Avatar 2 - The Way of Water Dec 2022

[Pob]

40 minutes ago, Jammy said:

I was tempted to take the boy to see this, but with a 3.5hr runtime and a slow middle act it would be a recipe for an unenjoyable experience for both of us. I would like to see it as intended though, as much for the spectacle as anything. 

 

Hang on, it's getting longer. Was there a Day 1 patch or something?

[James Lyon]

I wasn't sure if I would go see this but I just watched the first one again for the first time since release and still enjoyed it, so I'm happy to go see this, if only for the spectacle.

 

I managed to book in for an IMAX 3D showing. I've still got a pair of Real3D glasses I bought when watching the original. Will those definitely work with the new one?

[Alex W.]

I’m just getting the discourse second hand here through podcasts but why is Iowa such a big part of this movie?

[James Lyon]

2 minutes ago, Alex W. said:

I’m just getting the discourse second hand here through podcasts but why is Iowa such a big part of this movie?

 

The na'vi really like Slipknot.

[Paulando]

27 minutes ago, James Lyon said:

I managed to book in for an IMAX 3D showing. I've still got a pair of Real3D glasses I bought when watching the original. Will those definitely work with the new one?

If it’s a ‘big’ IMAX (1.43:1), you get some glasses when you go in (as they aren’t disposable), not too sure if it’s one of the smaller IMAX screens.

[James Lyon]

18 minutes ago, Paulando said:

If it’s a ‘big’ IMAX (1.43:1), you get some glasses when you go in (as they aren’t disposable), not too sure if it’s one of the smaller IMAX screens.

 

It's the one in Edinburgh. Looks like it's not 'proper' IMAX but the digital one.

[the_debaser]

4 hours ago, IcEBuRN said:

Nope, I don't get it. I see what you guys are saying, but if you've invested the time and money to get to the cinema, you've sat through two thirds of the film, why not complete it at that point? You're really not gaining anything by leaving that far through, and I'm sorry, but  there must be a warped sense of quality going on here, because while I didn't think the film was amazing, there's absolutely, objectively, no way it's so bad it's worth walking out on like that.

Fair enough. I just hated it and decided my time would be better spent going home and finishing off Andor. Which is excellent btw. 

[Hanzo the Razor]

4 hours ago, the_debaser said:

Decided my time would be better spent going home and finishing off Andor.

 

F'nar

[JohnC]

Edie Falco was taken by surprise by the recent release. She filmed the movie 4 years ago and movies don't normally take that long. So she thought it had been out already and been a massive flop because she'd heard nothing about it in the meantime.

[Paulando]

Wonder when we’ll start to see posts from people overjoyed to see it’s ‘flopped’ because it hasn’t done $2.9billion? 

[Ork1927]

2 hours ago, JohnC said:

Edie Falco was taken by surprise by the recent release. She filmed the movie 4 years ago and movies don't normally take that long. So she thought it had been out already and been a massive flop because she'd heard nothing about it in the meantime.

 

Spoiler

Given she disappears about a quarter of the way in - I forgot she was in it by the end.

 

[scottcr]

Is this a bit of a waste if you don't see it in 3D?  

[Paulando]

1 hour ago, scottcr said:

Is this a bit of a waste if you don't see it in 3D?  

Not really, but you’d definitely need to see it the best way possible, on the biggest screen possible. Otherwise it’d be like watching a POV video of a roller coaster instead of going on the actual thing yourself.

[Made of Ghosts]

Disorganised thoughts:

 

Spoiler

- They’re so in love with this “world” they’ve created but it’s really just a very ordinary (albeit pretty) alien planet. This whole movie feels like “let’s explore this new part of Pandora” above all else, but there’s basically nothing interesting or unique about it. I’ve no idea why the place is deemed worthy of a franchise. 
- They couldn’t even think of a new story so it’s basically the exact same “adjusting to a weird alien culture” story again, just with slightly different-coloured aliens.

- The bond between the kid and the outcast alien whale is kind of engaging. Too little too late though. 
- Killing the mama whale should be an effective beat but that scene just went on and on (like the movie overall) and ended up feeling kind of nasty and gratuitous. 
- Why is it so long?

- What’s Jemaine Clement doing there?

- Why do the kid characters all talk like YouTubers?

