Cliff Curtis – Memphis Flyer

It took George Miller 18 years to shepherd Mad Max: Fury Road from pre-production to release. He went down blind technological alleys; wrote, produced, and then canceled an anime version; and went through multiple Maxes and Furiosas. But the false starts and revisions paid off — Fury Road was the best film of the 2010s, and arguably the greatest action movie of all time.

James Cameron’s been cooking his sequel to 2009’s Avatar for 13 years. The Way of Water was originally scheduled to bow in the summer of 2014, but underwater motion capture photography, which had never been attempted before, turned out to be much harder than the director anticipated. Then came the pandemic.

Miller used his time to refine Fury Road down to its essence, assembling a stripped-down hot rod of a film that goes full throttle for two hours. The years of delay had the opposite effect on Cameron. His original idea for an Avatar trilogy expanded into a pentalogy, and TWOW is a bladder-bursting 192 minutes long — comparable to the running time of Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King but with fewer endings.

We return to Pandora to find that just about the same amount of time has passed there as in real life. Jake (Sam Worthington), the runaway space marine, has married Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and now permanently inhabits his blue Na’vi body. He’s the chief of the tribe, and they’re raising quite a brood: two sons, Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) and Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), and their daughter Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss). They’re also raising Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), the Na’vi daughter of the avatar of the late Dr. Grace Augustine (also Sigourney). Who Kiri’s father is, or how any of that works, biologically speaking, is left a mystery for future installments. In the midst of all the techno-wizardry, using mo-cap to empower Sigourney Weaver to play her own teenage daughter turns out to be Cameron’s greatest stroke of genius.

Two Sigourney Weavers meet in *Avatar: The Way of Water*.

The strangest member of the mixed Sully clan is Spider (Jack Champion), the biological son of Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), Jake’s former commanding officer who died during Avatar’s final battle. Spider was abandoned on Pandora after the humans withdrew and was adopted by the Sullys.

But Col. Quaritch’s story isn’t over. The Resource Development Administration (RDA) backed up his consciousness as a way of preventing the loss of institutional knowledge. The powers that be implanted his mind into a Na’vi clone. When the RDA returns to Pandora in force, clone Col. Quaritch is sent on a mission to hunt down the traitor Sully and terminate him with extreme prejudice.

Had TWOW been released on time in 2014, the last decade at the movies would look very different. It’s quite possible the 3D revolution Avatar inspired wouldn’t have fizzled in the mid-teens. Cameron understands the technology better than anyone. Instead of just throwing things at the screen for cheap shocks, he uses 3D to add depth to scenes. Cameron’s goal is to be immersive. And with TWOW, “immersive” becomes literal. The director’s other obsession besides filmmaking is scuba diving, and one gets the impression that he would be perfectly content to jettison all of this annoying story and just take us on a 3D swim with space whales — and I’d watch it.

The Sully family meets the space whales, who are called “tulkuns,” when they flee for the coast to hide among the Metkayina, or “Reef People.” Na’vi who are aqua-green instead of turquoise, the Reef People are led by Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and Ronal (Kate Winslet), who, like many female Na’vi in this film, is what I like to call “skinny-pregnant.”

Kate Winslet and Cliff Curtis in *Avatar: The Way of Water*

Cameron’s ambition for his story is to become the Tolkien of the screenplay format, with Avatar as The Hobbit. Instead of Tolkien’s high European fantasy, Cameron’s idiom is the “hard” science fiction of the 1950s, with a sprinkling of New Wave influence (primarily from Ursula Le Guin, whose A Wizard of Earthsea provides inspiration for The Way of Water’s archipelago setting). Cameron’s gender politics blind spots and gung-ho militarism reflect the limitations of his chosen genre. On the other hand, TWOW is an anti-colonialist work, The Last of the Mohicans as eco-science fiction. Even though he’s a hero to his adoptive world, Sully and his kids are stuck between cultures. The human colonists are mostly craven xenophobes, but even the enlightened Na’vi carry their own prejudices.

TWOW is big, unwieldy, and sometimes clunky. But it is also truly epic in a way very few films have ever been. After a long wait, James Cameron finally delivers the goods.

