The _Avatar_ sequel, presumably also directed by James Cameron

SeaQuest!

We created a broad canvas for the environment of film. That’s not just on Pandora, but throughout the Alpha Centauri AB system. And we expand out across that system and incorporate more into the story – not necessarily in the second film, but more toward a third film. I’ve already announced this, so I might as well say it: Part of my focus in the second film is in creating a different environment – a different setting within Pandora. And I’m going to be focusing on the ocean on Pandora, which will be equally rich and diverse and crazy and imaginative, but it just won’t be a rain forest. I’m not saying we won’t see what we’ve already seen; we’ll see more of that as well.

ew.

The Abysser

Can't wait! </uncool opinion>

He obv has a good team of imaginers / visual artists in his employ, and all the money in the world to play with. At the very least this movie should rise to the level of "pretty neat stuff to gawk at".

He obv has a good team of imaginers / visual artists in his employ, and all the money in the world to play with. At the very least this movie should rise to the level of "pretty neat stuff to gawk at".

― Aimless, Wednesday, 21 April 2010 02:18 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

http://matrix.ugo.com/images/galleries/matrix_reloaded_filmtv/matrix_reloaded_17.jpg

avatar 2: electric bugaloo

and now, we wait

i actually saw and enjoyed Av 2x (3-D IMAX) and was surprised that it held up well the 2nd time. i know the general consensus on ilx was hoping for it to fail but yo dudes, save that bile for your wes anderson criterion boxset or whatever.

Shasta out

hey u like something crappy it happens don't sweat it

yeah, i like u!

\(^0^)/

i neither loved nor hated Avatar, but imo there's nowhere to go but up w/ any sequels, think it'll be pretty easy for them to make at least a slightly better movie with the same template/visual style

i mean it's such a boring readymade sci-fi 'world' as one movie that they can only improve on it by being forced to fill it with more details and stories and make it more lived-in.

I'd rather watch Stan Helsing 2

Doesn't matter if it's good or not it will make a zillion dollars anyways.

have been genuinely surprised/impressed with Cameron's recent capacity for putting his time/money where his mouth is re: the politics underpinning the movie

Loved it, fuck a script there's such a thing as world-building carrying the day. On board for more.

Really hoping the 2nd + 3rd movies aren't entirely based on the big bad US military coming back for more & the Avatarians fighting them again and again, yet succeeding cos Jake is 'the chosen one' in some prophecy or something.

i could do without ANY military stuff in the next few, because it was boring and dumb.

Yeah it would be so much better if the conflicts were like creature group v. creature group. Or maybe 'left over tech from human incursion causes conflicts between pandora beasts'.

next couple flicks will be all about satisfying the overwhelming demand from the fan community for more giovanni ribisi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mslJnkh5Pnw

yeah i will totally see this

“Right now we are planning our 3-D tour movie and James Cameron is directing it,” will.i.am tells VIBE. “We have the biggest director because we are the biggest group on the planet. The Peas are filming it in South America. People will be able to see us in the theater with the 3-D glasses and everything."

"There will be a storyline that Cameron came up with, which will be dope," the BEP frontman continues. "It’s a full-length film and it's based around our tour activities. We’ve toured from America and Europe, to the Middle East, South America, Asia and Africa. It’s not like we go, 'Yo, we are international, you know what I’m saying? London and Paris!' Nah, that’s just two cities. We want to go across the planet.”

http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=42852

“I can tell you one thing about them,” Cameron laughs when Empire nonchalantly enquiries about storylines. “They’re gonna be bitchin’. You will shit yourself with your mouth wide open.”

cool guy

i wonder if the theaters owners know about this

ha ha

imagine saying this! you will shit yourself with your mouth wide open!

say what you will about the man, at least he knows his audience

There's gonna be three sequels for Avatar?! Seriously?

I mean, I liked it an all, but it didn't exactly scream "four-part movie series", did it?

Well, something has to support the Disney park in progress.

Cameron: You should make a Disney park based on "Avatar!"
Disney: What's "Avatar?"
Cameron: You know, the movie with the blue people?
Disney: "The Smurfs?"
Cameron: No, the other one. It made a billion dollars!
Disney: So did "Frozen." I think we'll make a "Frozen" park.
Cameron: Wait, wait! Does "Frozen" have ... a sequel?
Disney: Of course it does. We have at least one in the pipes, maybe two.
Cameron: Well, what f I told you "Avatar" had ... [looks at accountants and lawyers, who shake their heads cautiously) three sequels? [accountant slaps head]
Disney: Well, Jim, I would say that's starting to sound like some Disney numbers. Does it have a princess?
Cameron: It does!
Disney: We're in. Someone go tell Elsa the bad news that she's going to Epcot's Norway pavillion. Jim and I have to get to work spending some blue money.

Avatarier: More Avatarin'!

http://ew.com/tv/2017/09/27/avatar-2-first-look/

https://ewedit.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/avatar.jpg?w=2700

Imagine they're all blue, or most of them are.

“We never had this youthful element before, and that brings a different kind of energy to the film,” he says. “They represent the future generation of Pandora and play a very significant role — not just in this movie but throughout all the movies.”

I'd like to think that picture was taken of focus group kids after they got their own "first look" and were all, eh.

They mostly come in blue. Mostly.

I hope those kids are strapped in for the kind of career momentum that Sam Worthington has enjoyed.

whats an avatar?

http://ew.com/tv/2017/09/27/avatar-2-second-look/

https://hips.hearstapps.com/cos.h-cdn.co/assets/16/32/1470929175-hook-teaser.jpg

"now you kids better not plug your tails into anything!"

Imagine they're all blue, or most of them are.

Except the whitest kid, what a weird coincidence

RUFIOOOOOOVATAR xxp

could swear I've seen that kid second-from-the-left in something before

if you're talking about the Hook photo, he was in Band of Brothers

http://www.collectorsproof.com/uploads/bfadb5a8c2bab1cf8a738a21030eb04431bbc98126ef0a8624adff09.jpeg

he also looks a little like Carbone from the prequel Li'l Goodfellas.

no I am talking about the Avatar cast photo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNfhOEYg80c

cicieraga is god

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/avatar-way-of-water-runtime-1235251391/

lol over 3hrs. Sure thing. Jim. I want to see a cut that is entirely people speaking underwater.

"Blrrb. Blurrble blurb blur."

"Blurbbb!!! Blurrr bla blurb brbbble!"

sounds great

damien chazelle's three-hour star-studded comedy about the transition from silent to sound is a "tentpole"! a little ominous

I've seen the Babylon trailer enough times over the past month that they sure are trying for that. Then again, it's about the same amount of times I saw a trailer for that smash hit Amsterdam.

took me a second to remember that Babylon was not the subtitle of the new Avatar.

Amsterdam: The Way of Babylon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9MyW72ELq0

I feel in his heart of hearts Cameron would have preferred to just make an IMAX movie of people scuba diving, but he probably also thinks millions of people around the planet have been wondering what's up the magical world of Avatar and its colorful characters.

all I can think of are those sea monkeys that used to be advertised in the backs of comic books

"Blrrb. Blurrble blurb blur."

"Blurbbb!!! Blurrr bla blurb brbbble!"

omg someone call burt stanton, mystery finally solved

grimreaponium

“We’re in a different world now than we were when I wrote this stuff, even,” Cameron continues. “It’s the one-two punch—the pandemic and streaming. Or, conversely, maybe we’ll remind people what going to the theatre is all about. This film definitely does that. The question is: How many people give a shit now?”

