A Sea That Holds the Body Up

Water as a Place, Not an Effect

Lindqvist reviewed the first Avatar here and found it strongest when it trusted Pandora to exist. The sequel narrows that question usefully. Almost everything worth defending in these one hundred and ninety-two minutes happens in water, and water is the one element that cannot be faked into obedience. It has drag. It slows an arm, lifts a chest, buries sound. A body in water is a body being acted upon, continuously, by something the frame cannot argue with.

Cameron went to considerable trouble to photograph performers actually submerged rather than suspended dry and corrected afterwards. That decision is legible on screen, which is the only place a production decision has any standing. Breath becomes duration. When a Metkayina child descends, the shot holds while the descent costs something, and the cost is what makes the space real. The camera does not cut to inform us that the water is deep; it stays until depth is a fact about the body rather than a caption.

The film's compositions are at their most confident when they keep a whole figure inside the frame against a horizon of reef. Full bodies, full gestures, no coverage: the swimming sequences respect the actor's silhouette in a way the land-bound scenes rarely bother with. There is a recurring arrangement — a figure small in the lower third, the reef opening above and behind — that does what a good deep-focus composition does. It offers more than the story needs, and lets the eye go looking.

The Middle Hour

The long acclimatisation passage is the film's real achievement and its least fashionable one. Nothing much advances. A family arrives somewhere it is not welcome, and then learns to hold its breath. Held to that programme for the better part of an hour, the film becomes an argument for training rather than declaring — for showing competence acquired instead of asserted. The tulkun sequences work for the same reason. An animal that large has to be filmed with patience or it becomes a prop, and the camera is patient with it: it waits for scale to register as relation rather than as size.

The variable frame rate is the one technical choice that resists praise. Cameron drops between rates, and the effect within a single scene can be a change of substance rather than of motion — the image thinning where it moves fast, thickening where it stops. It is not manipulation exactly. It is a seam, and a seam in a film this committed to continuity is a strange thing to have engineered on purpose.

Where It Decides For You

The last stretch is where the film stops trusting itself. The action is superbly staged; that is not the complaint. Cameron knows the weight of a ship, the geometry of a listing deck, the awful patience of water finding a way in. He filmed one of these before and he has lost nothing. But the cutting accelerates past the pain it invokes, and Simon Franglen's score arrives to say what the composition has already established. There is a difference between a film that lets grief occur in a shot and a film that scores grief so the spectator cannot mistake it, and the difference is precisely the one worth insisting on. A drowning should be permitted to take its own time.