Avatar 2 - The Way of Water Dec 2022

[makkuwata]

I haven’t kept up with Kermode since the move, I didn’t know he was saying naughty words now!

 

He uh, he didn’t like it very much.

[Hanzo the Razor]

4 hours ago, CarloOos said:

Piranha 2.

 

Since T2? And P2 wasn't a sequel to one of his own films, so neeer.

[Capwn]

Yeah it’s clearly awful;

 

 

[krenzler]

Nice alternative titles. 

 

It's still going to shatter box office records. It's the perfect timing.

[Benny]

1 hour ago, Capwn said:

Yeah it’s clearly awful;

 

 

 

Fantastically savage.

[Stanley]

Shitetanic 

[James Lyon]

I'm debating whether to go see this or not. The only showing I can feasibly do is 2D only and I'm thinking if I can't get all the bells and whistles it might not be worth going at all, especially with all the OK to mediocre reviews.

[Stanley]

2 hours ago, krenzler said:

Nice alternative titles. 

 

It's still going to shatter box office records. It's the perfect timing.

Perfect timing for what, bland overly long movies with awful sub PS2 era character designs? 
 

And why are people so obsessed with how it performs at the box office? Like if somehow it does in fact beat all the records then Cameron will have proven all the doubters wrong. Being the biggest has never meant much in my book. 
 

Sorry not really aimed at you I just don’t understand the obsession with money and marketing. 

[krenzler]

Ok.. That's fair. I'm not obsessed with box office either. Just saying what I think.

 

Perfect timing because of sour uncertain times and also the current MCU fall-off. 

 

Cameron doesn't make movies he crafts events. His films resonates broadly and people will lap up this spectacle.

[glb]

5 minutes ago, Stanley said:

Perfect timing for what, bland overly long movies with awful sub PS2 era character designs? 
 

And why are people so obsessed with how it performs at the box office? Like if somehow it does in fact beat all the records then Cameron will have proven all the doubters wrong. Being the biggest has never meant much in my book. 
 

Sorry not really aimed at you I just don’t understand the obsession with money and marketing. 

Personally, box office takes are something that have been involved with my work for a while albeit less so in current role so don’t get to do as much analysis. Do find the smoke and mirrors of Hollywood accounting fascinating.

 

Avatar piques my interest because the first one was so massive, but the releasing market has changed significantly since 2009. I’m not even sure it needs to do numbers comparable to the first one as its hardcore base is well-established, and there are so many nozzles with which blockbusters can hoover up money anyway. Certainly not interested in using its box office in a pejorative way; as a film Way of Water is a very interesting case study,

[Bazjam]

A solid 2/5 from me.

 

I honestly can’t remember the last time I was this bored in a cinema. How on earth did Cameron spend 12 years making this and forget to put a plot in. I swear 80% of this film was just shots of smurfs swimming with big fish while soaring music plays.

 

Its gonna take a lot for me to sit through another one of these films.

[Hamus]

6 hours ago, Capwn said:

Yeah it’s clearly awful;

 

 

 

I must admit that video is a hard watch.

[Triple A]

Saw this yesterday in Dolby Cinema x 3D x HFR.

 

The plot was bobbins and the script was pure fromage, but damn if I wasn’t totally mesmerised the whole time.  Visually speaking this was a generational leap imo and worth the entry price alone - my gob was smacked (bummed?) so many times!

The film is pretty emotional at times too, sometimes when you least expect it.

 

The final action sequence is breathtaking and is tied for the benchmark top spot with Mad Max Fury Road.

 

It’s quite a tiring watch - a combination of runtime, whizzbang 3D/HFR/12-bit colour gamut, and a flabby middle - so sleep well before watching this if you can.

 

And the HFR - hmm.  The way it cut in and out of HFR, where I often couldn’t really figure out why it kept switching, was quite jarring.  But my god much of the HFR stuff looked stunning.

Think of this as a three-hour theme park A/V experience attraction.  If you go in with that expectation you’ll have a very good time.

I want another go!

[choddo]

I didn’t know Cameron was still banging the HFR drum after the Hobbit roasting.

 

Will have to see this obvs.

[Paulando]

9 hours ago, Hamus said:

 

I must admit that video is a hard watch.

I like Kermode but honestly, he just comes across as an annoying twat. That voice ffs.

[Triple A]

54 minutes ago, Paulando said:

I like Kermode but honestly, he just comes across as an annoying twat. That voice ffs.

It’s as though he’s become somewhat of a shock jock, trolling for views, since leaving the beeb 

[Triple A]

6 hours ago, choddo said:

I didn’t know Cameron was still banging the HFR drum after the Hobbit roasting.