The final runtime of James Cameron's 'Avatar: The Way of Water' is 3 hours and 12 minutes, three minutes shorter than 'Titanic.' pic.twitter.com/gLKPPHpSyA

— The Film Stage 📽 (@TheFilmStage) November 21, 2022

Well I’ve chipped in to the Let Cameron Be Cameron fund — $100 for four IMAX seats on the opening Friday night.

And $100 for the motorman's friend you'll need.

Especially with the $20 beer I'll probably buy.

Not that I always get my movie opinions from Uproxx, but I want to believe.

AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER: Yeah never bet against James Cameron. Trying to spare hyperbole, but I’ve never seen anything like this from a technical, visual standpoint. It’s overwhelming. Maybe too overwhelming. Sometimes I’d miss plot points because I’m staring at a Pandora fish

— Mike Ryan (@mikeryan) December 6, 2022

it’s gonna be dope

Wider range of reactions here, some complaints about thin story and characters (duh) but basically everyone's like, Yah, this is cool.

https://variety.com/2022/film/news/avatar-2-first-reactions-james-cameron-masterpiece-1235451389/

These post screening "first reactions" dumps are always the same. "Cameron's best movie yet!" Like, no one thought it wouldn't look cool, no one thought Cameron was going to shit out some totally inept effort. Looking cool and being well-made are the minimal Cameron standards. Lately (which is to say, his last 30 years/three films), good acting and story and writing ... not so much. And those are the things that will keep me away, not the run-time.

can't even be spared of your opinion of this movie you haven't seen and won't see

Gonna stick with the knockoff mockbuster:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/LkXg1YnbuU4/maxresdefault.jpg

Looks dope!

boosters otm itt

The first avatar definitely one of those movies that looked ridiculous in the trailer and then wound up being genuinely good and even likable in its sincere willingness to appear silly and have the audience identify wholly with a newly created alien species and against the human villains. I agree with some of the consensus that the first film maybe didn’t have some sort of massive pop culture impact but that may also be due to the overwhelming ubiquity of the Disney machine taking up a lot of the air in the room w marvel and Star Wars. At the same time it really was a singularly massive success and that success is probably even more impressive considering its lack of ties to any pre-existing material.

I'm excited as hell for the new one but let's not pretend that the first one was not a James Cameron movie with a major studio marketing budget, not exactly the Little Indie Movie That Could

no one's pretending that ffs

it is a labor of love with a major studio marketing budget, the domain of spielberg and cameron pretty much exclusively these days

I saw the trailer for this in the cinema and I absolutely cannot wait not to see this. The purples and teals are like a Thomas Kincade painting, kitsch beyond kitsch, the beings are fully CGI as far as I can tell, with all the problematic mouth movements that implies.. I mean I guess if your favourite part of Marvel movies are the entirely CGI scenes of large groups of magical beings swirling around each other then this is for you

justice for roger dean, i will not rest

I didn't really care about the story in the first one, and barely even remember what it was about, but it looked dope in 3D and felt worth it for that alone.

I was at the premiere in Leicester Square last night! Well I walked past it and it was very loud and there were people watching from the 1st floor of Burger King, then much later I realised what it was. It was as obnoxious as any other premiere in Leicester Square.

xxxxxxxxxxxxetcp Brad, my post wasn't responding to you but also, I get that it's a labor of love but my point being, it's not exactly a miracle that it made $$$$$ at the box office

I barely remember the first one for its plot - but I remember that I saw it in 3D at the cinema in a particular bleak period (weather-wise) between Christmas and New Year and it was like a mini-holiday of a film.

the first movie was dull and looked horrible, there was never any justification for sequels beyond the pursuit of cash, this blockbuster rollout fills me with ennui

Reasonably interested in this following the reviews even though I hated the last one

My chance of wanting to wear someone’s previously warmed-up 3d goggles in the covid era is a strong zero percent however

The thing that actually got me psyched for this movie was doing the 3D Avatar ride at Disney World back in February. That was awesome and made me want more.

Which is to say, if the movie successfully approximates an amazing theme-park ride, I'm in. (Sorry Morbs, R.I.P.)

I found the Avatar 3D ride equally disappointing, although I did enjoy the Pandora boat ride, it was more chill and psychedelic

god of war looks better than this, no idea why anyone would want to return to this nonsense cycle

One of the most credulous-unto-bootlicking reviews I've ever read of anything. "I still believe in him." What are you, eight?

Still remember the day I found out James Cameron wasn't real :(

Lol

Surely it would've been cheaper to just release the first one again?

They dare to hunt sacred water animals in stunning sequences during which you have to remind yourself that none of what you're watching is real.

i don't think i would have to remind myself that none of what i'm watching is real

Surely it would've been cheaper to just release the first one again?

He likes making these films and his audiences like watching them, so where's the harm in churning out a sequel or two? Or five? It keeps him busy and employs a whole bunch of visual artists.

Surely it would've been cheaper to just release the first one again?

The thing that actually got me psyched for this movie was doing the 3D Avatar ride at Disney World back in February. That was awesome and made me want more.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Wednesday, December 7, 2022 11:48 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

I was a skeptic going in but was ultimately sold on Avatar Land. It's a cool space with cool rides. Which is what this franchise should be centered on because the movie was like a whole lotta nothing. And the trailer for the new one is like...Cameron, have you taken a gander at any of the sci-fi/fantasy stuff made in the past decade? Because this looks like a mash-up of all that stuff which already exists (and which probably partly ripped you off but still).

It keeps him busy and employs a whole bunch of visual artists.

This reminds me of a story I saw somewhere about how both The Abyss and True Lies have basically been ready to release on Blu-ray for ages--transfers, new extras, the works all ready to go--but they need Cameron to go over everything and sit for his own contributions (interviews, commentaries etc). The producers approached him a few years ago asking for like a week tops to work with them and he said he couldn't even spare a couple days because of everything Avatar.

It's been a long enough time now that they'll have to (if they haven't already) rescan everything now for 4K & above so these things can be released.

Avatar: James Cameron's New Jersey.

Get to know Spider, a human friend of Jake and Neytiri's children in #AvatarTheWayofWater https://t.co/SX6II6W2yk

— rob delaney (@robdelaney) December 16, 2022

More seriously, I just learned that at least some screenings of this are high frame rate. Has any blockbuster tried that since the shitty Hobbit movies, which also looked shitty?

ang lee's gemini man?

once again can't wait to see avatar 2

I had the afternoon off so took in a matinee of this.

Why Cameron thinks he needs 5 movies to tell this story is kinda beyond me when there’s really barely a story in this 3 hour movie. Looks great, as to be expected, but after the novelty wears off this world and its conflicts and characters are still unfortunately just… dull. Why main dude has like, idk, 5-6 kids in this who take up a lot of screen time yet are mostly indistinguishable and given just shards of a personality is beyond me.

Only really takes off during the action sequences and when cool military tech shows up. The stuff Cameron’s always good at. But even that’s kinda wearing thin and feeling repetitive.

So yeah, it’s an Avatar movie I guess. Don’t know what I expected. Maybe that it would build into something more interesting after the stage setting of Pt. 1, but unfortunately it doesn’t.

RE: frame rate. Not sure if there’s a full 48 FPS version of this, but my screening would switch between 24 and 48 frames per second. 48 for the Big Spectacle Moments obv. The 48 stuff definitely popped more, I kinda dug it even though motion smoothing features on TV’s make me gag.

