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Avatar 2: The Way of Water


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20 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

And is it churlish of me to mention that none of those reviews use the dreaded "D-word"?

 

It's not churlish. It's ridiculous. Language is for using.

21 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

See the difference? Think I'm being too harsh?

 

You asked for positive reviews that still made that criticism. I gave you positive reviews that still made that criticism. Now they're too positive? I sense goalposts being desperately shoved. 
 

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As far as i can tell, this entire derailment began with Deadlines being upset that one blockbuster movie from 15 years ago had reviews with different language than other reviews of another blockbuster 10 years ago. As a fan of the thread's original film, and also the other film that made a ton, can we just move along?

Avatar 2 continues to crush box office numbers when many people expected it to be a bust. Bear with me, it's late, but I work a very public job as a bartender where plenty of recent phenomena are discussed - from sports to celebrity gossip to the newest movies. No one ever talks about this film - and my restaurant is a half mile down the street from a gigantic iMAX cinema. I'm an unrepentant geek for 3d content and never expected this much profit from the film. Cinemas are in a very odd state where people will apparently only go to spend money on the grandest spectacle movies, and pretty much anything else is at best a 3 week flash in the pan. I cannot imagine a sustainable business, with all due respect to Coppola and Cameron and the other visioneers depressed to see the inevitable change to household streaming/VR/on-demand viewing of movies. 

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 4 weeks later...
  • 4 weeks later...

I saw the film a couple of days ago and it is solid. The visuals are a big step up over the first film, which is remarkable given that the first film was probably still the best-looking CG film in existence until this one came out (slightly embarrassing for the entire vfx industry in the 13 intervening years, but okay).

Cameron still delivers massive action spectacle incredibly well. It's an underrated skill to make important information read in battles and vfx sequences and not just have a confusing morass of bullshit hurtling across the screen, and Cameron is one of the very best at action choreography. The worldbuilding continues to be very decent, and the cast are all pretty good.

Story and character wise, it's adequate with some intriguing elements (i.e. Kiri) but mostly it's pretty standard stuff, with one vague irritation (Spider) and one slightly bigger irritation (everyone getting captured continuously, to the point where one of the characters talks about it in the movie).

The biggest issue I think is the ending, with the otherwise-excellent pacing (the first 65% of the film doesn't plod the way Avatar could) let down quite a bit. I think Cameron had two options for a massive finale, either a huge battle scene or a Poseidon Adventure-style disaster movie, and he decided to just merge them into one setpiece, but at twice the length of a normal finale. The result is very impressive, with lots of great individual scenes and action shots, but it just goes on...and on...and on.

But it was a pretty decent movie and probably better than all of the MCU offerings since around Endgame. I am not massively excited about the three (!) more movies to come, but if they keep up this hit rate, they should be solidly enjoyable.

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18 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Cameron still delivers massive action spectacle incredibly well. It's an underrated skill to make important information read in battles and vfx sequences and not just have a confusing morass of bullshit hurtling across the screen, and Cameron is one of the very best at action choreography. The worldbuilding continues to be very decent, and the cast are all pretty good.

Yeah, this. Probably my single biggest complaint (about a movie I like) is the action sequence at the end of GotG Vol.2, which is kind of what you're talking about here.

Not that I mind spectacle. I love spectacle. but action sequences should have a dramatic arc of their own and Cameron excels at that.

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34 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Yeah, this. Probably my single biggest complaint (about a movie I like) is the action sequence at the end of GotG Vol.2, which is kind of what you're talking about here.

Not that I mind spectacle. I love spectacle. but action sequences should have a dramatic arc of their own and Cameron excels at that.

The Marvel movies have mostly been okay with it. The Russos are probably the best at it (in Winter Soldier especially but they also did a great job with the mega-scale scenes in Infinity War/Endgame which could have gone full Bay very easily). GotG2 I think was one of the worst films for that issue.

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1 hour ago, Werthead said:

The Marvel movies have mostly been okay with it. The Russos are probably the best at it (in Winter Soldier especially but they also did a great job with the mega-scale scenes in Infinity War/Endgame which could have gone full Bay very easily). GotG2 I think was one of the worst films for that issue.

Whedon too for that matter. Avengers was great in this regard. 

Although, the Marvel films had this annoying tendency of breaking the tension by having "this" or "that" characters closeup or a mildly funny banter or a sight gag every 60-120 seconds. I get that a good bit of that is dictated by the studio, but it gets tiring after a while. 

It's like when I saw Basic Instinct in the cinema all those years ago. More than once, I'd say to myself, "Oh hey, this is turning into an interesting suspense... Aaand, they're fucking again. Fantastic."

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  • 2 weeks later...

Finally got to watching this tonight. (Last time got cancelled when our babysitters had to leave town to avoid a snowstorm :p ) I really liked it, more so than the first and I liked that one too. It’s just this story felt less cookie cutter or rehash than the first. Also felt like we didn’t have to spend 50 minutes being taught about the setting and could instead focus more on characters. And as a father and husband this story hit closer to home than the first. Not as big a spectacle but more impactful non the less.

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  • 1 month later...

