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Watched Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

Jenna

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Holy shit. Longpost ahead because I simply must rant about how much this film sucks.

First, the good. It's visually pretty like the first, but the charm wears off fast. Some of the action sequences, especially when the bluepeople start attacking the whalers in the third act are neat. Uhh, that's it.

Now onto the bad. Firstly, the plot. There's one end-of-movie spoiler I won't give away, but here's the plot: so remember in the first film the blues defeated the humans and made them retreat? Within five minutes, that's over, the humans are back and that's that. The bad guy from the first film has been resurrected as a blue creature and has a mission to kill Jake because... it's never really explained why. They do that annoying trope of "the white man came to these natives and was promptly named their leader!" so now Jake's in charge of the blue people. So Jake goes to hang out with the water blue people where they can't find him (???) but the water blue people talk with space whales, so the bad guys start killing whales for no real reason. Their logic is literally "if we kill these space whales, the blues will have to defend them", and they do and there's a big hourlong fight over it. Movie over. How do you spend so many billions of dollars on this movie and have such a basic "things happen because bad guys are bad" narrative. How?

Moving onto the characters. So now that the bad guys are bluepeople too, almost everyone is blue and CGI. Except for Carmella Soprano as an evil general (lol), Jermaine Clement as an American who isn't funny, and Spider... we'll get to Spider later. So Jake and Zoe Saldana have three kids, two teenage boys and a little girl. There is absolutely no way to tell the two teenage boys apart. They both look exactly the same, behave exactly the same, and with all this amazing CGI and visual effects you have to guess which one is in each scene. One of them goes and befriends a space whale, which one? Who knows. There's another teenage girl blueperson they adopt, played by 14-year-old actress Sigourney Weaver. Look I loved her in Alien and Aliens too, but why is a 73-year-old actress motion capturing a 14-year-old character? Because she was in the first one and wanted to be in the sequel? At least when they meet the sea blue people, they're a slightly lighter shade of blue, but even then it's more confusing teenagers. So you need to tell apart four teenagers in Jake's "family", then two teenagers in the sea people's "family", and then other assorted sea people teenagers who bully Jake's family because their tails aren't long enough. Then the bad guys are all blue as well, even though they only fight at the beginning and end of the movie, but at least they wear army camo so you can go "oh those are the bad blue people".

Which brings us to Spider. Let me post a picture of Spider first:

755


Spider is a 14-year-old twink with white boy dreadlocks who spends LITERALLY EVERY SCENE IN THE GODDAMN FILM wearing a loincloth. I figured okay, do the whole Tarzan thing at the beginning when he's hanging with the blue kids, but then when the army captures him, make him put on some clothes, right? Wrong. Oh, so very very wrong. So you have army soldiers on their water spaceship base running around in army clothes, alongside fucking Jungle Boy. This is by far the most non-blue character featured in the film, even though the in-universe science makes it very easy for him to become blue like everyone else, nooooo let's keep him like one of Bryan Singer's poolboys. The only saving grace was me going "this asshole looks familiar", turns out I saw him a couple weeks ago in Scream 6 where he was killed by, you guessed it, Jenna Ortega. So at least my devotion to Jenna helped in that aspect, as everytime he was on screen looking like the captain of a Middle School swim team I pictured the princess jamming a sharp knife down his throat.

The dialogue? Terrible, all forgettable pseudo-philosophy stuff. We are one with the ocean, and the ocean is one with us are you?

The stunts? Pointless. Apparently Kate Winslet broke the record for most time spent underwater, fucking where? What scene did this occur? The previous record holder, Tom Cruise in one of the Mission Impossible movies, I remember that stunt. It was pretty cool. At no point does Kate Winslet's character need to be underwater for 6+ minutes, IIRC there's one scene where one of the teenage sons (can never figure out which one) almost drowns hiding from a space shark.

The runtime? Over three hours. Keep in mind, this is not a grand historical epic that's worthy of that runtime. It's a bunch of CGI retards interacting with CGI whales, and swimming through the ocean as space fish swim around them.

The direction? James Cameron is clearly at the age where he's going to do fucking whatever and masturbate how much he loves the ocean, and the rest of us have to nod along. Give Ed Wood $460 million to spend on visual effects (and certainly not paying off ""top"" movie reviewers to give this glowing reviews where none of the flaws get mentioned) and his movies would look great too.

In summary? Holy shit, how does this trash make so much money? Marvel movies are fun, Fast and Furious movies are fun. This is TEDIOUS.
 

HotDogJoe

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I'm not reading all that but I know even without watching it that it sucks. I saw the first one in IMAX when it came out and I remember mentally checking out after the first hour. It was so fucking boring beyond the visually impressive stuff, which wears off very fast.

I can't hate Cameron because the first two Terminator movies are so damn good but seriously how long as it been now since he's made a seminal, universally acclaimed movie? I think it was T2, so 32 fucking years. Just give it up already. Nobody gives a shit about your climate change message, faggot. Just make entertaining movies.
 

Jenna

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I haven’t seen the movie but I thoroughly enjoyed this review. I bet it’s more entertaining than the movie itself.