 

[James Lyon]

I saw it today in Imax 3D. Overall, I thought it was pretty good. No way it's terrible or mediocre, but everyone's right that it drags in the middle. I've got to confess I got very sleepy at one point (see spoilers), but I blame that more on my level of tiredness. Essentially, if you're at a point, where you think it's not going anywhere, you're probably just 10-15 minutes away from the action starting up again and once it does, it's pretty much full-on till the end. The plot isn't amazing, but it services some good solid Cameron action sandwiched between them learning the way of water.

 

Technically, the 3D was very good. CGI was very convincing and you could have told me they'd shot on location and I'd believe you. No idea if I was watching it in HFR, but I didn't notice anything better or worse about the picture so I guess not. IMAX was nice, but I guess I wasn't as wowed by the size as I thought I'd be for the £20 I paid for it. I'd have to watch again a different way to compare and, yes, I would watch it again!

 

Some other spoiler thoughts for myself:

 

Spoiler

I started falling asleep just at the whaling section. Tried to stay awake at that bit, where it seemed to go on for ages, and from what I recall seemed oddly different from the rest of the movie. Not sure what they were going for there. Right after that is when the movie gets back on track and gets back in the action for the better.

 

Speaking of whaling, they effectively introduce a late-stage duo of bad guys, one of whom is called Ian. The whaling only seem to exist to make an excuse to make the fight more personal for the sea people. Suddenly they're substituting unobtainium for whale juice which seemed a bit too much of a stretch to explain why they're out there.

 

Watching a young Sigourney Weaver in Na'vi form was a bit disconcerting. They seemed to be setting her up as some kind of powerful being who can control nature better than the others but I wasn't sure if the identity of her father was meant to be foreshadowing for the overarching story. Certainly, there's the idea that Pandora is more than just a planet that they keep hinting it.

 

I'd like to see more of Bridgehead City. Obviously that's going to feature more in the third as a battleground, although no idea where they would go after that for a fourth and fifth. There's only so much military vs bow and arrows I can conceive so I hope they've got some good ideas coming.

 

[Paulando]

7 hours ago, James Lyon said:

IMAX was nice, but I guess I wasn't as wowed by the size as I thought I'd be for the £20 I paid for it.

Which screen did you see it on?

[sammy]

The CGI/3D in this is next level, black magic stuff.  The underwater scenes were mind blowing, just completely convincing to me.

 

The story was basically more of the same, and that’s okay because I loved the first film.  A lot of handwavy nonsense that I didn’t really take in to explain why Sigourney Weaver is playing a teenage Na’vi and why Quaritch is back and also has a kid.  Didn’t really matter because once it got rolling I was along for the ride.  I’ve read some criticism of the second act dragging too much but I thought it was fantastic, I loved spending time with the family getting to grips with reef life, and then the last hour was pretty much full on Cameron action insanity.
 

I’m tempted to go again next week just to knock about in Pandora for a few more hours.  It’s the first time a film has given me that transportive sense of wonder in years.

[Paulando]

7 minutes ago, sammy said:

I’ve read some criticism of the second act dragging too much but I thought it was fantastic, I loved spending time with the family getting to grips with reef life

Yeah, this was excellent I thought. I was watching it on an enormous IMAX screen in laser 3D with HFR, which I’m sure was half of the enjoyment. It was close to experiencing something in VR.

[James Lyon]

3 hours ago, Paulando said:

Which screen did you see it on?

 

It was at Cineworld Edinburgh. I'm a bit confused about the specs but it didn't seem to be a laser one. It was more just that I never had a moment where I thought 'wow, this is amazing' due to the size, although I did find the film overall technically impressive. I think it's a me thing rather than the movie, though!

[Nick R]

On 22/11/2022 at 21:08, Nick R said:

Meanwhile my local cinema has this 2D/3D split:

 

 

 

No high framerate 3D screenings, unfortunately. But I don't know if this cinema ever fitted the equipment capable of showing them (this cinema opened a couple of years after the last Hobbit film came out).

 

I'll do a separate post about the movie, but here's an update on the saga of my attempts to find out what formats that cinema is showing it in:

 

At some point after the above post, the cinema's website updated to say that the 2D screenings were HFR - but the 3D screenings didn't specify whether they were or not:

 

 

So on Monday, being in town near the cinema anyway, I decided to go in and ask them. The first staff member had no idea what I was talking about. He called over his supervisor, who was similarly unsure about it. She said she'd go and check, went off to some room behind the scenes, came back and said, "We're showing both 2D and 3D in the same format, 4K." This didn't answer my question, but there was no point in asking any further so I left it at that.