As expected, I enjoyed the new one. It has all the same strengths and weaknesses of the first one - can't imagine it will interest anyone who didn't like the first movie. The story was a little more complex this time around, but the extra runtime it added was not really worth it; it takes like an hour to get to any new locale. Pare the story and number of characters down and this could have been a tighter movie without losing any of the best parts

But man, pretty much any shot showing above or below the ocean is gorgeous

Also kinda funny that the final set piece is like 3-4 different Cameron movies in a blender

Yeah my wife said it was like a James Cameron greatest hits album. We enjoyed it, with all the caveats noted above. The family consensus was a solid 7 out of 10, primarily for the visual experience of it. I agree there's not a lot of actual story, but at the same time it's kind of laden with subplots, which is what makes it longer. Still, I will go see these movies on big screens as long as he makes them. I think he's the only person who should be allowed to make 3D movies.

One of the most credulous-unto-bootlicking reviews I've ever read of anything. "I still believe in him." What are you, eight?

― but also fuck you (unperson), Wednesday, December 14, 2022 11:38 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Written by...well...

Jaymc ALWAYS mentions his "film-critic friend"!
― 400% Nice (nordicskilla), Thursday, October 6, 2005 4:53 PM (seventeen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Haha. You hate him.
― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, October 6, 2005 5:30 PM (seventeen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Ah! It's a "him"! The first clue has been spilled.
― Eric H. (Eric H.), Thursday, October 6, 2005 6:01 PM (seventeen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

is it Ray Pride? Rosenbaum? Roeper? Roger?
― gear (gear), Thursday, October 6, 2005 7:36 PM (seventeen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

We wanted to go to the cinema today but this thing has taken over - five out of seven screens and the other two just have kids films.

Enjoyed this a lot. It's spectacle, but pretty spectacle.

Agree that I have no idea what they need five movies for though

especially when the only plot he can apparently think of for these is "everything was great.. until some bad guys showed up!!!"

I mean it worked in Terminator

I mean that’s even the plot of Die Hard, John Wick, opening scene of The Wild Bunch, every marvel movie…I don’t mind it. I kinda wonder if this is gonna have the massive impact of the first. Probably to some extent. We’re getting how many more of these, three or four?

yes exactly, die hard, terminator, john wick... all franchises that got very dire & bad by 4th, 5th, 6th entries, due largely to same recycled plots getting v boring

Wild bunch 4 though!

lol tbh i could have sworn there was some kind of forgotten low-rent Wild Bunch sequel in the later 70s, had to google to confirm i was imagining it

some kind of forgotten low-rent Wild Bunch sequel in the later 70s

No sequel, just an 80s reboot/tribute:

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/W/WEBP_402378-T2/images/I/81Xoa62PZXL.jpg

That movie rules, basically the best possible modern era remake of that movie.

yes exactly, die hard, terminator, john wick... all franchises that got very dire & bad by 4th, 5th, 6th entries, due largely to same recycled plots getting v boring

― waste of compute (One Eye Open), Saturday, December 17, 2022 11:40 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

the terminator sequels beyond 2 (not including dark fate which is highly enjoyable and guess who’s involved) aren’t bad bc of recycled plots … they’re bad bc they’re soulless and stupid and actively undermine the themes of t1 and 2

god i need to see extreme prejudice so bad

Nolte totally somehow chiseled in that one, totally devoid of his frequent shagginess and shabbiness.

anyway i’m into the late work of an artist being a collision of basically every idea they’ve ever had and if i’m reading the reviews of this right we’re in jim cameron’s late period

The cast of bad guys is just fantastic, major scenery-chewing in the best sense of the term.

god i need to see extreme prejudice so bad

It might not be the best Walter Hill movie but in many ways it's the most Walter Hill movie. There are so many moments in it where your jaw just drops.

weirdly this is the 2nd time someone has mentioned Extreme Prejudice to me this weekend, going to obey the will of the universe and watch it this week

this movie felt like a propaganda film to support the na’vi war effort

not necessarily a bad thing haha

loved this

just rewatched avatar 1, it’s still dope, the insane bioluminescence of literally everything, the constant stream of beautifully plotted action and aerial ballet in the last thirty minutes where you also feel the impact of every death

people who don’t like it are nerds

seeing way of water tomorrow afternoon :)

people who don’t like it are nerds

nah. they're just people who don't like all the same things you do.

it’s an enormous spectacle and it is 100 percent successful at being that. ppl caught up in the plot or lack thereof or the acting ffs are denying themselves immersion to appear smart. huge nerds

Seeing this Friday, psyched

ppl caught up in the plot or lack thereof or the acting

lol that's setting the bar low. Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

"Ooh, cartoon whales pretty!" *claps hands*

way of water was miles better than the first avatar. the things that were issues in the first one (lack of plot, stock characters, white savior narrative) are marginally improved upon, while the visuals and action go up several notches

did you read my post. do you think it’s easy to create effective, clean, dazzling spectacle. given the past 20 years of blockbusters i would say it isn’t

it’s a beautiful movie. the plot is spare bc there’s such a visual feast going on that nothing should get in its way! but i find it thematically resonant regardless bc yes the military and the capitalists are the problem and they should be marched off the world

the avatar/going native stuff being icky for some is fair and i acknowledge it! i get major trans vibes from abandoning your traumatized earthly body for one that feels more like home to you tho

this movie reminded me more of titanic than avatar 1, tbh

only a few hours from now and i can’t wait!!! maybe should’ve watched titanic last night instead of the first avatar

Written by...well...

Unmasked at last!

I totally get where Brad is coming from, but I think the counter argument is legit, too: if the acting/writing/plot is good, a movie might have less need to be so visually resplendent/spectacular.

I think the other argument is, why are we demanding that a visual spectacle have a mega complex story when we lap up other action movies that are largely visual? it isn't as if Commando had a Charade-esque story going on.

I don't really think either Avatar story was 'bad' either. both of them tread common ground, have some broad-stroked baddies, and almost all of Giovanni Ribisi's dialogue was terrible in the first, but two spends a lot of time culture/world-building in a way that is very effective.

i think it's part of cameron's point with these movies tho, that if you build a compelling enough sandbox and hit the right story beats, you don't need that stuff. it's pure cinema, removing any vestigial elements of the stage

it was funny, back in 2009, with all of my theatre buddies railing against the piece, and listing all of the problems they had with it,which basically amounted to "we want movies to be like theatre"

cameron executed the story very well in both films (he knows structure!) but i massively prefer the "family of refugees attempts to adapt to new home" story to the dances with wolves/last samurai rip of the first one

The problem is the novelty of the visuals does wear off. It's a three hour movie!

I didn't hate this fwiw, just more of a *shrug*. I like JC's brand of cheese and would prefer he'd not spend what looks like the remainder of his career doing these movies over and over.

I'm sure Brad will dig it though. Enjoy!

And I also don't require some complex story at all. Just conflicts and characters that are interesting. I struggled to care about anyone in the movie.

Sigourney's the only one who popped for me.

Different strokes and all that, but I think that's a reason why Villeneuve's sci-fi streak has been so strong: they're visually striking while also being mostly well-written and acted (imo). It doesn't have to be theatrical (in the theatre sense), but compelling characters and actors carry a lot of weight. So I have no doubt this movie is visually amazing - that's why it was made - but I don't really want to see it because I'm not invested in the characters. Iirc I *liked* the first Avatar, and recommended it to folks, but I've never wanted to see it again because I didn't get anything out of it *besides* the spectacle.

