The _Avatar_ sequel, presumably also directed by James Cameron

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.