 

Will have to see this obvs.

The frame rate varies between standard 24 and HFR, intention being to mitigate soap opera effect in scenes showing character dialogue.  It didn’t always work to that logic though, with some dialogue scenes being HFR and some landscape or action scenes being SFR, and with the constant & unpredictable switching being a somewhat unwelcome distraction.

I don’t think I would have wanted to see the whole thing in HFR, as the soap opera effect was noticeable at times - especially in dialogue scenes with human/non CG’d characters.  That said HFR absolutely elevated much of the movie imo, given the heavy use of CG generally speaking.  
I didn’t think that this movie completely cracked the problem.

[Loik V credern]

11 hours ago, Bazjam said:

A solid 2/5 from me.

 

I honestly can’t remember the last time I was this bored in a cinema. How on earth did Cameron spend 12 years making this and forget to put a plot in. I swear 80% of this film was just shots of smurfs swimming with big fish while soaring music plays.

 

Its gonna take a lot for me to sit through another one of these films.

 

It sounds like a..character driven film but..there are no characters? Getting through this in the cinema without self harming sounds like it might be an achievement for me, I'm curious what experiments in time sabotage Cameron has done. 

 

It seems like responses to the film are either enraptured by its scale and supposing it's distinct from any other cgi heavy mainstream film or yeah bored by it.

 

Which is what I expected but ..no plot, how are the majority of casual cinema goers going to take to that. Don't usually plot loss films rely on their eccentric characters, sharp wit and vibes to engage you, action blockbusters if nothing else however much of a Transformers 2 train wreck of confusion try to hit those we need to do this right now or else beats with a high frequency. An action blockbuster that just..is, with characters spewing nothing but clichéd theme heavy lines, while swimming. 40 minutes longer than The Fabelmans which was already fucking long. 

 

Kermode there just looks like he's been driven mad by the film, he's been angry before or despondent and beaten but that's during the review, he's bringing so much cynicism before he's even got into what's wrong with it. Like how he used to with saying McG's name stupidly. 

 

It's funny because Jeff Canata on the filmcast is at the complete opposite end of talking about the film as though it injected pure child like joy into his soul and reduced him to tears multiple times. He is an actor and exaggerates often but still the difference between these reactions is all in how we take the basic stuff all films do. Kermode is having none of it, Canata is having all of it. And if films lose us then that's it, they're not getting us back. 

 

If a film has humour even if they're naff jokes the levity goes a long way to puncturing the often exhausting high stakes forced drama of these Hollywood blockbusters. 

 

Cameron is so cartoonishly confident he's entertaining, it feels like more characters in his films ought to be naughty, even if just one of the blue guys is an absolute cunt, just an arsehole to everyone for no reason i think that'd get me through any excessive cgi scuba diving. 

[makkuwata]

2 hours ago, choddo said:

Will have to see this obvs.

I always figured I would, but now that the day is here I can’t see myself bothering. I haven’t even been able to summon the will to rewatch the original for the first time since cinemas.

At least it gave us one of the few funny SNL sketches of the last decade, maybe they’ll sequel it.

 

 

[Loik V credern]

[RubberJohnny]

Cameron actually went on a weird rant at Ryan Gosling over that sketch recently, as if Ryan wrote it, which was proper weird, I guess he resented it sticking in the popular consciousness more than the original film? I mean it's bad enough when internet fans attack an actor for playing a role they don't like, it's a bit different when it's coming from the director of the most successful film of all time, he seems very insecure.

[Paulando]

2 minutes ago, RubberJohnny said:

Cameron actually went on a weird rant at Ryan Gosling over that sketch recently

Where was this?

[RubberJohnny]

It was in Empire when someone brough it up to him:

 

Quote

"Ryan Gosling needs to get out more, instead of freaking out over our font. Time to move out of your mom's basement, Ryan! And if Papyrus resonates with the issues of Indigenous cultures in the public consciousness, then that fits well with 'Avatar,' so I'm not losing any sleep over it."

 

[Ry]

5 minutes ago, RubberJohnny said:

It was in Empire when someone brough it up to him:

 

 

 

No fucking way that's real, he must have been joking. Cameron can't be that much of an idiot

[the_debaser]

I just spent about 2hrs watching this and walked out of the cinema so don’t know how it ends. And to be honest I don’t care. It is unbelievably boring, and quite possibly the worst thing I’ve seen all year.  

 

Avoid. 0/5. 