Neando's "Commando" example is interesting, because what is "Aliens" if not "Commando" with more compelling plot and characters? Makes a difference!

"novelty wears off" is otm for me. yeah imho even with avatar 1, even by 2009 i had already been shown so goddamn many "visually spectacular" CGI alien planets and elaborate landscapes and fantasy beasties that it just didnt make me ooh and aah like it was supposed to. its cool for a bit but after an hour or so "look at what else we animated" stops being enough to hang the whole experience on. if that makes me a joyless nerd who needs to have their brain stroked by retrograde "elements of theater" (rmde) so be it.

also the racial stuff is gross as hell, props to those who can at least admit it, nobody should be fooling themselves w that shit

Iirc I *liked* the first Avatar, and recommended it to folks, but I've never wanted to see it again because I didn't get anything out of it *besides* the spectacle.

yeah i felt the same way about the first avatar, but i kinda want to just get on this ride again lol

after an hour or so "look at what else we animated" stops being enough to hang the whole experience on

This is what drives me nuts when, for example, Twitter accounts dedicated to "amazing shots" will post a still frame from some fucking Marvel thing that is 100% computer-generated. It's not a "shot" of anything — it's a digital painting. Which is fine! But don't pretend you filmed something.

the racial stuff is gross as hell

Slate has a good piece on that topic today.

when you're making these movies you have to figure out what the "camera" is doing even if that camera is just the way the frame moves. so... you're wrong

i'm willing to spend two hours watching mr. cameron's magicquarium if in the third hour i can see one of film's great set piece choreographers indulge in some of the most visceral and elaborately-staged (and surprisingly violent!) action i've seen in years

i mean, fair cop that a still frame from a marvel movie is totally empty garbage xp

when you're making these movies you have to figure out what the "camera" is doing even if that camera is just the way the frame moves. so... you're wrong

Words mean things, Brad. If a new word for what Cameron (or some Marvel hack) is doing is required, great — come up with one. But *shooting a scene* is one thing, and *creating a digital cartoon* is another. They are two different ways of approaching the same art form (cinema). I'm not saying that one is better or worse than the other. But to deny that they're two fundamentally different things is just foot-stomping.

i certainly get off on my share of brainless visual spectacles, but as i get older i find i'm more & more interested in visual spectacles that involve the human body. the way ppl are talking about enjoying the new avatar isnt foreign to me, its 100% how i enjoy martial arts & car chase/stunt movies these days, but i guess my bias is that theres something in my brain that is way more activated by the spectacle of human bodies in motion on planet earth and less & less blown away by planets where the sky is green or w/e.

the way ppl are talking about enjoying the new avatar isnt foreign to me, its 100% how i enjoy martial arts & car chase/stunt movies these days, but i guess my bias is that theres something in my brain that is way more activated by the spectacle of human bodies in motion on planet earth and less & less blown away by planets where the sky is green or w/e.

Me too — just keeping it to car stuff, I would much rather watch a movie like Lost Bullet where all the stunts are done by real human beings in real cars than one of the Fast & Furious movies where cars are leaping from one skyscraper to another or floating in space.

i'm willing to spend two hours watching mr. cameron's magicquarium if in the third hour i can see one of film's great set piece choreographers indulge in some of the most visceral and elaborately-staged (and surprisingly violent!) action i've seen in years

Yeah that's the other thing the movie has going for it which doesn't get mentioned enough — dude is one of the great action directors, and I for one did not get tired of the closing 40 minutes of mayhem because the action kept moving and changing.

Also, I don't pretend to understand everything that goes on in making such a CGI-dependent movie, but it's not only a cartoon, there are actual actors (in motion-capture suits, granted) actually moving, there are actual sets and actual cameras moving through them.

i do think there's a fundamental difference between mo-cap and pure cgi, and, to me, that difference comes across very starkly when comparing the action in this film to *insert marvel film here*

Yeah, the action feels much more visceral here.

Definitely some rad action stuff in the final third, but thought the final throwdown with the big bad was a little anticlimactic.

I agree but that's partly because he got away. And also because Sully himself had to be rescued by his kids, solidifying the movie as really being more their story than his.

the movie is all-digital sure, but that doesn't mean that cameron didn't use a boatload of practical effects. this is the guy who basically built an artificial lake for titanic, and he's back on his water bullshit again

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/16/movies/avatar-2-fx-cgi.html

it's hard not to be impressed with the scope of filmmaking ingenuity required to make this movie look as good as it does.

see also, this indiewire interview: https://www.indiewire.com/2022/12/avatar-3-james-cameron-interview-1234793007/

I haven't seen JC's last three movies. I'm watching them on a 30 year delay, looking forward to finally seeing Titanic in 2027.

When I think about James Cameron's movies, the first thing that comes to mind is honestly the characters, with the effects and action second (Even though the effects in action are usually pretty awesome). I don't remember anything about True Lies, maybe my least favorite movie from him, but I remember all the characters pretty vividly. Avatar might be the sole example of the opposite for me among his films, in that I remember the look of the movie pretty well, but nothing about the characters.

just rewatched ikiru, it’s still dope, the solemn piety, the measured pacing, the sudden lurch from present to future (past to present?), the disintegration of the funeral in the last thirty minutes where you feel the impact of death in the truest human way

people who don’t like it are nerds

how were the fx?

i’m sure you could devote this energy to a new tv show forks

the fx in ikiru are just fine and match the needs of the narrative well, which is a difficult thing to do! you wouldn't think so but juggling a meaningful story with memorable characters that touches on complex topics, presented thoughtfully and without facile metaphor is somehow harder to pull off than crafting an entire world in a computer.

i'm pretty good at devoting my energy across an array of topics and media, mostly because i manage a pretty consistent intuition as to where i'll emerge feeling that it was wasted.

i think it's part of cameron's point with these movies tho, that if you build a compelling enough sandbox and hit the right story beats, you don't need that stuff. it's pure cinema, removing any vestigial elements of the stage

― comedy khadafi (voodoo chili), Wednesday, December 21, 2022

I mean, there are plenty of guns planted in the first two acts to pay off in the third... but this is it right here. the last hour

that every beat in this movie is entirely predictable, down to gosh that's a long way to swim and we haven't seen the our whale buddy in a while I bet... is a feature not a bug. it's the cinematic equivalent of Larry Bird telling his defender exactly what he's about to do and then doing it.

whoops "the last hour" snuck in there as non sequitur. was just going to say it's up there with mad max: fury road as pure cinema. the efficiency with which Cameron ensures that we are fully on board with every last random henchperson getting what they have coming is extraordinary.

yeah it's not a complex story, but it's exceedingly well-executed

the complexity comes through the visuals and the imagination of another world, its people, and culture. that's the part that doesn't always resonate with me (all the spiritual stuff about the living world is woo woo nonsense), but the story is structured well enough that i do care about the world and the characters, even if i don't always remember names

hmmm y'all want me to watch this, doncha

cameron's work has always bounced off me; am i right in assuming this is a refinement of his process and not an overhaul?

dontcha wish your Avatar was blue like me

it's the cinematic equivalent of Larry Bird telling his defender exactly what he's about to do and then doing it.

that would be exactly right, if the entire audience were all furiously hoping to stop James Cameron from doing it

he didn't start the fire

don't ask me why

Rewatched the first Avatar with the kids to prep for seeing the sequel in the theaters. We’ve been working our way through the Marvel movies and I was struck by how good JC is at overall pacing and how well directed the action sequences are. No matter how chaotic things are, you always know where to look and it’s always very clear what is happening.