Stephen King famously hates The Shining. To be clear, he hates the 1980 Stanley Kubrick adaptation of his 1977 novel, despite the fact that it is widely considered to be one of the greatest movies ever made. I’ve never really understood why. I’ve read The Shining, and sure, it’s a lot different from the movie. But different things work onscreen than work in print. That’s just the way of the world. Both the film and the book work great for the medium they’re presented in.

Maybe that’s the gist of King’s distaste. Writing is such an intimate medium. A writer can literally make you hear voices in your head. I’m doing it right now. King’s book wasn’t just a Psycho-type horror potboiler, it was about his own struggles with alcoholism. Seeing it abstracted into the third person had to be uncomfortable, especially given Kubrick’s cold, analytical style.

Ewan McGregor (above) plays an older Danny Torrance plagued by alcoholism and PTSD.

In the sequel, Doctor Sleep, which King released in 2013, the writer explored the implications of the end of The Shining. Jack Torrance, the alcoholic writer driven murderously mad by the spirits of the Overlook Hotel, has frozen to death, leaving his wife Wendy and son Danny alone. They move to Florida, and Danny tries to come to terms with his psychic powers and PTSD. Thanks to the help of the ghost of the ill-fated Overlook Hotel employee Dick Hallorann, Danny gets a handle on his shining. Not so much on the PTSD.

The film adaptation of Doctor Sleep is something unusual in the world of the Hollywood studio: an auteurist work. Mike Flanagan scores the remarkable triple bill of writer, director, and editor, something rarely seen outside the low-budget indie world. The older I get, the more skeptical I become of auteur theory, the notion that the director always puts his personal stamp on a picture. I think the interplay of talent on the production team is more important in the long run. But with Doctor Sleep, Flanagan makes a good argument, at least for the notion that he knows what he’s doing.

Kubrick’s work on The Shining was transformative, while Flanagan seems content to be translative to the text. And that’s okay. His visual style is attractive and well designed, but not flashy. King’s strengths in plotting really shine through. Every action is motivated and logical, even to a fault. Danny is played as a child by Roger Dale Floyd, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Danny Lloyd, Kubrick’s Danny, and then as an adult by Ewan McGregor, who brings a satisfying depth to the performance.

The film’s second act takes place in 2011, when Danny is taking after his alcoholic father, drifting from job to job, pounding shots and running lines on a weeknight. When he is drawn to a small New Hampshire town that seems to be perpetually bathed in autumnal night, an act of kindness by Billy (Cliff Curtis) convinces him to go to AA and clean up. He takes up residence in the town, and gets a psychic pen pal, a tween girl named Abra (Kyliegh Curran). But the pair discover that they’re being stalked by a clan of psychic vampires called The True Knot, led by Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson).

The funny thing about Doctor Sleep is that it is not so much a horror movie as a good, old-fashioned supernatural thriller. It’s more Dark Shadows than Halloween. It’s also pleasingly retro in its structure. Flanagan takes his time introducing all the players before they start bouncing off each other. Its three acts take place in three different time periods, but within the acts, there’s a lot of craziness.

King has always excelled at bringing supernatural-tinged horror down to Earth by setting the action in the most mundane of places. Hitchcock liked to set the climax of his films in recognizable landmarks, like Mount Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty. King puts a climactic set piece in a crappy little New England state park. He has a knack for finding the haunted spaces in our collective imaginations: lonely highways, abandoned factories, musty attics. Flanagan is at his best when his characters are digging up bodies in a dusty wilderness, lit by truck headlights.

Doctor Sleep is not an all-time classic, but it is a solid genre piece for horror fans that will hold up to repeat viewings. At 152 minutes, it’s long, but it doesn’t feel self-indulgent. Flanagan adds to King’s legacy and does no damage to Kubrick’s masterwork by not slavishly imitating it. Yes, during the climactic scene in the crumbling Overlook Hotel, he recreates the elevator blood-flood gag. But come on, given the opportunity, would you be able to resist such temptation?

Doctor Sleep