Kate Winslet – 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.

I was a huge Woody Allen fan for years but haven’t watched his movies since Dylan Farrow published her letter detailing memories of abuse. Until I was assigned Wonder Wheel this week, I avoided his films. Having an object of intense identification (whom I aspired to imitate as a writer-filmmaker) suddenly designated for intense ostracism resulted in alienation: You just don’t think about who you formerly idolized. I loved him; now, I associate him with rape.

,p>His later, hackier works are often pale shadows of movies from the height of his talent. (Instead of watching them, I now periodically consume Farrow family testimony.) Any online discussion of new work instantly becomes a battleground over the specific history of his case. His movies lay the groundwork for many other romantic comedies and dramas, and their association with child rape is an incredibly uncomfortable piercing of the pop-culture bubble.

The bubble should pop. Nevertheless, the first two-thirds of Wonder Wheel has the attributes of a dramatic product that is consumable. We open on Mickey (Justin Timberlake) in a 1950s Coney Island lifeguard tower, addressing the audience. He is a playwright who wants to write a great melodrama in the style of Eugene O’Neill

The beach he surveys is fully realized: a million bright bathing suits in Edward Hopper light. We follow Carolina (Juno Temple) and Ginny (Kate Winslet) as they meet there. Ginny is an actress turned waitress, and Carolina is her stepdaughter, on the run from a Mafioso ex-husband, in search of her estranged father, Humpty (Jim Belushi). They go back to Ginny’s house, and it is a proper stagebound set with the eponymous Ferris wheel in the window, always flooded with artificial golden light. The trio emote in their cramped, fake quarters with screaming and monologues, but the framework saves it.

The O’Neill and Tennessee Williams pastiche forgives the tendency of Allen’s characters to state their thoughts and feelings too plainly. Temple and Winslet are pros; Belushi never quite leaves the quotation marks of his character, an abusive husband who wears a wife-beater. Timberlake pulls double duty as both self-proclaimed author of this world and Ginny’s secret lover. He gives one too many speeches commenting on the action, but there is a coldness to his eyes and a willingness to deceive in his delivery that make him interesting.

Justin Timberlake and Kate Winslet (right) star in Woody Allen’s new film Wonder Wheel.

Ginny and Mickey discuss fatal flaws in tragedy. Humpty threatens to hit Ginny. Winslet’s pyromaniac son (Jack Gore), the only openly comedic character, sets things on fire. Ginny dreams of starring in Mickey’s play and running away with him to Bora Bora. As she begins to obsess over him, Winslet does a great soliloquy swathed in unnatural red light. When things get more melodramatic, her scenes are soaked in neon blue, then harsh white.

Unfortunately, the artificiality that sold the beginning of the movie handicaps emotional connection at its end. Simple moments like a birthday party have no real life. The pauses between lines among minor characters there have the rhythm of an amateur stage production where the timing is flat. What made Allen’s delivery as an actor special was the sense he was both doing a comedian’s routine and reacting authentically to the world he had constructed around him. His anger and fear seemed real.

Without Allen, everyone is Margaret Dumont. The only characters that seem alive are the two female leads. Temple mainly fuels the plot, but Winslet has a great American accent that is best used in cutting anger and brutal sarcasm. The movie should have built toward that, turning her self-hatred outward toward those around her. Instead, at the finish line it fumbles a final monologue by heading toward an emotional state similar to Cate Blanchett’s in Blue Jasmine: denial.

As with everything, Allen’s biography leaks in. Ginny seems to be a stand-in for Mia Farrow, Timberlake for Allen. The movie is arguably a multimillion-dollar protestation of innocence. Last week, Dylan Farrow wrote a second letter, realleging the abuse and demanding Allen’s removal from the world of prestige filmmaking as the only punishment available (after previous contradictory legal episodes). Her question is not of separating the art from the artist, but of public safety. If Allen is a predator in a position of power, he is able to commit crime and avoid both justice and rehabilitation. Such questions make Allen’s art inconsequential to his nonfiction.