Brad is probably the only person who could make me be interested in Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) but I don't think it's gonna work

my reaction to the trailer was basically shock that over a decade of work he hadn't come up with anything

like if you make an animated movie and your characters aren't conveying anything about themselves through costume, silhouette, or movement, and in fact are scarcely to be distinguished from each other except by whether or not they have mechs(?), why did you make an animated movie

Brad labeling everyone who doesn't agree with him about the movie as just 'nerds who are trying to look smart' is... an unfortunate approach. But we'll all get over it, I'm sure.

silbs this is a deeply expressive movie on every level

didn’t you love alita? the same earnestness bleeds from this, on top of which the climax is like five cameron movies in a head-on collision, haven’t felt that since the matrix reloaded

the highway sequence specifically which i think even matrix sequels haters will acknowledge as cool and also heavily indebted to cameron, it was that kind of constant raising of stakes and complexity even though you were witnessing everything with total clarity

also whales are cool and there are so many whales in this movie

Brad labeling everyone who doesn't agree with him about the movie as just 'nerds who are trying to look smart' is... an unfortunate approach. But we'll all get over it, I'm sure.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless)

Aimless, you've been on this board too goddamn long not to understand how internet hyperbole works.

exaggerating for effect bc i am sure there are ppl out there who have totally legit reasons to dislike avatar and how can i account for that, how can i dismiss that all as unfettered nerdedry???? obv it’s ridiculous. however you’ll notice only nerds raised their hackles

We're all nerds yo

nerd, c'est moi

i am the kind of nerd who loves looking at cool shit and well-plotted action and these movies offer me a phantasmagoric portal into realm that is nearly 100 percent that. they are effective on that level. if you are looking for something that they are not offering, i can't take the objection seriously

vc otm that the new group of kids offers interesting characterization on top of the visual splendor, especially spider and teen sigourney weaver (i also will never remember any of the sully family's names except jakesully)

also whales are cool and there are so many whales in this movie

― flamenco drop (BradNelson)

Ok this is a genuine selling point, I guess I might watch this at some point and put up with the parts with Avatar guys

Never did see the first one either but it’s hard to believe that’s essential in any way

long-form James Cameron (everything from Titanic on) doesn't really appeal to me, but I get what he's going for and can appreciate what he's doing. one of the few people working on insanely expensive movies who understands scale and spectacle

there were some amazing scenes in this one and I ended up caring for the characters more than I did with the original. I didn't love it, but I appreciated it

silby you can totally skip the first one. I had only a vague recollection of the plot and there's enough summary and description that it makes the broad strokes of the first movie clear

you have to hand it to Cameron, he doesn't really do vague callbacks or require you to remember details

I don't even remember the last time I saw a movie in 3d, but I do know this is only one of a couple times I have done so and felt like it was worth seeing in that format

(oh wait, the last one might have been Gaspar Noe's Love. that was uh, maybe worth seeing in 3d for completely different reasons)

agreed that anyone interested in seeing this can skip the first one, there's basically an extended "previously on avatar" sequence that begins the film and tells you everything you need to know

i usually don't love 3d movies but i think in this instance it worked really well in tandem with the high frame rate to make the action scenes pop.

like i have no need for little floaty bioluminescent flowers to be in 3d, but i dug it during the climax

i liked the near-constant presence of bugs in the first act

I loved Marines dying for the second time in two movies

I'd heard someone describe the new one as the first third catching you up, the second third advancing the characters and story, and the final third being ... well, yeah, a mash-up of five Cameron movies at once.

Speaking of whales, when I saw Black Panther 2, with its whales and blue people, I wondered if they were trolling Avatar.

My kids really liked the first Matrix, but they've never forgiven me for making them watch (part) of the second one, which they hated so much we never finished and I disliked enough on rewatching so much I never brought it up again.

and yeah i hate 3d and it was so worth seeing in 3d. i so associate 3d glasses with projecting a grey dimness onto a movies' images (maybe this was more pronounced in the 2010s than now) and the experience could not have been more vivid and colorful and dimensional whoa

xxp

Yeah it was very much worth the IMAX 3d

I almost put my hand up to shield my glasses from getting wet when it started raining in 3d on the screen

i liked the near-constant presence of bugs in the first act

― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Wednesday, December 21, 2022 7:16 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i thought the bugs flitting around the ears of the marines were a subtle sign that the hivemind was starting to realize they were hostile to the ecosystem, but that never really paid off

or maybe it will in one of the many sequels!

random observations:
- Jemaine Clement playing a character with a completely different accent threw me and at several points I was like, "hmm, that is him, isn't it?"
- Sigourney Weaver also playing the teenage daughter of her character was.... good? one of the few characters that had some extra depth
- the Spider kid kept making me think he was ripped from an episode of MTV's Wildboyz
- Edie Falco playing that particular type of role was o_O
- realized at least part of my lack of interest in the first movie was the entire focus on Jake Sully, "jarhead who discovers he has a heart" and his entire type of guy just doesn't hit for me

- Jemaine Clement playing a character with a completely different accent threw me and at several points I was like, "hmm, that is him, isn't it?"

i noticed the same thing. why hire jemaine clement and have him do an american accent?

my only explanation is that viewers might not be able to differentiate between his accent and an Australian one and the movie wanted to depict Australians as terrible assholes (see: the airship guy he was paired with)

where's the car???

Aimless, you've been on this board too goddamn long not to understand how internet hyperbole works.

Damn straight I do. But I wasn't pointing at Brad's post because it was hyperbolic. It wasn't particularly. My point was that defending your position by saying that people who disagree with you are (paraphrasing here) 'poopyheads' descends into pure stupidity. <nb: hyperbole

Edie Falco was my only gripe. Why cast someone that talented and waste them in a small faceless cameo.

Woulda been better if she was the outright baddy.

my ever so slight raising of hackles has nothing to do with avatar, which is gonna do what its gonna do and do it without me, and everything to do with the silly prima facie argument that personal opinion - whether Cameron or Kurosawa - is somehow proof of quality or anything really. it's okay to like the most popular movie in the world but it's absurd to demand that i like it.

unless you're on How To with John Wilson at which point whatever gets you through the night.

Always strange to me that nobody ever talks about how weird it is that in this franchise about the evils of colonialism the main character is a white guy who takes over a custom-bred body of a different color for his own use.

a brief google search for "avatar colonialism" suggests lots of people are talking about it and here's why

and yeah i hate 3d and it was so worth seeing in 3d

On top of not really caring about 3D, the first movie made me pretty motion sick during the 3D shaky-cam parts. But I gave this one a chance and very much enjoyed the 3D, with only a slightly sick feeling at times (not sure whether I changed or if there's a difference between the two films)

jim cameron you mad bastard you did it again

saw this in imax hfr 3d and thought it was an astonishing spectacle

the man spent a billion dollars to make a nature documentary about animals that don’t excise that is also a war movie about transhuman osama bin laden and i simply have to respect the hustle

exist not excise ffs

I decided to revisit some old Cameron stuff I haven’t seen in a while. Titanic. First rewatch since the 90’s. True Lies lined up next, I think.

