Avatar: The Way of Water

Writer-director James Cameron has a knack for writing chimera: characters who combine, or who are at least attempting to reconcile, two disparate forms of identity. His Terminators are the most obvious example of this psychological discrepancy. They are futuristic machinery wrapped up in a sheath of human flesh that either rots in place after being shot full of holes or transmits such a convincing camouflage that the deception begins to turn itself inwards, inspiring a dot matrix approximation of heroism. In the first Avatar, Sam Worthington's futuristic conquistador, Jake Sully, dreamt himself into a life in which his withered battle-scarred body had been replaced with that of a towering feline alien. This new flesh and carbon fibre bone allowed him to run and leap then, finally, soar with dragons. Sully willingly plugged into this transformative experience, consciously deciding to let his waking - human - life fade away and, eventually, die. 

Cameron, co-writing with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, dedicates no small part of Avatar: The Way of Water to re-examining this process from the perspective of a less enthusiastic participant. Stephen Lang's motion-captured shade of Colonel Miles Quaritch is an abomination; a high-and-tight infiltrator who makes no attempt to assimilate or even disguise his Earthly origins. He is the memories and prejudices of an American imperialist, inscribed on the eve of what he believed to be his career-defining victory then wired into another massive cobalt clone. His arrival on the satellite planet of Pandora is marked by cataclysm. The enormous retrorockets decelerating these unwelcome visitors obliterates the forest setting from the first film; animals and trees alike are shattered then consumed by bubbling firestorms. Simon Franglen's score - which otherwise builds itself around the themes and motifs of the late James Horner - seizes on this apocalyptic, mechanised imagery, quoting the pounding percussion and shrieking strings of Gustav Holst. Mankind's arrival is likened to that of a Martian invasion force. Terraforming on this habitable moon is to be achieved through extermination, a plan of envy straight out of HG Wells' The War of the Worlds. 

The Quaritch thing is always aware that it is a facsimile, it embraces the designation, allowing a video recording of its (somewhat dismissive) clone father to appoint it as a creature of pure vengeance. With very little information regarding its parent's passing - this is reproduction as the purely technological duplication of the hopelessly macho - the zipped-up Na'vi decides to retrace Sully's steps, to experience this planet as he did. Jake Sully's eager symbiosis is caricatured by a team of colossal photostats who refuse to let go of their branded sunglasses and tactical apparel. Quaritch and his thugs only speak the language of conquest, clinging on to the possessions and hang-ups that defined their (now extant) human lives. We are told a couple of times in The Way of Water that Na'vi bodies can easily survive in the oxygen rich environments mankind has created on Pandora. The Quaritch copy though remembers being human, it's fixated on its vulnerability in this harsh extraterrestrial environment. So, rather than breathe shallow in a false climate, it clings to an artificial breathing apparatus, supping on it greedily.