The only reason for the Avatar sequel to exist is as a toy, as a way for James Cameron to continue playing in the water as he has done for the last 30 years. All he wants is a reason to work on new technologies, which would be admirable, except that it’s a self indulgent venture. It would have been different if Cameron actually had a story that he wanted to tell. But instead we get more cultural appropriation, more PSA style thematics – instead of Save The Rainforest, it’s now Save The Whales -, and more liquid thin character and plot development. The movie is 3 hours and 12 minutes of drivel.
Me and Avatar 2 got to a very bad start. I wasn’t a fan of the first movie, but at least I understood its appeal for those who need their cinema to be spectacle. Everyone needs a sugary treat every now and again. Back in 2009, I still wasn’t sold on the visuals; James Cameron’s blue man group still looked like CGI rag dolls swinging in the wind. And yeah, it borrowed heavily from Dances with Wolves and Pocahontas… and that’s fine as it was a coherent story.
So I had little interest in seeing The Way of Water in the first place. But then I made the big mistake of seeing it in 3D with HFR. And for those of you that don’t know, HFR stands for High Frame Rate. Movies are usually shot at 24ish frames a second. You get 24 pictures that run through a projector every second. Movies have been shot this way for almost a century now. There’s been filmmakers in the past that have experimented with HFR, The Hobbit movies were shot in 60 fps, trying to eliminate all sense of motion blur, trying to mimic how our eyes perceives real life. Cameron obviously realized how awkward those movies looked, so he made the decision to shoot Avatar at variable frame rates. Most of the movie is at 24 fps, while certain scenes, mainly action sequences and underwater sequences, are shot at 40 fps. This causes those sequences to look and feel like a video game cut scene. They looked awful and silly, and distracted from the movie, especially whenever a 24 fps shot is randomly inserted into those 40 fps scenes.
But the rest of the CGI and the creatures that have been created for the movie are indeed stunning, They are beautiful to look at, but they aren’t, in themselves, stimulating or mentally engaging. I might as well have been looking at a computer’s screen saver for 3 hours. The plot, stupefyingly, is able to steal arcs from Cameron’s other films, there’s a bit of Terminator mixed with a dash of Titanic, and a whole lot of The Abyss thrown in to make things very moist Plus there’s a whole Moby Dick subplot as we spend at least 15 minutes watching humans go whaling.
Now I could go on about the plot, how the blue main characters from the first movie have to flee to a village of aqua blue people as they are hunted down by the same bad guy from the first film. But the plot felt like it was almost an afterthought, as you could predict the beats 30 minutes before they happen. It’s inconsequential… as is most of the movie.
Leave a comment