Well, it’s finally happening. After 13 freaking years, Avatar: The Way of Water is almost upon us. In fact, a sequel to Avatar is now so long overdue that it might even be considered a nostalgic follow-up in the same class as Bill and Ted Face the Music or Top Gun: Maverick. This on top of the fact that while the world was waiting on a sequel, the 3D fad came and went, 20th Century Fox went bust, and there’s no lasting pop cultural impact left from the Na’vi to be found. Could it be that we’re in for a major box office bust?

It bears remembering that people were asking that exact same question back when Avatar first dropped in 2009, twelve years after he last took over the whole godless world with Titanic.

I was there, folks. Even when Avatar was still in theaters, the detractors were many and vocal. Freaking everyone knew that the characters were paper-thin, the plot was pure bullshit, and the story was made entirely of cliches and contrivances pulled from so many other, better movies. Yet for all of that, the film is still the highest-grossing film worldwide. Adjusting for inflation, it only comes in second to goddamn Gone with the Wind!

Avatar thoroughly dominated all of humanity like nothing before or since. Nowadays, sure, we have the Marvel Cinematic Universe justifiably claiming the title of the biggest and most successful pop culture enterprise of all time. But nobody ever became suicidally depressed because the MCU isn’t real. Nobody ever claimed that they were an Asgardian in a past life. At least, I seriously hope nobody has, because that would be some next-level crazy.

And yet that’s exactly what happened with Pandora. Yes, the Na’vikin were and still are a real thing, and people do ostensibly believe that through some multiversal dumbfuckery, they either were Na’vi in past lives or currently identify as Na’vi. You know, the fictional CGI aliens that didn’t even exist until James Cameron made them up.

Avatar broke records that are still intact to this day, and it continues to inspire devotion to a psychotic extent that no other property could or should attain. There’s got to be more to it than this. What was it that ever made this movie so goddamn special?

As Disney quietly pulled the 2009 film from their Disney+ service (to drive up the box office returns on their ongoing big-screen re-release, no doubt), I went and rented the DVD to revisit the film by way of the ultimate edition extended cut. (Thank you, Movie Madness.) It is indeed a gorgeous film, and the VFX still hold up impeccably well by 2022 standards. It’s also a pathetically thin movie populated almost entirely by one-dimensional characters, held together by contrivances and cliches and bullshit.

I still distinctly remember the detractors unfavorably — but not unfairly — comparing this movie to Dances With Wolves, Pocahontas, Fern Gully, and other such environmentally-conscious films that the filmmakers shamelessly ripped off. But to my mind, the clearest comparison is with Princess Mononoke, now and forever my top choice for the greatest animated film of all time. There was another epic fantasy picture about a man trying to navigate a war between an industrial society and a sacred forest. Hell, both movies had a plot driven heavily by a romance between a man from the human world and a woman representing nature. Of course, the difference is that Mononoke made its case with nuance and intelligence, such that there were compelling characters with sympathetic motivations on all sides. It was a film about finding balance and coexistence, instead of casting one side or another as an evil that has to be defeated.

That said, while Princess Mononoke is widely regarded as a crown jewel in the oeuvre of Hayao Miyazaki — one of history’s all-time most revered animators — it’s not exactly a pop culture powerhouse on the scale of Avatar. For that matter, neither are any of the other films this one flagrantly cribbed from. What made Avatar so special? Maybe we should look instead to James Cameron’s previous world-conquering smash, Titanic.

The two films are quite alike in that they’re both bloated CGI behemoths at close to three hours long apiece, loaded with cliches and contrivances, and populated entirely with characters who barely deserve to be called as such. Both movies revolve around a romantic couple — Jack/Rose in Titanic, Jake Sully/Neytiri in Avatar — who are primarily strong by virtue of the fact that they’re two-dimensional people in a world full of one-dimensional characters. I might add that Rose and Neytiri are both a far cry from James Cameron’s feminist reputation, as his previous lead heroines — most notably Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley — were compelling and fully-realized characters in their own right with arcs independent of a male co-lead. But I digress.

Let’s get back to the point that each of those movies was close to three hours long. If that time wasn’t spent developing the characters or the plot into anything with three dimensions, then where did the time go? Well, what were the intended purposes of those movies?

Titanic was made as a heartfelt tribute to the namesake ship and those either killed or traumatized by that fateful shipwreck. Meanwhile, Avatar was made as an environmental allegory. In both cases, Cameron’s approach was to focus on the production design — the sets and costumes of the Titanic, the flora and fauna of Pandora — to make the audience feel like we’re really there. Moreover, Titanic was meant as a story about the divide between the haves and have-nots while Avatar was built as a treatise on the evils of colonizing an indigenous population. In both cases, a star-crossed romance between classes made sense.

