for an escape from the doldrums of the modern world. When these very familiar dudes keep shouting “bro” and “cuz” at each other, it kind of infringes upon the fantasy.
Courtesy of 20th Century Studios
It doesn’t help that one of the boys that Lo’ak is constantly calling “bro” and “cuz” is literally a human: Spider, a.k.a. Miles (Jack Champion), the son of the bad guy from the first movie. (He’s back this time too, for convoluted reasons.) Spider runs around in a loin cloth and with an oxygen mask on, because he’s a Na’vi in spirit if not biology. Even when Spider is captured by the humans and forced to help them locate Jake and his family, after they escape the forest, he’s wearing his Pandoran tighty-whities while rolling his eyes at and calling his captors “losers.”
There’s remarkable dissonance between how Lo’ak, Spider, and their bros talk to each other and how well-articulated the rest of the film is. Cameron has spent decades establishing the rules of Pandora: its spiritual traditions, its social structures, and the specific shades of blue skin each tribe possesses. Even if the blue people look kind of silly, they, and everything else, make sense within the confines of Pandora. For all the specificity and ambition at work in The Way of Water, that the same care wasn’t applied to how its main characters talk isn’t just strange—it’s also kind of lazy.
As I listened to these kids shout stock phrases at each other, I grew confused about the film’s tone: Was I watching a live-action movie about pubescent guys getting into oceanic misadventures, culminating in a giant spear fight on a sinking ship? Or was this a mostly computer-generated picture that just so happens to have a couple real people in it, who have influenced the unreal people to talk like they do? Was this Jake’s fault, because he was a human American man once? Or maybe this was just Cameron’s attempt at making this highly artificial movie feel a little more grounded.
Either way, Avatar hit its “bro” quota very fast,—and then continues to overuse the word for its 192-minute runtime. If we’re going to return to Pandora, please leave the boys at home.