Titanic is legit fucking bad. Like comically bad through a large portion of it. I say that as someone willing to embrace the cheese. Maybe he has been growing as a filmmaker.

from a disaster movie standpoint, I love Titanic. w/e about the romance bit

It works as a disaster movie when it gets macro and you see the boat splitting in half and people falling and such but that’s probably 15 minutes of the movie at best. Lot of time with cartoon characters and Rose running back and forth in water doing cartoon things.

It is not good.

It's not like he's made much since then, but that was the introduction of his "who gives a shit about the script and acting, it's all about the impact" mode of filmmaking. Basically shamelessly sensorial (including sentimentality). But imo the reason he can get away with long stretches of inaction in movies like the Terminators, the Abyss or Aliens or even (to a lesser extent) the really dumb True Lies is that one likes and is invested in the characters and their relationships in more than a surface way. That's one of the most disappointing aspects of "Titanic" and where imo it loses the plot (so to speak). Since you know from the start that the boat is going to sink, that does a lot of the heavy lifting while you sit through all the boilerplate melodrama. Whereas movies like Aliens and T2, you think you know where they're going, but for sequels they're full of surprises, which heightens the situations of characters you actually, well, care about. Sounds like maybe the new Avatar does a better job on that front than the first one did.

it helped that the "boilerplate melodrama" of titanic featured a romance between two of the absolute finest actors of their generation

titanic is a much more old fashioned film than avatar, a pure star-driven vehicle that relies on their charisma to keep the movie afloat (no pun intended) before everything goes to shit.

that romance was the box office draw, much more than the effects, no matter how state of the art they might have been.

Ffs Billy Zane was in it. Practically screams time capsule.

hey now, Billy Zane slammed evil. Show some respect.

romance was the box office draw

otm. it was a romance 'date' movie from the ground up. the culminating disaster/gruesome mass death/big sfx aspects allowed men to enjoy it, too.

two of the absolute finest actors of their generation

Winslet is very good but are you arguing with a straight face that Leonardo Dicaprio is a good actor? Shit, he's not even a good movie star.

DiCaprio can be good, but he was not good in Titanic. In fact, he was bad (or at least had some of the worst dialogue). But it made him a household name movie star, of which he remains one of a dwindling few.

The romance is what gave it legs for sure, and the sort of legacy that Avatar lacked, but as I remember it was sold as spectacle. Everyone saw Titanic for the FX, but it was the legions that saw it again and again for the romance that surprised the naysayers and made it huge.

I feel like Cameron understands what actors are charismatic but I think at some point he lost the ability to write charismatic dialogue

maybe he never had it, idk!

brad and voodo chili otm, everyone else offtm

Aliens has fabulous dialogue wtf

maybe he never had it, idk!

He managed to make Arnold Schwarzenegger an icon, despite his obvious limiations.

See, Schwarzenegger had no obvious limitations. He never wanted to play Lear, he didn't want to be Meryl Streep: he wanted to be the biggest star on the planet and, maybe, get the Constitution changed so he could run for president. He succeeded with the former. I don't knock off points for realizing his career aspirations.

They’re both good in it, Winslet particularly. But there’s a ton of ADR, understandably (boat deck stuff mostly) and it is weirdly crappy.

I went in with open arms with this one, paid to rent it, but it is insultingly stupid. Without the gloss of WOW that it had at the time, there’s nothing there. Obv The Romance connected hard with a certain segment of pubescent people at a certain time and I can’t begrudge them that. But man, it’s pretty rough as an adult viewer in 2022.

but apparently Scrunchy Face is so good at the sexing that Winslet's hands presses against automobile glass.

every night in my dreams, I see you, I FP youuuu

near
far
I watch Avataaaaaaar

i don't think this movie's politics are bad at all tbh. it's an anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, and environmentalist big budget hollywood movie celebrating a successful indigenous resistance movement. it kind of seems miraculous that it exists? it's a breath of fresh air compared to the cynical ironic centrism of marvel movies. the sequel downplays the white saviour/noble savage stuff a lot relative to number 1 imho

it's a deeply earnest and corny movie so it's inevitable that people who value feeling cool and aloof will clown on it, but it's a genuinely incredible achievement

Cameron's politics are often as opaque as John Milius'. True Lies is a batshit terrible anti-Arab and anti-woman movie, but the Alien and Terminator films have enough genuine contempt for capitalism and faceless corporatism.

I haven't seen anything DiCaprio's been in since Shutter Island, but he's usually been good, especially in his earlier roles.

See, Schwarzenegger had no obvious limitations.

Apart from his inability to deliver dialogue of any length or complexity, which Cameron obviously recognized.

eh every scriptwriter ever has written to a star's limitations. He's not any worse.

Cameron's politics are often as opaque as John Milius'. True Lies is a batshit terrible anti-Arab and anti-woman movie, but the Alien and Terminator films have enough genuine contempt for capitalism and faceless corporatism.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, December 23, 2022 2:45 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

anti-woman, anti-arab, anti-capitalist, anti-corporatism are not mutually exclusive. makes sense to me as the ideology for an 80s action film director

xp But that's my point, it was actually genius to write a script where Arnold's most memorable lines consisted of no more than a handful of words.

It’s not a miracle that a James Cameron movie put out by Disney that is destined to make billions of dollars has milquetoast anti capitalist, hippy sentiments, sorry.

xp’s

anti-woman, anti-arab, anti-capitalist, anti-corporatism are not mutually exclusive. makes sense to me as the ideology for an 80s action film director

― flopson

True. See: First Blood.

yeah I might even go see it again tonight. I get the white savior comments of the first (i made them myself), but in this film you get illegal game hunters 86'ed, evil imperialist Marine avatars all diced up (but one), the military portrayed as dim-witted automatons that do nothing but destroy, and then there's the inclusivity aspect, where Grace's daughter is at first derisively called 'half-breed', the children all having 'demon blood' and having those same bigoted people coming around and accepting them (except the marines but fuck them).

I feel like Avatar franchise gets held to different standards than some of its peers, mostly because Cameron is a cocky dude. like in 2009 among people I knew it was "well it LOOKED great, but it doesn't look as good on your home tv screen or sound as good, and it doesn't hold up as well on repeat viewings, and also the plot seemed like Ferngully and I needed something STIMULATING for my forward-thinking brain, something like Forrest Gump". whereas some of these same people showed up to Jurassic World opening night and came all over the movie theatre seat cushions

guess I won't be sitting down on any Sanford theatre seats

It’s not a miracle that a James Cameron movie put out by Disney that is destined to make billions of dollars has milquetoast anti capitalist, hippy sentiments, sorry.

Black Panther was a fine movie but its politics were a bit iffy. wouldve been way better if at the end the Black Panther turned to the camera & said "i am communist now" & then specified hes the exact kind of communist i am

— TORMABLAS PARODYIACKLELALES (@Tormny_Pickeals) February 19, 2018

xpost who cares if they're milquetoast, when it comes down to it, the politics of just about every Marvel movie are pretty cringe (and half the fans took the wrong position, Team Captain, in Civil War). and blah blah blah 'detention center filled with innocent contractors' Star Wars etc etc. idk why Avatar gets singled out.

lol flopson

xps- calling it "milquetoast anti capitalist" proves my pt that "it's a deeply earnest and corny movie so it's inevitable that people who value feeling cool and aloof will clown on it"

the Bill and Ted Halloween show at Horror Nights in Universal used to have a running gag for a decade (until it closed) where someone could come out dressed as an Avatar character and say "THEY HAVE SEX WITH THEIR TAILS" and during the final show ever this actress admitted they'd had it wrong for years and that it was the hair they had sex with and not their tails.

