In what now feels like a humbling admission of my own naiveté, I sat down to watch “Fire and Water: Making the Avatar Films” under the baseless impression that Disney+’s new streaming documentary was a legitimate creative exercise in its own right, and therefore worthy of review. My bad.
I knew, of course, that its release was timed to stoke interest in next month’s “Avatar: Fire and Ash” (my interest in which requires no further stoking, I assure you), just as I knew better than to expect the most corporate of movie studios to serve up a candid, “Megadoc”-like glimpse behind the scenes of a James Cameron set just a few short weeks before the headstrong auteur’s latest blockbuster is set to open in every multiplex on planet earth.
And yet, if only because the “Avatar” franchise is so deserving of more serious examination, it never occurred to me that a feature-length window into the intricacies of its creation would settle for being a transparent piece of sponsored content. Or that, even worse, it would be arbitrarily divided into episodes in order to inflate the view count and/or pander to short attention spans (Eywa wept).
Directed by Thomas C. Grane, “Fire and Water: Making the Avatar Films” is so unabashedly a glorified EPK that it opens with Cameron imploring viewers to stick around till the end for a sneak peak at the next installment of the franchise (spoiler alert: While the eventual clip promises to be a crucial scene in the actual movie, it’s a bit whatever out of context). Back when America was a real country and physical media was still a multi-billion dollar industry, this kind of thing would be automatically packaged on every Blu-ray from “Avatar” to “Zack and Miri Make a Porno.”
In fact, some — or even most? — of the footage in “Making the Avatar Films” was included on the collector’s edition disc that Disney released for “The Way of Water” two years ago. I’d be all for offering subscribers “free” access to that content, but for a service that provides so little original programming, it feels somewhat disingenuous to frame this as a major event.
And yet, for all of those complaints, it’s undeniably fascinating to watch how Cameron and his team put these marvels together, and there is at least some value to seeing a more fully collated look at how the very blue sausage gets made. That value stems from the other thing that Cameron announces directly to camera at the start of the doc: “I want to let you in on a little secret,” he says. “‘Avatar’ films are not made by computers. They’re made by people.”
True enough, while the documentary that follows has a heavy emphasis on the bespoke technology behind the franchise’s living alien world (specifically as it pertains to the subaquatic challenges invited by “The Way of Water”), every instance of on-set problem-solving — every detail of how that technology was leveraged towards creating a singularly immersive sense of wonder — is visibly grounded in the work of brilliant artists and engineers. Clear as that already was to anyone who’s sifted through the various featurettes that have been made about these films, the 75-minute running time of Grane’s whatever this is allows him to hammer the point home with greater emphasis than ever before.
While Cameron has been a bit more bullish about incorporating AI into his workflow than you might expect from the man who invented Skynet (to say nothing of the hideous AI upscaling he recently inflicted upon several of his greatest films), “Making the Avatar Films” is nothing if not a testament to the fact that the most sophisticated motion pictures ever created are indivisibly human at heart.
Indeed, “Making the Avatar Films” is nothing but a testament to that fact, but it’s totally enjoyable to watch so far as such testaments go. The project has the hodgepodge structure of a dozen Blu-ray bonus features cut together, but it adheres to the general chronology of Cameron and co. figuring out how to shoot performance capture underwater. While the director is a militant visionary who refuses to take “no” for an answer, there’s something enjoyably childlike to his process of trial-and-error.
We don’t get to see him ideating about the characters or the story beats (this entire documentary takes place on one of two soundstages, save for a brief excursion to the Bahamas in the middle), so our entire sense of his creative drive is focused on figuring out how to make the movie’s aquatic stunts feel believable to the naked eye. As a result, that challenge reads as less of an obstacle than an excuse — a manufactured invitation to do things that had never been done before. As Cameron puts it, a mischievous smile on his face: “The second you decide to make a movie underwater, you’ve just opened a gigantic can of whoop-ass on yourself.”
We watch as Cameron and his team come to the realization that dry-for-wet wire work isn’t convincing enough to get the job done, which gives them permission to “think of it like the space program” and model the “Way of Water” soundstage after NASA’s training facilities, complete with massive water tanks. But every solution brings another five problems along with it, as the crew soon realizes that the infrared lighting scheme they used on the first “Avatar” won’t work in an environment that’s 800 times denser than air. Oh no, I guess they’ll just have to shoot with infrared and ultraviolet light at the same time and invent a program that allows them to synthesize the two camera feeds in real-time.
Subsequent headaches inspire a similar creative giddiness, to a degree that left me wondering if Cameron was as fulfilled by writing the movie’s script as he was by figuring out that he could address a crucial lighting issue by coating the surface of the water tank in tiny white ping-pong balls. The wave machine someone invented to simulate the oceans of Pandora risks crushing the actors to death under eight pounds of steel? I guess the boys will just have to put their heads together and design an elaborate, jail-like structure to keep people safe from the device. Shooting “wet for wet” requires the cast to hold their breath for several minutes at a time? That sounds like a great excuse to hang out with underwater parkour expert Kirk Krack for several weeks on end — freediving lessons for everyone! It’s basically just billionaire summer camp for nerds.
Having said that, the most compelling aspect of this doc isn’t the tech itself, but rather how these newfangled tools allow Cameron to reinforce the most basic aspects of cinematic storytelling. For all of the toys at his disposal, Cameron never loses sight of — and is always driven by — the simple fact that Pandora will never feel real to audiences if it doesn’t feel real to his actors. “Acting is truth in imagined circumstances,” Sam Worthington pops up to remind us, but the “Avatar” movies wouldn’t be able to engineer a fraction of their emotionality if not for how far Cameron went to make its circumstances easier for his cast to imagine.
We don’t get to see much in the way of the director helping Sigourney Weaver or Zoe Saldaña to better understand their motivation or whatnot, but perhaps that’s because he didn’t really have to do that. The freediving, the man-made waves, the specific PSI that Neytiri would require to pull open a half-submerged door on a sinking ship, and the rest of the solved problems that Cameron assigned himself allow the swimming pool to function as a portal to another world, as primordial emotion and newfangled technology are braided together as organically as Na’vi dreadlocks into the roots of the Hometree in order to make both sides of the equation seem as real as the back of your hand.
To a less rewarding but even more lucid degree than the “Avatar” movies themselves, this slapdash making-of documentary serves as an all too necessary reminder that digital film technology — including but not limited to AI — is little more than a parlor trick, if not for the presence of a human soul behind it.
“Fire and Water: Making the Avatar Films” is now available to stream on Disney+.
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