Avatar: The Way of Water — Waterlogged

Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for strong violence, dramatic intensity, partial nudity and occasional profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.23.22

Well, it happens to the best of us.

 

James Cameron has run out of ideas.

 

Realizing that their presence puts the entire Na'vi clan in peril, Jake (Sam Worthington,
far right) insists that his family — from left, Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), Neytiri (Zoe
Saldaña), Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) and Lo'ak (Britain Dalton) — must leave their
home, and move far away, to another part of Pandora.

There’s no shortage of opulent, eye-popping imagination in this long-overdue sequel to his 2009 hit; this is sci-fi/fantasy world-building on a truly monumental scale. Every frame could be extracted and admired, for the meticulous detail and all the “little bits” that you’ll likely overlook during first viewing.

That said, sitting through this semi-slog a second time, won’t ever make my to-do list.

 

Writer/director Cameron, with a scripting assist from Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Josh Friedman and Shane Salerno, has basically recycled the first film’s plot, along with — thanks to cloning — the exact same primary villain: Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang). He and his elite team of kill-crazy mercenaries have been transformed into “recombinants” : artificial 9-foot-tall avatars embedded with the memories of the humans whose DNA was used to create them.

 

The character template has broadened a bit, and the setting has shifted from the forest-dwelling Omatikaya Na’vi clan to the ocean realm of the Metkayina clan. But the conflict is identical: Earth’s nasty-ass Resources Development Administration (RDA) returns in force, this time determined to colonize all of Pandora, as the new home for humanity.

 

“Earth is about to become inhabitable,” RDA’s Gen. Francis Ardmore (Edie Falco, appropriately callous) intones, “so Pandora’s natives must be … tamed.”

 

And, as if this bit of déjà vu all over again weren’t enough, Cameron’s climactic third act includes a re-tread of Titanic’s ultimate fate … except, instead of a sinking ocean liner, our heroes wind up scrambling about the shifting decks of a 400-foot-long attack vessel, as it slowly slips beneath the sea. Heck, we even get the same “climb this way … now this way” scramble involving two key characters.

 

All that said, this still could have been a reasonably engaging 150-minute film … were it not expanded into an insufferably self-indulgent 192 minutes. Cameron clearly didn’t trust his three co-editors.

 

The second act, in particular, accomplishes little beyond filling time. So many tight close-ups of slow, thoughtful takes; so many half-baked lines delivered with measured, melodramatic intensity.

 

The Forgotten Battle: A bleak, riveting war epic

The Forgotten Battle (2021) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated TV-MA, with R-levels of relentless violence and gore, and dramatic intensity

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang

The World War II experience, as depicted by Hollywood since the 1940s, logically has focused on the involvement of U.S. troops; during subsequent decades, our expanding impression of the Allied struggle against Nazi forces — on the large and small screen — has been augmented by equally absorbing and informative films from our British cousins.

 

Marinus (Gijs Blom), who betrayed his Dutch comrades by joining the German invaders,
finds his beliefs shaken after a telling conversation with a disillusioned Nazi officer.

But very few English-language productions have acknowledged the greater scope of Allied resistance. Rare exceptions include 1977’s A Bridge Too Far, which takes place in September 1944 and gives equal weight to American, British, Canadian, Polish and Dutch participation in Operation Market Garden; and portions of the 2001 HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, with similar attention paid to Canadian involvement.

No surprise, then, that it has fallen to Dutch filmmakers to properly depict how the Allied/Nazi clash impacted a considerable portion of the Netherlands.

 

Director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s impressively ambitious De slag om de Schelde — re-titled The Forgotten Battle, for its Stateside release — is the second most expensive Dutch film ever made, and the money certainly is visible on the screen. This is riveting, old-style, war-era filmmaking, with hundreds of extras populating production designer Hubert Pouille’s jaw-droppingly expansive sets and locations.

 

The overall tone? Quite grim.

 

The story is set primarily in German-occupied Zeeland, the westernmost province of the Netherlands, following the June 1944 Normandy landings and subsequent incremental advance against Nazi forces. As cleverly illustrated by the interactive map that prologues this film, the Allies’ goal is to open a shipping route to Antwerp, in Belgium, to act as an essential supply channel.

 

As summer passes into autumn, the extremely complex script — credited to van Heijningen, Paula van der Oest, Jesse Maiman, Pauline van Mantgem and Reinier Smit — follows subsequent events through the eyes of three disparate (fictitious) characters.

 

Marinus van Staveren (Gijs Blom), a turncoat Dutch volunteer who joined the Wehrmacht in the naïve belief that Germany would improve conditions in his country, is introduced during a furious battle against Russian forces on the Eastern front. Marinus later wakens in a hospital, more or less intact, and comes to the attention of a disillusioned SS lieutenant, who — after having lost both his legs — has learned just how unscrupulous the Nazi concept of “fair” actually is.

 

“If you tell a lie big enough, and repeat it often enough,” the lieutenant laments, quoting Joseph Goebbels, “eventually people will come to believe it.”

 

(Boy, doesn’t that sound familiar?)

 

The lieutenant still has some juice with his superiors, and — in an unexpected act of benevolence — manages to get Marinus transferred away from the front.