Hollywood has been blandly liberal forever. I mean I guess we’ve dumped far enough that we need to stand up and applaud Avatar 2’s politics.

The piece of cloth dangling between the male Na’vis legs will always cover their penis. They may jump around, swim, or fight, but cloth will always swing into place to hide the penis. Their energies are forever connected with Eywa. The great mother watches over them 🙏

— Rajat Suresh (@rajat_suresh) December 20, 2022

think flopson was more reacting to why people said the politics were terrible in A2 rather than saying Cameron had literally achieved The Battle of Algiers with Blue People.

like do I really go to these hollywood tentpoles thinking "I am hoping to see a film that advocates for a living wage", no, at best I say "I hope this film is entertaining and that its makers don't ruin it with really toxic beliefs" .

lol Aliens is practically the hambone '80s Battle of Algiers.

"Let's see how we whiteys can survive as the native population takes revenge on us."

I checked out on Marvel shit many years ago so if this is a welcome corrective measure, I’ll take it. I grew up in the age of Fern Gully and Free Willy and I guess I don’t see it as revolutionary.

This was a lot of fun.

To be fair, the aliens in the Alien franchise are also colonizers.

Also fwiw, I commute a lot for work and listen to some movie podcasts and Cameron and Avatar are very much Cool and In. If I’m bucking, I’m bucking that thing.

I think he’s got 3 great movies. First Terminator fucking rules and is his best imo.

tie between that one and Aliens.

I was being a bit flip but I do enjoy the dialogue in everything Cameron did pre-Titanic. I wasn’t changing that assessment, just expressing self-doubt

and I know he was the writer and not director but when are we going to get a Strange Days critical reassessment

by the time I watched Aliens the entire Space Marines trope had been kind of driven into the ground so it wasn’t as compelling to me as Alien, which is just top tier

Aliens kills, but Ridley wins that one by a mile. Some of the best art direction in the history of film.

it was kind of fun in avatar 2 to see those aliens-esque space marines as the villains

I mean, they’re not the heroes in Aliens, either. They’re hubris getting clobbered.

i played Hudson in a Shakespearean adaptation of Aliens this past year and basically my entire motivation was "be the loudest talking, dickwaving bullshitter on the planet, then whine like a baby at the first sign of trouble"

true, but fun to think of the movie as aliens from the point of view of the aliens haha

my favorite part of this movie was the general getting overruled by the angriest marine, and then she just walks away and out of the movie about 2 hours before it finally ended

she's just like 'eh, they'll fix it in post, it doesn't matter, bye'

really? that was only my second favorite part of the movie

it was a tough choice! lol

i love this article and the rumor it's based on:

https://www.cbr.com/james-cameron-avatar-3-cut-nine-hours-vfx/

The rumor comes courtesy of industry insider Jeff Sneider, who discussed the third Avatar installment's progress during an episode of the Hot Mic podcast. "Someone reached out [to me] and said Cameron handed in a cut of Avatar 3 last week," he said. "The cut was, no joke, 9 hours long. And apparently, he's insisting on doing the [visual effects] for this cut, so that all 9 hours get fully VFX'd, then he'll cut it down. Rather than figuring out what he wants and having them just do the VFX for that. That's what I heard."

and now that's what i heard, too!

Nine hours?!?

And you'll love every minute of it or else

so that all 9 hours get fully VFX'd

That can't possibly be true.

i feel like a good rumor should push the envelope of plausibility juuuust a little bit

Or maybe that is what Cameron wants, I dunno

Relax guys he'll break it into two 4 1/2 hour installments, it's a win-win.

lol if that’s even a tiny bit true it’s another tick mark in the “dude doesn’t know how to make an animated film” column

It's going to be a Zaireeka-esque experiment where you enter the film midway through at a random point, and there's one boombox with the score, one with the dialogue, and someone in the front row is responsible for hitting play on both

Speaking of Cameron rumors: https://www.thesuburban.com/arts_and_entertainment/entertainment/james-cameron-confirms-urban-myth-about-unique-aliens-pitch/article_c9796270-bc89-5447-a1a5-1938acef7767.html

To be fair, I'd probably watch a Cameron version of DAU.

you have to respect cameron's hustle - feels like he basically convinced the studios to front him three hundred million dollars for his own personal submarine hobby by saying look, it's a big upfront investment but you're gonna get at least 3 billion dollar blockbusters out of this one investment. and feels like he may be... right? i mean it's obvious we're not gonna get dune: avatar or avatar: into thin air, as much as that'd be cool. it's gonna be water from here on out because james cameron loves submersing.

Guessing he’s had some crazy waterproof pressurized casket made so he can be dropped into the deepest part of the ocean.

Cameron at the crib

https://media.tenor.com/jSXJXHzJe64AAAAC/simpsons-troy.gif

It’s interesting to contrast where this movie sits in worldwide movie revenue for 2022 vs US movie revenue for 2022.

Avatar 2 is up to about $2 billion in revenue

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/avatar-way-of-water-box-office-2b-globally-1235306500/

james cameron has directed 3 of the 6 films to pass the $2B marker

And he's only made one of the top 10 most expensive. It's crazy to me that Titanic is now tied for 47th-most-expensive movie ever, and even the first Avatar is 25th.

Is that adjusted for inflation?

inflation of the boat

Crazy how many of the top spots on the most expensive movies of all time list are taken up by those ugly ass Pirates of the Caribbean sequels.

Which is of course why one should never cite box office as a sign of much more than exceptional marketing success.

once hollywood decided (correctly? who is to say) that dumping insane amounts of money into a movie as an input gets you insane amounts at the box office they locked into a blockbuster death spiral

Is that adjusted for inflation?

Good point, no. If you do, Titanic is number 2 and Avatar number 6.

does the title Titanic refer to the boat or the amount of money spent making the movie hard to say

it refers to how good the movie is. the quality of the film is titanic

This thing is on HBO (excuse me, Max) starting Wednesday. Gonna install the Max app on my phone and check it out.

I like the theory that most of the movie's tickets were sold to ghosts.

Er what?

Just the idea that this is the biggest movie of all time, right? But for whatever reason I'm not sure I personally know a single person who has seen it. None of my friends, no children of friends, not my kids, none of their friends, not a soul. It's kinda weird. So must be mostly ghosts.

yes, non-americans are ghosts

I don't know anyone who voted for Joe Biden but my assumption is that everyone who did is Na'vi

Nice try, Na'vi can't vote. Fake Blues!

No shade, everyone should enjoy Avatar 2. I was only relating my surprise, since I wanted to know what my friends or their kids thought of it, but none of them saw it, not even the ones I thought would want to see it. Which I thought was weird.

amazed Our Lady Peace hasn't done an Avatar collabo

i made it through 30 minutes of this before i bailed

cannot imagine sitting through 3+ hours of that

parts of it looked great on the big screen, i can vouch for that, but i can barely remember anything about the plot, and most of what i do remember was really annoying.

i made it through 30 minutes of this before i bailed

cannot imagine sitting through 3+ hours of that

I lasted about 15 before I was actually angry with myself for having even tried.

veg you missed Brendan Cowell getting his arm sliced off by an alium whale and sproing-spiralling off of a boat snapped in half by a giant cable while his arm wheeeee-spiralled in a different direction

as good as that sounds, i still wouldn’t sit through it for that

i felt like i was watching the 29th bratz doll vhs or some other knockoff toy series like this endless exposition worldbuilding is just absolute gibberish to me, a grumpy elderly woman who enjoys Movies and Cinema that YOU sir James Cameron USED TO MAKE ugh idk why it irritates me so much but omg i could not have hated it more

plus they all look like deer

That a film more than 3 hours long just inelegantly and unclearly infodumps for its first 20 minutes is hard to forgive.