You kinda lost me at the end though:

A fantastic example of this would be the recent Dungeons & Dragons movie that just came out. Very paint-by-numbers, all the cast members are playing by type, the ending is completely telegraphed, but I still managed to enjoy it. Chris Pine is a handsome rapscallion and there's a fat dragon.
 

LingerLonger

Still spreading the O&A virus
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I can't hate Cameron because the first two Terminator movies are so damn good but seriously how long as it been now since he's made a seminal, universally acclaimed movie?
After T2 he did True Lies, wrote Strange Days for his girlfriend and helped her direct it, and then did Titanic. Titanic then turned into a decade of Titanic documentaries and deep sea diving expeditions for him where he became obsessed with ocean life. Which lead to 'dances with smurfs' or Avatar.

Since Titanic everything he has done film wise has been pure dogshit. The Terminator sequel he did recently is one of the biggest bombs of all time. I would not be surprised if Cameron is one of those guys that dies nearly broke with the way he spends money.
 

HotDogJoe

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A fantastic example of this would be the recent Dungeons & Dragons movie that just came out. Very paint-by-numbers, all the cast members are playing by type, the ending is completely telegraphed, but I still managed to enjoy it. Chris Pine is a handsome rapscallion and there's a fat dragon.

I agree with this. There's entertaining garbage and there's tedious garbage. If I had the choice of watching the last 9 Fast and Furious movies (I only saw the first one when it came out) and the newest Avatar movie, I would legitimately choose the former.
 

Turk February

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After T2 he did True Lies, wrote Strange Days for his girlfriend and helped her direct it, and then did Titanic. Titanic then turned into a decade of Titanic documentaries and deep sea diving expeditions for him where he became obsessed with ocean life. Which lead to 'dances with smurfs' or Avatar.

Since Titanic everything he has done film wise has been pure dogshit. The Terminator sequel he did recently is one of the biggest bombs of all time. I would not be surprised if Cameron is one of those guys that dies nearly broke with the way he spends money.
Strange Days is such an underrated movie. Kathy B should make a Strange Day 2025 or some shit.
 

HotDogJoe

Professional leech since 1994. Anyone can do it.
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After T2 he did True Lies, wrote Strange Days for his girlfriend and helped her direct it, and then did Titanic. Titanic then turned into a decade of Titanic documentaries and deep sea diving expeditions for him where he became obsessed with ocean life. Which lead to 'dances with smurfs' or Avatar.

Since Titanic everything he has done film wise has been pure dogshit. The Terminator sequel he did recently is one of the biggest bombs of all time. I would not be surprised if Cameron is one of those guys that dies nearly broke with the way he spends money.

True Lies is very entertaining to be fair, although it is trashy shite compared to his best work. I dunno why he's so autistically obsessed with the Titanic but whatever.

Was that latest Terminator movie actually his? I thought he was just a producer on it. I know he's planning to do a new Terminator movie though, when he "sees how AI pans out in the real world". Will almost certainly be terrible. Faggot should just retire at this point.
 

Jenna

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Did you like the first one @Jenna ?

I’m in the same boat as Abe where I saw it a while back and remember nothing.

I got an eye thing where I can't see that real-3D shit, it just all comes across as blurry. 20/20 vision otherwise but I think my eye thing affects like 5% of the population.

Despite not being able to see it, it was okay. It borrows heavily from other movies like Dances with Wolves, but at least the main character had a journey and I wasn't confused to which character was which. It wasn't memorable but I did remember things from it that get brought up in Avatar 2. Flying on the jungle birds, the evil humans having mech suits and shit.
 

HeyItsVos

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I got an eye thing where I can't see that real-3D shit, it just all comes across as blurry. 20/20 vision otherwise but I think my eye thing affects like 5% of the population.

Despite not being able to see it, it was okay. It borrows heavily from other movies like Dances with Wolves, but at least the main character had a journey and I wasn't confused to which character was which. It wasn't memorable but I did remember things from it that get brought up in Avatar 2. Flying on the jungle birds, the evil humans having mech suits and shit.
Part of the reason I avoided this sequel was because I thought best case scenario is it’s as good as the first one. And that’s just not good enough.
 

CutesyMissy

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I almost feel embarassed that I love The Terminator (I'm one of those people that doesn't like the second that much) and Aliens (probably the best sequel of all time, because it isn't particularly close to the first one, it has his own tone and genre, despite organically continuing the Alien storyline). True Lies is fucking hilarious (even though I couldn't find a copy above 240p).

But fuck. Ever since Titanic (a generic soap opera with a billion dollar budget), James Cameron hasn't done anything worth watching. Yes, Avatar looks beautiful, but the story and characters have been done better, even in kids movies (I'd watch Fengully 40 times before gazing at "tall smurfs").

The tragedy is that he'll keep pumping them out because they never bomb.

I'm about to believe that he's in some jewish scheme (I know, redundant) to develop alternative metrics to measure box office success. And even more terrifying is that people voluntarily went to the cinema to watch that dreck (in which case, it was a pleasure knowing you, because we as a species are finished).
 
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