In the more than a decade since Avatar became the highest-grossing film of all time – raking in $2.9 billion at the box office – it fell into a sort of limbo. The cardboard-cutout story – indigenous people fighting off aggressive eco-exploiting colonists – was forgiven because of the pioneering visual effects that director James Cameron brought to the screen.
The long-awaited sequel Avatar: The Way of Water is set after the defeat and eviction of the “sky people” (ie humanity) from the forests of Pandora, a fictional moon of a distant gas giant. The hero of the first film – paralysed former marine turned indigenous leader Jake Sully – has settled down with his Na’vi wife Neytiri to start a family. Inevitably the sky people return to disrupt this idyll, with plans to completely colonise Pandora, as Earth is soon to be uninhabitable.
With the arrival of their vast resource-stripping machines and space-marine bodyguards, we are also treated to the return of Avatar’s great antagonist – marine colonel and former mentor to Sully, Miles Quaritch, who was cloned into the 10-foot blue body of a Na’vi before his death in the first film. Soon after his arrival, he is dispatched with a team of similarly upgraded, formerly dead jarheads to track down his former protégé. Cue an initial clash with our hero and the kidnap of his adopted human son, Spider, who happens to be Quaritch’s biological son.
Aware that Spider could be forced to lead the humans to his tribe’s mountain hideaway, Sully and his family flee to the sea, where they settle with the reef-dwelling Na’vi – differentiated from the Sullys by their turquoise skin and facial tattoos reminiscent of Maori Tā moko.
From here on, the sequel is much the same as its predecessor, albeit underwater and seen through the eyes of child protagonists; there is remarkably little for Jake and Neytiri to do. As before, the protagonists must find their way among a new people with different traditions who don’t accept them as their own; they go through rites of passage, learning to embrace and protect new CGI beasties; and, of course, fighting off the nature-destroying sky people and their dazzling array of hi-tech weaponry. This time, they are no longer after “unobtainium” ore, but in accordance with the fishy environs are pursuing tulkun (whales) for exoplanetary ambergris, which can halt the ageing process in humans.
These leviathans of the deep are hailed by the reef-dwelling Na’vi for their intelligence, capacity for musical composition, mathematics and philosophy, while humans prize them solely for their economic promise.
These thinly disguised whales live in soothing symbiosis with their turquoise humanoid neighbours. Indeed, barring one briefly sinister sharklike creature, Pandora’s watery flora and fauna is almost comically friendly – so friendly that you start to wonder whether any of them ever actually eat. Cameron’s vision is quaint and appealing, though it conveniently glosses over Mother Nature’s more ruthless side.
Released around the same time as Cameron’s eco-opus was the fifth season of Yellowstone, the saga about the Dutton family’s battle to keep their ranch in present-day Montana, which presents a markedly different view. Yellowstone and its ever-expanding universe of historic prequels and spinoffs – 1883 (about the Oregon trail) and 1923 (about ranching during Prohibition) – present an eternal three-way conflict between the Duttons (and other ranchers), the First Nations tribes and the corporations as they fight over the rights to own the land in Paradise Valley, Montana.
Though old tensions between the legal and ancestral owners of the land are endlessly threatening to boil over, it soon becomes apparent who the true enemies of the land are: corporate America and the state government that can profit from it. This is no accident as the creator of the Yellowstone universe is rancher-turned-writer and native Texan, Taylor Sheridan.
Sheridan doesn’t hesitate to instruct his audience in the day-to-day life of the modern-day wranglers, of cowboys and cowgirls – from birthing and branding cattle to breaking horses, from fence repair to the administration of antibiotics and pretty much everything in between.
What is perhaps most appealing about Sheridan’s work is his ability to communicate the necessity of the way of life that he so clearly cherishes. The audience isn’t just presented with a snapshot of nature and the adjacent cowboy lifestyle, it’s also given a reason as to why it is as it is.
The idioms and sayings that pepper Sheridan’s dialogue may be a little folksy at times and a tad too idealistic at others, but they are rooted in a striking sincerity about the land. That several of the show’s series regulars are bona fide cowboys themselves (including Ryan Bingham, Forrie J Smith and Jake Ream), and Sheridan’s insistence that his actors attend a cowboy bootcamp to learn the trade, speaks to his commitment to authenticity.
Rather than creating an immaculate Eden to be ravaged by man after his industrial Fall, as Cameron does, Sheridan presents a vision of nature that is dignified and dangerous. And it is all the more compelling for it.
Avatar: The Way of Water is in cinemas nationwide. Yellowstone is available to watch on Amazon Prime
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