But there’s another environmental allegory with a star-crossed romance between classes. One with fully-realized characters and a fascinating plot. And while it’s a massive sci-fi fantasy epic widely regarded as an all-time classic in its genre, it still hasn’t inspired anything close to the mania I alluded to previously. I’m of course referring to Frank Herbert’s Dune.

The key difference is that while Dune is certainly an environmental allegory, it was also written from the ground up as a political allegory. Thus while the book (and its subsequent cinematic adaptations) spent a great deal of time on the environment and people and wildlife of Arrakis, significantly more time was spent on explaining House Atreides, House Harkonnen, House Corrino, the Bene Gesserit, the Fremen, the Spacing Guild, and all the other players and agendas involved between them.

For another point of comparison, The Lord of the Rings and its related works were borne of Professor J.R.R. Tolkien’s fascination with Germanic folklore and ancient mythologies. Accordingly, huge tracts of Tolkien’s magnum opus are devoted to the objects, people, places, and entire civilizations with centuries or even millennia of backstory. Lord of the Rings is an epic story because it takes place in a world that is itself comprised of stories.

Avatar could easily be an epic saga on the scale of the Imperium or Middle Earth. But it isn’t. Nor do the filmmakers show any particular interest in achieving such a scale. Because if we’re really looking for the reference that made Avatar as utterly huge as it turned out to be, I’d argue that the answer lies with The Boy Who Lived.

J.K. Rowling set out to make a book series that would inspire and encourage kids to seek out more fantasy literature. James Cameron set out to make a film that would inspire a deep abiding love and respect for nature. Both authors achieved their goals through the same means: All throughout the Harry Potter books and films, as with James Cameron’s opus, there’s the exact same slavish devotion to the sets and locations, the flora, the fauna, the magic/technology, and so on.

But quite tellingly, neither property has any political detail like what’s shown in Dune. The Wizarding World’s Ministry of Magic and the enigmatic RDA of Avatar are both presented as monolithic entities with virtually no regard for the players or agendas involved therein. Moreover, while Lord of the Rings was all about the backstory of Middle Earth, Avatar and Harry Potter barely go into anything more than the most superficial of details about their respective lore.

It’s also important to note that Dune, Lord of the Rings, and even Princess Mononoke all took great pains in telling new stories and introducing novel concepts. We’ve already established that Avatar cribbed mercilessly from other films, but it bears remembering that J.K. Rowling didn’t bring much of anything original to her saga either. Aside from Quidditch, the Deathly Hallows, and many instances of “a mundane thing or setting, but magical” (e.g. Hogwarts = “a school, but magical”), everything from the Wizarding World was more or less pulled right off the shelf. (To wit: You think Rowling invented Horcruxes? Think again.)

But here’s the thing: With Avatar as with Harry Potter, the goal wasn’t to create a deep and thriving universe. The goal was to create a universe that the audience could immediately and effortlessly dive into.

Consider the protagonists involved. Because Dune is a political allegory, Paul Atreides is the heir to a wealthy duke, a frightfully perceptive boy genius with the resources to learn extensively about Arrakis before he ever sets foot on the desert world. Because Lord of the Rings is in many ways a great myth about great myths, Frodo Baggins was brought up with stories about the outside world by way of Gandalf and Uncle Bilbo.

By comparison, Harry Potter and Jake Sully — very much like the audience — are thrust into their respective fantasy worlds with no orientation or training whatsoever. Indeed, both characters are frequently chastised for their reckless ignorance, constantly shown to have more courage than intelligence. Yet this makes them ideal sounding boards for the other characters, such that the protagonists learn about the world and its inhabitants at the same time as we do. Most importantly, both characters have a development arc that inevitably ends with the fantasy world becoming their new home. We the paying audience are led to instinctively call the Wizarding World our home just as Harry Potter comes to do so, ditto for Pandora with Jake Sully.

It’s quite telling that even while both protagonists begin as outsiders, they’re both quickly marked as “special” by some contrived and arbitrary means. For Harry, it’s the circumstances of his parents’ death and the prophecy that singled him out as Voldemort’s potential downfall. For Jake, it’s the genome that makes him — and him alone — uniquely suited to control this particular Avatar, just before he’s inexplicably marked by floating seeds from a tree sacred to the Na’vi. On some level, yes, it’s absolutely a power fantasy that we’re following a protagonist christened as The Chosen One. But on another level, all of these omens send a clear statement to the protagonists, and thus to the audience: “This is where you truly belong. This is who you really are, this is where you were always meant to be.”