[Loik V credern]

1 hour ago, RubberJohnny said:

"Ryan Gosling needs to get out more, instead of freaking out over our font. Time to move out of your mom's basement, Ryan! And if Papyrus resonates with the issues of Indigenous cultures in the public consciousness, then that fits well with 'Avatar,' so I'm not losing any sleep over it."

 

haha that's amazing. The snl sketch is genuinely good i think as a send up of thrillers as much as the font, If Cameron didn't find it funny then i'm not sure he finds anything funny.

 

Also he's still bothered by the whole argument over whether Leo could have got on the door that he's done a scientific study on it.

 

Quote

Any fan of James Cameron’s “Titanic” has surely debated many times whether or not Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) had to die. Many viewers claim there was enough room for both Jack and Rose (Kate Winslet) on the floating door turned makeshift raft, but Cameron himself is here to prove everyone wrong. Speaking to The Toronto Sun to promote “Avatar: The Way of Water,” Cameron revealed he has documented a “scientific study” that proves two people could not have survived on the floating door at the end of “Titanic.”

 

“We have done a scientific study to put this whole thing to rest and drive a stake through its heart once and for all,” Cameron said. “We have since done a thorough forensic analysis with a hypothermia expert who reproduced the raft from the movie and we’re going to do a little special on it that comes out in February.”

 

Cameron continued, “We took two stunt people who were the same body mass of Kate and Leo and we put sensors all over them and inside them and we put them in ice water and we tested to see whether they could have survived through a variety of methods and the answer was, there was no way they both could have survived. Only one could survive.”

 

There was even an episode of the Discovery Channel's Mythbusters that described a variety of ways Jack could have been saved. Cameron actually joined the team of scientists to test their theories, but the director just wasn't buying it.

 

He broke down the facts in a very scientific manner, explaining:

 

'OK, so let’s really play that out: you’re Jack, you’re in water that’s 28 degrees, your brain is starting to get hypothermia, Mythbusters asks you to now go take off your life vest, take hers off, swim underneath this thing, attach it in some way that it won’t just wash out two minutes later'

 

James continued: '[That] means you’re underwater tying this thing on in 28-degree water, and that’s going to take you five to ten minutes, so by the time you come back up you’re already dead.

 

'So that wouldn’t work. His best choice was to keep his upper body out of the water and hope to get pulled out by a boat or something before he died.' 

 

The Avatar director has no bitter feelings for the myth busting scientists though, saying: 'They’re fun guys and I loved doing that show with them, but [with this] they’re full of shit.'

 

Cameron made headlines in 2019 for calling the never-ending debate over Jack’s fate “stupid.” The filmmaker told the BBC, “There’s no debate. But if you really want to unearth all the dumbass arguments associated with it…I mean, let’s go back to, could Romeo have been smart and not taken the poison? Yes. Could he have decided not to bring his little dagger just in case Juliet might stab herself with it? Yes, absolutely. It sort of misses the point.”

 

“[Jack] needed to die,” Cameron added. “It’s a movie about love and sacrifice and mortality. The love is measured by the sacrifice…Maybe after 25 years, I won’t have to deal with this anymore.”

 

 

i think i've found the reason Avatar has no sense of humour.

[Paulando]

I don’t think he’s ever really had a sense of humour? Aliens has some good laughs though.

 

I know some people are out for blood because he made Avatar instead of True Lies 2 or whatever, but Cameron isn’t one of the bad ones. He’s made some of the best films ever, some other fairly mediocre but nonetheless exciting films, he’s big on the environment, and has spent the rest of his time going to the bottom of the ocean. He’s fine.

[makkuwata]

Just an asshole.

 

 

[Ste_S]

49 minutes ago, Paulando said:

I don’t think he’s ever really had a sense of humour? Aliens has some good laughs though.

 

I know some people are out for blood because he made Avatar instead of True Lies 2 or whatever, but Cameron isn’t one of the bad ones. He’s made some of the best films ever, some other fairly mediocre but nonetheless exciting films, he’s big on the environment, and has spent the rest of his time going to the bottom of the ocean. He’s fine.

 

Never really got the love for True Lies. That whole middle part of the film, where they humiliate Jamie Lee Curtis' character is weird/creepy, and Tom Arnold is never not annoying.

[Capwn]

10 hours ago, Triple A said:

The plot was bobbins and the script was pure fromage, but damn if I wasn’t totally mesmerised the whole time.  Visually speaking this was a generational leap imo and worth the entry price alone - my gob was smacked (bummed?) so many times!

The film is pretty emotional at times too, sometimes when you least expect it.