series achieved this more than anything has. Cat Valente’s Orphan’s Tales. Planet of the Apes. How to Train Your Dragon. I could name more, but regardless, it’s a relatively short list. And now The Way of Water sits near the top of it.
Sometimes when I write out this idea in an essay, I worry it doesn’t come through that I’m so excited about this because it’s just cool as hell. The payoff isn’t abstract or intellectual. Natural history is inherently cool, and Cameron’s storytelling brings it to life. The climax of The Way of Water is exultant. Blue cat-elves are shooting bows and machine guns from the backs of pterodactyls. Whales are leaping out the sea to crush marines in mech-suits. Crab submarines are plucking children out of giant pitcher plants. But it’s not just random toys smashing together. It was all cool long before they had the big battle sequence, because the cool part is the process of adaptation that produced all of these things in the first place.
The Way of Water might not be to everyone’s taste. But its particular flavor is beside the point. Cameron’s success opens a door for fantasy creators. Build your version of Pandora. Take us into a world as dynamic as our own, where we can see cultures and technologies and bodies evolving in response to each other, at the pace of the lives of your characters. Don’t gloss over the pain and tragedy and the hard choices inherent in those changes. Lean into them. Use them to heighten and complicate the stakes of your story. Focus on details, show how the structure of things serves their function, but don’t tie your hands with misguided hangups about realism. Whatever you come up with probably won’t make a billion dollars. But it wouldn’t be unprecedented if it did!
This is left implicit in the movie, but it’s spelled out in The World of Avatar: A Visual Exploration.
Once again, The World of Avatar: A Visual Exploration is not at all subtle about this.
The fact that killer whales are in the same business was not lost on human whalers, and they were often killed to reduce competition for their shared prey. But on at least one occasion, orcas became long-term members of a human whaling crew. The orcas got the tongue and the humans took everything else.
Attenborough does tack on a bit at the end here to try to salvage the hippy worldview. He tells us that this cruel murder is ultimately our fault, since it was the warming climate that removed the protective barrier of sea ice that formerly kept the killers away.
To their credit, the BBC NHU series about human ecology, Human Planet, does include a sequence in which humans kill a sperm whale.
Or at least, it was this time around. Avatar has an equivalent of the Tulkun hunting sequence and it is utterly bland (they just blow up the home tree with a bunch of rockets). There’s also a Na’vi hunting sequence presented with positive affect and it’s equally underwhelming. Iteration is the way, even for the best of us.