I'll never watch this on purpose, but I'm sure I'll eventually see the entire thing, bit by bit, spread across dozens of walks by bright TV displays in big box stores. Who needs movie theaters when I have Costco visits?

it seems kind of pointless to see this movie on anything other than IMAX 3D? (I haven't seen this movie)

you all are wrong this movie ruled

Otm

otm = out of your mind

<3

As someone who did see it in 3D on an IMAX screen — and largely enjoyed it — I can't fathom watching it in 2D on TV, much less on a smaller screen. It would be like watching a YouTube of a rollercoaster ride.

Does watching it on an IMAX screen also offer a better script and actual characterization?

Only in the future four+ hour extended version.

I do appreciate that James Cameron spent years and years making movies on the water, in the water, under the water, diving, floating, sinking, researching and developing state of the art FX, until he was finally able to create computer rendered water so realistic it is indistinguishable from the real thing ... and then populated the movie with 10-foot tall blue people.

Does watching it on an IMAX screen also offer a better script and actual characterization?

No but neither do rollercoaster rides.

There is a whole subset of youtube videos dedicated to roller coasters, they're kind of fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViSVOWv3Pp8

lol I enjoyed this movie, esp the water/whale stuff (I was also v v st0ned), but I also enjoy watching YouTube videos of theme park rides so I guess it tracks.

Is the new one available on Max the newest one?

endless exposition worldbuilding is just absolute gibberish to me, a grumpy elderly woman who enjoys Movies and Cinema that YOU sir James Cameron USED TO MAKE ugh idk why it irritates me so much but omg i could not have hated it more

shit absolutely fucks once they stop talking and start swimming and fighting, you'd love the final action scene

(saw it in liemax 3D and liked it enough I went again in local 3D, had not seen the first one until the reissue in November or whenever)

final action scene

which goes for about an hour forty if you want to skip ahead

you have mistaken me for someone else if you think i’m going to at some point “continue watching” and/or “finish the movie” or even “skip to the good parts”

https://media.tenor.com/images/3832e18bd9b1b83a21d03a80ca20b4e6/tenor.gif

anguished_payakan.gif

Lol at "liemax". We also only have one authentic IMAX here locally and I made sure to see it there and not the pathetic fake IMAXes

For future installments, Cameron will build a series of 100 GIMAX theaters — 32 stories tall, a city block wide — equipped with fully mobile seats that will rise, fall, and swoop through the air. It will raise the cost of the next film to $12 billion, everyone will make fun of him, and then he will gross $25 billion.

isn't that basically just the avatar ride in disney world?

Pretty much! Which is awesome fwiw.

For all its prettiness, a sad lack of imagination on display in this. The new Na'avi are just wet Maori stereotypes, and having them all talking English just lays bare how they're completely mundanely human in emotions and thought. The animals are all familiar aquatic animals with bits from other familiar species bolted on. They don't come up with anything really alien at all.

There is a very clear reason for that tbh

It’s an open polemic, not The Mote In God’s Eye

You can still make polemics interesting and not racist.

I watched this but shouldn’t have because I hated the first one. I hated this more - intensely, loudly witless and boring, and unforgivably devoid of imagination.

i thought the water/whale scenes in this were just brimming with wonder and beauty lol

prob my favorite “second act where all the narrative momentum disappears for whatever reason, usually bc of the temporary evasion of the bad guy” in a james cameron film

lol I enjoyed this movie, esp the water/whale stuff (I was also v v st0ned), but I also enjoy watching YouTube videos of theme park rides so I guess it tracks.

― Judi Dench's Human Hand (methanietanner), Sunday, June 11, 2023 11:44 AM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is urgent and key for these films.

yeah are people watching this sober??

I tried watching this sober today. Lasted about 20 minutes. Nope. Gotta be in the mood for endless CGI “wonder”.

avatar ii is a non-racist movie imo

watched it sober on a big screen and loved it

big screen = imax 3d

Well-meaning but lazy cultural appropriation is still racist, just not Nazi racist.

naw

James’ sentence is true, and I’m not equipped to judge how the scales tip between lazy and well-meaning in this instance — but Cameron’s clearly foregrounding the references, and cast Cliff Curtis as the head wet guy.

Cameron is totally going to follow up "Avatar 5" with "Titanic 2," about the search for the sub in search of "Titanic." He's got the CG water FX down, the next few years will be spent working on the script.

in the same film

Avatar 5: Titanic 2

Sigourney Weaver has been attached to play the sub via motion capture.

Good interview here, as usual pretty full of shit, lol:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/james-cameron-interview-avatar-future-1236451614/

“I’m frustrated because the human race seems to be delusional about what they think is going to happen next. We are going backwards. But who’s to say we wouldn’t be going backwards even faster if it wasn’t for these films? There isn’t an alternative Earth without Avatar we can point to and say, ‘It made this measurable difference.’ What we can say is the Avatar films are on the right side of history.”

Let me be one of the first to say: thank you, "Avatar" films.

🤣

jfc

lol I wish he could just admit he likes making expensive movies with lots of explosions and fights.

I mostly liked the 2nd one, because I do like the scale and I think he's one of the only people who uses 3D well. I'll probably still see this one, but yes my interest is waning.

he should just stick to being the rich submersible expert who bores everyone rigid every time there is a new Titan doc

submersible idiot is right

supposedly the evil marines are still the baddies in this one. they were the most cliched part of the original. they should have stayed dead.

Something else that irked me about the interview was how he more or less shirked responsibility for AI in Hollywood, when the whole point of a series literally called "Avatar" is about replacing human actors with cartoons. Sure, people have been doing that for a while now, but Cameron's big thing is making his computer-made world indistinguishable from what is 'real,' which is to say, proof that it can be done. So why wouldn't Hollywood follow through with what he pioneered? In the interview, he arrogantly (natch) claims he can make a car chase that looks as real as an analog stunt. I'm sure he can, and people do, just as they make virtual sets and virtual gun muzzle blasts and blood and all sorts of other stuff. But virtual people, that's the inflection point, and no matter how much Cameron touts his motion-cap bona fides, the better he and it gets, the less incentive Hollywood has to use real actors. He wants to cut himself out of the discourse, then he should make a movie using mostly practical effects to prove *that* can still be done.

Speak of the devil, watched "The Abyss" the other night for the first time in years. The blend of models, sets, projection, CGI, even stop motion may not be seamless, but as with "Jurassic Park" the (most conspicuous) CGI stuff holds up relatively well. The irony of "The Abyss" is that Cameron whiffed the *ending*. Writing is one of the fundamentals totally at risk to AI, but writing is the one thing Cameron has struggled with more than most things.

fire and ash isn't a particularly terrible movie, but man is it a let-down after way of the water

If you think it's a let down then you are letting down the Earth. Think about that.

lol

it's incredible to me that water and fire were originally conceived as one movie. since fire consists of copy-paste retread of like ten different major scenes from water