I turned some of it on tv, just to see how it looked. I know it’s just watching at home on tv, not in 3D, but still I was massively underwhelmed by it all. I’m not sure why there isn’t more commentary about just how fucking stupid the Navi look. I forgot about that.

Far from amazing design I think a lot of what I saw on screen was ugly an uninspired. Visually I’m sure just like the first movie this is incredible in 3D but in plain 2D it looks the same as basically everything else out there. When you have stuff like Love Death Robots and Spiderverse pushing visual design forward you really notice how uninspired everything in Avatar really is.

Didnt bother watching the movie, I don’t see the point, it’s not a movie, it’s a theme park ride.

Edited by Heartofice
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2 hours ago, polishgenius said:

I wonder if James Cameron is ever upset that he's finishing his career making a franchise of which the cultural impact is limited to 'woo box office' or if he's like 'fuck it, I made Terminator 2, I can be at peace being Michael Bay now'.

Cameron has been quite open on why he made the first Avatar and why he's continuing to make more Avatar films.

Quote

I've been a climate activist since high school. The film wouldn't have existed if I hadn't been because the head of 20th Century Fox said, "Well I like the story, it's a good script. Can we get all this tree hugging hippie bullshit out of it?" And I said, "Actually, no because the reason I want to make the film is exactly because of the tree hugging, hippie, hairy legged, Birkenstocks wearing bullshit."

Then after a couple years of overt activism.
 

Quote

 

Eventually I realised "OK, I can just be another drive-by do-gooder, or I can go make more Avatar movies and reach a much wider audience, maybe with a somewhat diluted message, 'cause it's interwoven with entertainment, but maybe throw a much broader net."

So that was the point at which I decided to go ahead and make more Avatar films. Which was actually a difficult decision, 'cause I had a lot of things I was interested in in terms of ocean conservation and sustainable agriculture. A lot of projects I was working on that I had to turn away from to go back into the saddle as a filmmaker. I almost bailed on being a filmmaker. And the thing that kept me in the game was the possibility of the Avatar universe reaching a lot of people with a persistent kind of emotional message and reaction on the part of the audience to maybe fight for and protect that which we're losing.

 

Seems he's thought deeply about what he's doing with these films. Doesn't seem upset about it to me. I wouldn't bet against him.

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9 hours ago, ithanos said:

Seems he's thought deeply about what he's doing with these films. Doesn't seem upset about it to me. I wouldn't bet against him.

 

 

I mean, I admire the sentiment, but wouldn't that make it worse? Like, if he's thinking 'lots of people have seen it that means it must percolate', okay,but is there really any suggestion that Avatar is having any influence on people to make them more receptive to that kind of thinking? I'm sure there's some kind of fandom movement around it, but its message doesn't seem to have touched the zeitgeist. Like, the Matrix created whole new idioms and metaphors, it literally changed the language. Terminator did too, to go back to Cameron's patch. Like even now in 2023 conversations around technological advancement are often conducted using language James Cameron invented or defined (as well as conversations in sport about unstoppable bastards). Is Avatar having that kind of effect on the environmental side? Coz I assume that's what he's aiming for, but I don't see it. 

 

There's been almost no cross-medium sprawl, either. Okay, maybe that's Cameron maintaining tight control of his IP, which is fair enough. But there's been like, three games, from which as far as I can tell, one did alright, and one spin-off comic, which was basically Cameron dumping an idea he himself deemed inadequate for a movie into a comic form. Sure, not every franchise needs an expanded universe, some just aren't fit for it and some don't need it, but a demand for it is usually a sign that a 'verse has connected deeper with the public than 'woo, just watched it, was fun'. And if the idea was to affect people as much as possible with your cause, you'd have thought you'd want them to make as much wide-ranging stuff on the subject as possible. 

 

Maybe the idea is that kids who grew up with Avatar will go on to be influenced by it as adults (indocrination oh noes) but there's absolutely loads of franchises ahead of it in terms of merchandise it sells, apparent demand for spinoffs based on it, etc. And I don't know how otherwise you'd measure that potential impact. 

 

 

Hell, even memery. Where's the 'I love you three thousand' of Avatar? 

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1 hour ago, polishgenius said:

[snip]

This is such a non-argument. The question has been answered definitively before:

Quote

James Cameron doesn't do what James Cameron does for James Cameron James does what James Cameron does because James Cameron is James Cameron

Spoiler

 

 

Edited by Veltigar
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I watched the first one last night, for the first time since the theaters. I liked it. I'm pretty sure Rodrigez's character's callsign was "Rogue One." Also there a "strange reptilian animal kinda snorts" noise that I swear they lifted right out of Jurassic Park. 

Really the only thing I thought was stupid was the "Jake is important and the planet knows it so it sent little fluffy puff things." bit. 

In retrospect they could have taken a scene or a line or two to establish that the bad guy had a kid, and alluded to the literal "backup" plan in case he died. But I assume Cameron hadn't worked all that out yet and it's not too jarring. I'm about 1/3 through the second one and like it so far. 

I don't know if it makes sense for the family to leave to protect the people though. Isn't the human goal to eradicate the people regardless? They weren't just coming after them because of Jake. 

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