Avatar: The Way of Water

[Jeremy Blackman]

I wonder if the Avatar 1 remastered re-release primed me for it or trained my brain in some specific way, because the variable framerate was by far the highlight of Avatar 2 for me. I need James Cameron & co to teach other filmmakers how they accomplished this, because I need to see it in other movies. The high framerate feels absolutely essential for The Way of Water to play the way it does. And I found the FPS ramping to be far more seamless in this compared to the Avatar 1 remaster. The motion grading worked flawlessly for me.

This also happens to have the best visual effects ever done in a movie, and it's not even close. As with Avatar 1, this world and its creatures are simply real, here even moreso. I didn't detect a single unconvincing frame. Miraculous. And of course it's stunningly beautiful and inspired. There's less of a shock factor here, because the first movie exists, but I still thought it was glorious. This had an identical existential effect on me, where once it's over you just feel like a zombie walking out into a cold, gray world, a transition so jarring that the film you just saw can only live in a dream space.

I have some complaints. Kinda wish Cameron was not given a writer's room for this movie, because I found the story and dialogue to be pretty comprehensively inferior. Some of the new characters are quite good, but it gets very tropey with story beats you've seen a thousand times before, far more than the first film. And the acting is noticeably worse. Strange!

It's still the best movie I've seen this year (so far).

Spoiler: ShowHide

To be clear, I had no problem with most of the story—just the third act, really, which had a lot of generic stuff that I could've done without. I hesitate to say this, but it had a Marvel feel... like, you know, we're on a big vessel that's slowly blowing up over the course of 45 minutes, and the kids are taken hostage, except it's a trap, except we can still rescue them, etc. That was disappointing for a movie that's otherwise operating on an absurdly high level of imagination.

Also, I think we spent a bit too much time with Spider. I've had more than my fill of that greasy little man with his dopey expressions and unsettling loincloth.

[WorldForgot]

" They even said that one day, there's a chance they'll calibrate television sets for an optimized picture quality" hmmm... Not sure how I feel about across the board motion-grading. It seems like that ought to be something that's designed per-project rather than applied to all our content?

"Each movie is different, with the calibration depending on how much or how little the filmmaker wants to, in Casillas' words, "push the envelope." One thing that the TrueCut Motion team is keenly aware of is what they refer to as "jutter" or strobing – a jittery effect that can oftentimes accompany certain camera movements, especially if they are against an ultra-detailed, high-res backdrop. As a test, the team showed me various streaming shows and movies that, honestly, looked pretty crummy, even with the highest quality monitor. Then they showed me those same shows run through this proprietary process. The scenes came alive."

I'll need to see these examples before I feel less suspicious.

And the acting is noticeably worse

Interesting! The returning cast members don't work as well in this film as they did in the first?

[Jeremy Blackman]

And the acting is noticeably worse

Interesting! The returning cast members don't work as well in this film as they did in the first?

Spoilers for returning cast

Well, let's see. Sam Worthington is actually better (probably the best performance in the movie, believe it or not). Stephen Lang is about the same. Zoe Saldana is worse. Sigourney Weaver, well, she had some great scenes, and some sketchy ones. (What's going on with her accent?)

[Drenk]

And the acting is noticeably worse

Interesting! The returning cast members don't work as well in this film as they did in the first?

I rewatched Avatar after despising The Way of Water and Sam Worthington delivers a masterclass compared to the sequel where he frowns throughout the movie and repeats some paternalistic lines from the eighties. Neytiri is barely a character in the sequel, so all the racist tropes are more troublesome. (She spends her ten minutes of screen time making animal noises. The accent is stronger.) Nobody has anything to play. Kiri has also ten minutes of screen time and spends most of it looking like an awed teenager at Disney World. I hope Kate Winslet got payed generously for learning to hold her breath for no particular reason, she's barely in the movie and has no real line of dialogue. The kids are Disney Channel characters.

Jeremy points some of the major things I disliked in the movie, which is interesting because he still found matter to love. Rewatching Avatar, it's also obvious that the franchise making of the sequels is a disastrous development. Nothing happens in the Way of Water. But isn't contemplative. It's a giant teaser. The final act isn't spectacular because it's filler. It reminded me of a secondary quest in a video game. The bad guys are literally introduced two hours in with some unnecessary McGuffin. I was heartbroken when I realized that I was really watching the climax of the movie because I was bored to death.

