The stakes were high for Avatar: The Way of Water when it released in December 2022. In the 13 years since the Avatar franchise debuted in 2009, the filmmaking landscape had changed significantly. Between superheroes dominating theaters and the introduction (and proliferation) of streaming services changing the way people interact with movies — not to mention a global pandemic momentarily prohibiting in-person screenings — audiences do not necessarily “go to the movies” as freely as they used to. And why would they, if, for no extra cost, they know the movie they want to see will inevitably end up being available on digital? Because of all this, Avatar 2 had an uphill battle to get audiences re-invested in the world of Pandora and their favorite Na’vi.
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Of course, as evidenced by the fact that it is now the third-highest-grossing movie of all time, people went out to see Avatar: The Way of Water in theaters, and it garnered both critical and commercial acclaim. Production designer Ben Procter, in our Zoom interview, credited the film’s success to the thoughtfulness and care with which director James Cameron led the movie.

“To create something that — at least even for me, as someone who’s worked on it — is so emotionally powerful and gives you such an amazing experience of witnessing the story, I think, in a way that isn’t true with most movies — that’s a bit of a miracle,” Procter said, “and takes Jim’s mental abilities to be able to corral an unbelievably complex process to give you a piece of poetry at the end that feels simple.”

Humans Versus the Na’vi: Co-Designing with Dylan Cole

Avatar: The Way of Water finds us back on Pandora, almost two decades after the events of the first film. Jake (played by Sam Worthington) is now chief of the Omatikaya clan, and is raising a family with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), which includes their sons Neteyam and Lo’ak, their young daughter Tuk, and their adopted children Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) and Spider, a human boy born on Pandora. While their lives have been more or less peaceful to this point, things change drastically upon the return of Colonel Miles Quartich (Stephen Lang), whose memories have been permanently implanted in a Na’vi avatar, and who is out for revenge against Jake and Neytiri.

Serving as a concept art director on the first Avatar, Procter had already had a taste of Cameron’s world before stepping into a full-fledged production designer role alongside Dylan Cole for The Way of Water. “Dylan dealt with all the amazing planetary designs of the Na’vi architecture, the culture, the greenery, the fauna, and everything to do with the planet. And then, on my side is the hard-surface side, the human technology,” said Procter of how they approached their work on the film. “The joke we make is that he makes all this pretty stuff, and I get to burn it.”

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Indeed, he did burn it: early on in The Way of Water, when the humans return to Pandora, one of their ISVs (interstellar vehicle) lands on the Omatikaya clan’s forest, effectively devastating everything in its radius, which prompts Jake and his family to seek refuge with the Metkayina clan on the eastern seaboard. Immediately, it’s an internally polarizing moment: on one hand, the damage done to the forest and its living creatures (all of whom we grew to love in the first Avatar) is heartbreaking, but, on the other, you can’t ignore the level of creativity on display in the ISV in terms of its design, function, and execution.

“The story function of the humans is, by and large, is to be destroyers, to be industrial, [to have an] extraction industry mentality, kind of corporate profiteering mentality that blinds otherwise good, hardworking people to the reality of what they’re doing,” said Procter of the principle that guided his work in designing the humans’ tech. “It’s a statement about the human ability to self-deceive and to not see, and it’s no accident that the Na’vi expression of ‘I see you,’ and their connection with nature, is a counter-balance to the human perspective.”

The Beauty and Terror of Human Creation
20th Century Studios

When asked about capturing the beauty of human creation and invention and the terror and corollary destruction that sometimes comes with it, Procter said that it ultimately stemmed from Cameron’s own affinity for technology. “Jim is a techie; Jim is a frustrated engineer. He loves this stuff, even though it’s evil, so he would never settle for something that’s ham-fisted or just seemed like it was trying to be villainous.” As a result, Procter and his team “tried on the outfit of the villain character,” putting themselves in the shoes of the RDA (Resources Development Administration) in order to imagine what kinds of engineering and technology they would invest in.

It also helped that Cameron has major connections at NASA, according to Procter. “Jim has buddies at NASA, he sits on a board at NASA, and he’s such a geek. The ISV is based on Jim sitting down sometime in 2005 or something and writing up a 10-page treatise on how that ship works, which had crummy little sketches and math calculations for how much fuel and what percent of lightspeed you could achieve […] It’s a visually iconic ship, but it comes out of a fascination with real tech.”

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Another terrifying but magnificent design was that of the Sea Dragon, which serves as the base of operations for the humans, the Tulkun poachers, and at the end, a final battleground between Jake and his family and Quartich. According to Procter, it was one of the more difficult ships to design precisely because of the many functions it had to serve: “It needed to be a wing and ground-effect craft, so right off the bat, it had an interesting technical conceit to it, which was going to make it special and give it a relationship to the sea as opposed to just a normal aircraft or boat like we’ve seen before.”

An initial illustration for the Sea Dragon came from concept artist David Levy: “He [drew] this thing just crapping water into the air behind it as it blasts across the ocean.” From there, Procter and the team set out to create what he calls a “mothership”-kind of base, turning to actual sea creatures like manta rays and whale sharks to “evoke a sort of predatory creature even though [they] are fairly peace-loving creatures — they have a sort of spooky look to them.”

Underneath the sheer destruction of the humans’ technology in Avatar: The Way of Water, Procter emphasizes the importance of the scientists in the films, like Jemaine Clement’s Dr. Ian Garvin, who loathes the poaching. “As far as good-versus-evil, human-versus-Na’vi goes, the good guys on the human side tend to be scientists — there’s no accident behind that,” said Procter. “It’s an interesting subtlety to how Jim wants to use science as a point of ambiguity between the good and bad.”

Avatar: The Way of Water is now available on Digital and will be released on 4K, Blu-ray and DVD June 20. Avatar will also be available on 4K for the first time June 20.