Literally everything is all about the audience viewpoint characters, to the point where their respective settings fall apart without them. For instance, Quidditch is a sport in which a Chaser throws a ball into a hoop to get ten points for their team. But if the Seeker (read: Harry) catches the Golden Snitch, their team gets 150 points, and the game ends instantly. As a game on its own merit, this makes no lick of sense whatsoever. As a challenge that Harry Potter can win or lose singlehandedly, it makes a lot of sense.

Likewise, Avatar is set on the world of Pandora, where the air is dangerous to breathe. Thus RDA has made clones of the indigenous Na’vi population, spliced with human DNA, and these clones can be remotely controlled, but only by the humans that the DNA came from. This whole process of creating an Avatar is shown to be so time-consuming and cost-effective that when an Avatar operator is prematurely killed, RDA decides that they would rather fly the controller’s identical twin across the galaxy and drop him into the Avatar with no training or prep. Because that’s the simpler and more effective solution than scrapping the Avatar and making a new one from scratch.

Why go through all this time and expense? The stated reason is to put on a friendly face to win hearts and minds with the Na’vi population. Except the Na’vi are clearly smart enough to know a human-controlled Avatar when they see one and treat them as an enemy, so that’s horseshit. As a ludicrously expensive and convoluted means of walking on Pandora when respiratory masks are available and in abundant use, the Avatar Program makes no lick of sense whatsoever. As a way for our protagonist to literally walk a mile in the shoes of the Na’vi and see through their eyes, acting as a bridge between the Na’vi and the humans, it makes a lot of sense.

Frank Herbert’s universe was big enough to tell countless stories taking place long before, after, and even during the time of Paul Atreides. J.R.R. Tolkien penned a great many stories in Middle Earth that had nothing to do with either Frodo or Bilbo. But the trade-off is that those literary universes had a higher bar of entry, with so much more backstory and politics that the reader had to get through before fully understanding and immersing themselves in these worlds. James Cameron, as with J.K. Rowling before him, made the opposite choice.

With the Wizarding World, with Avatar, and even with Titanic, the philosophy was simple: Total and immediate audience immersion at all times, at all costs. Anything to do with convoluted politics will only slow us down, so it has to go. Anything that explains where we are and how we got to this point is extraneous and only slows us down, so it has to go. Original concepts that need explanation have no place here, only established and well-worn concepts that the audience can understand completely and immediately on first sight. We can’t have the audience thinking about anything more complicated than “good or bad”, we want them focused on the pretty scenery and the character arc that will make the audience feel right at home in this fantasy land.

And what’s really sad about all of this is that if James Cameron really did want to make an environmental allegory that the entire human race would be willing to swallow without a second thought, this is pretty much the only way he could’ve done it. Cameron couldn’t make a movie about how all life on Earth is connected without getting brushed off as hippy-dippy bullshit, so he made a sci-fi allegory in which all plant and animal life is literally connected. He couldn’t sell a story about the complicated nuances of looking for climate change solutions when the whole world needs energy and so many people still need the money that comes from oil and coal, so he made up some stupid “unobtanium” rock that everyone’s after and threw away the other details.

Most depressing of all, Cameron gave us the Na’vi — these aliens with huge hyper-expressive eyes, mixing all the most adorable parts of cats and humans — in place of ecologists and indigenous peoples. Because after all these years of conditioning by politics and pundits and social media, we have an easier time sympathizing with fictional alien CGI creatures than with actual flesh-and-blood humans of another political party. Tell me I’m wrong.

So. After 13 years, is there any chance that Avatar: The Way of Water will be as successful as its prequel? Just ask the Harry Potter fandom. Yes, even in spite of J.K. Rowling’s repeated efforts at destroying her own legacy, there are still fans all over the world eager and waiting for any new content from the Wizarding World. Rowling’s method of immediate immersion at any cost is still effective and still profitable, and there’s no reason to believe it’ll be any less so for Cameron. And to the best of my knowledge, he hasn’t come out like a raving asshole lunatic the way Rowling has.

What’s more, the world has changed depressingly little since 2009. Environmentalism is still a hot topic, climate change is still an existential crisis, reckoning with the evils of past and present colonialism is an ongoing issue, and we’re no closer to any real solution for any of them because we’re still grappling with politics in a hyper-polarized time. Hell, it seems like the entire world has only gotten more sharply polarized ever since You-Know-Who got elected in 2016.

If nothing else, I can tell you this for a certainty: Never bet against James Cameron.

Avatar: The Way of Water is coming out on December 16th, 2022. Brace yourselves.