The issue with making filler to prepare another sequel is that you're not actually making anything interesting here. Avatar had a classical narrative but was a real movie, whereas, yes, James Cameron is now in the MCU business—it was even worse than some Marvel movies I've seen the past decades because the plot beats (and this movie is 80% a succession of quick plot beats) seemed AI generated. In that regard, the first hour is the worst thing I've seen in years.

When Cameron made Terminator 2, he made Terminator 2. He wasn't preparing a franchise just for the sake of it.

[pynchonikon]

Well, just like the Machines will never stop trying to kill John Connor till they succeed, humanity will never stop trying to colonize Pandora - kill Toruk Makto in the meantime?

Congratulations to James Cameron for giving us the most expensive direct-to-video Disney sequel ever made, I guess.

[Drenk]

Yeah, I realized halfway through that there was no reason to pursue the guy who had given up on the war. (The way they do is hilarious: nobody cared about writing a real hunt.)

In general, the story makes no sense. Avatar had a classical template but executed it properly. This? Cameron took to heart the complains about the story and produced in result thousand bits of incoherent stories mixed together.

[RudyBlatnoyd]

Finally saw this. There are many legitimate complaints to be levelled at the story and the awful dialogue, but I don't see how anyone could fail to be impressed by the technical accomplishments. The attention to detail is remarkable - I kept noticing little things like the way the waves would lap against the shore or the way the Spider character blended seamlessly into the Pandora environment and thinking to myself 'Good lord, this is impressive.' Now, does a series of reactions like that mean that it is a good movie? Probably not, but being able to generate that reaction from a viewer who's grown jaded with SFX-driven movies is not nothing.

Watching this in IMAX 3D felt almost like hallucinating after a while; my brain knew that what it was seeing wasn't real, but it accepted it anyway. I don't remember being so impressed by the first one - this felt like a giant leap forward to me, technically at least.

God help me, I'll see the third one.

[Jeremy Blackman]

Avatar 2 falls short of the first because it has too much story. I would rather see the Avatar movies fully comit to what they are, because it's a legitimate alternative to traditional blockbuster filmmaking, and no one does it better. The value is in the beauty and immersion. The "effects" shouldn't be there to support a Marvel-style action plot. It's the inverse. The ideal Avatar movie has just barely enough story to hold it together.

[RudyBlatnoyd]

I see Cameron has said that there will be fire Na'vi in the third movie, known as Ash People, and they will be evil or something.

Every idea this man ever had while stoned in college is going to be realised onscreen and gross many billions of dollars.

[Drenk]

I see Cameron has said that there will be fire Na'vi in the third movie, known as Ash People, and they will be evil or something.

Every idea this man ever had while stoned in college is going to be realised onscreen and gross many billions of dollars.

I was joking when I talked about Fire Avatar, but...that's all they have to do. The Big Volcano That Is Called A Vulkoun will be their friend and help them defeat the human military with nuclear fire. Ash People will accept the power of nature and kiss Jake Sully in the mouth.

Another thing I noticed: the voice over in Avatar is diegetic, Sully has a diary, and his dialogue is more natural and humane. In The Way of Water, it's generic voice-over. His tone of voice is robotic and the actual lines are generic. That + the overbearing music in the first forty minutes where scenes don't last longer than fifteen seconds were very unpleasant to me.

[RudyBlatnoyd]

If he does try to introduce some more moral ambiguity to the Na'vi characters, he might come a cropper at the box office in the third movie. No doubt some such narrative complexity would be welcome from an artistic standpoint, but I don't think it's a secret that the very simple 'American colonisers bad, indigenous populations good' formula is part of its enormous appeal in overseas territories.

Also, I don't know that a massive CGI volcano has as much imaginative appeal as an ocean teeming with alien fish, space whales etc. But I'd be foolish to cast too much doubt on the Cameron Midas touch at this point.

[WorldForgot]

Aguatar

[polkablues]

Avatar 3: Lavatar

[Drenk]

Preview.

[Alethia]

Featuring the ghosts of Maurice and Katia Krafft resurrected as Na'vi to aid in diplomacy with the Ash folk and get some bomb-ass b-roll for Jimmy