 

On Tuesday I went to a 3D showing. When I went to buy the glasses, I asked this third member of staff at the counter, who knew the answer: "Unfortunately no, it's just the standard 3D version - for some reason Disney didn't send us the high framerate 3D version." I asked if their protectors could have projected that format, and he said yes.

 

 

So I ended up seeing it in plain old 3D. However, during the film, there were occasional momentary flickers of black, which I don't remember ever happening in other 3D films I've seen. I noticed them maybe 7-8 times through the movie. I wondered if these coincided with where the switches between 24 and 48fps would have taken place? Except theydidn't seem to happen around transitions between action and dialogue scenes.

[Paulando]

9 minutes ago, Nick R said:

However, during the film, there were occasional momentary flickers of black, which I don't remember ever happening in other 3D films I've seen. I noticed them maybe 7-8 times through the movie. I wondered if these coincided with where the switches between 24 and 48fps would have taken place? Except theydidn't seem to happen around transitions between action and dialogue scenes.

That’s odd, but a switch between HFR and non-HFR probably happens at hundreds of points in the movie, so it might not be that. It also isn’t noticeable as there actually isn’t a switch at all (the whole film is played in 48fps).

[James Lyon]

This movie seems to be the equivalent of a Ubisoft game release with a hundred different versions and none quite right.

[Alex W.]

32 minutes ago, James Lyon said:

 

It was at Cineworld Edinburgh. I'm a bit confused about the specs but it didn't seem to be a laser one. It was more just that I never had a moment where I thought 'wow, this is amazing' due to the size, although I did find the film overall technically impressive. I think it's a me thing rather than the movie, though!

I remember going to that when they first installed it, it’s an ordinary IMAX Digital in a room that was originally installed for a now-defunct IMAX rival. Really got in to Ghost Protocol’s IMAX scenes there but I think it was the steep room as much as the format that gave me vertigo.

[JPL]

2 hours ago, Paulando said:

Yeah, this was excellent I thought. I was watching it on an enormous IMAX screen in laser 3D with HFR, which I’m sure was half of the enjoyment. It was close to experiencing something in VR.

Where did you see it? As much as I thought it was far too long, I only watched it ay my local Cineworld, so didn't get all the good stuff like HFR and whatever laser 3D is. I'd be up for giving it another go in Manchester if that's the better viewing experience.

[Paulando]

4 hours ago, JPL said:

Where did you see it? As much as I thought it was far too long, I only watched it ay my local Cineworld, so didn't get all the good stuff like HFR and whatever laser 3D is. I'd be up for giving it another go in Manchester if that's the better viewing experience.

At Printworks IMAX in Manchester. The screen size is 26.30m×18.80m according to Wikipedia, which is a little smaller than the BFI IMAX (28m×20m), which is the largest in the country.

 

The HFR is an odd one. It makes the water stuff incredible, and massively improves it, but it switches during some odd moments. Like, one shot will be non-HFR, it’ll cut away, then when it returns it’s in HFR. There’s an action sequence near the beginning in non-HFR, which has a brief shot of a weapons crate being opened in HFR. Super weird. Not sold on that being the future of anything, but it when it hits it makes for an incredible cinema experience.

[sammy]

Yeah agree, I didn’t find the HFR switching too irksome, but I think if it had stuck to HFR purely for the underwater scenes it would have been more coherent. 
 

 

[James Lyon]

I kinda want to see what all the HFR fuss is about now. I take it the cinema needs to have compatible protectors otherwise it would be the standard, right?

[Paulando]

If you haven’t seen it, S2E05 of How to with John Wilson has a pretty excellent/crazy section about an Avatar fan group in New York. Starts from about 17:50:
 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0clv58q

[Harsin]

The visuals are nice, but apart from that I thought it was distinctly average. Felt like a retread of the first film (not helped by it having the same villain) and the story of that was pretty cookie cutter to start with. Cameron can still do well shot action in his sleep so there's that at least. After all the talk of waiting for technology to catch up and exploring an alien ecosystem I was hoping for something a bit more adventurous and strange than not-whales in not-Polynesia.

 

Sample script page:

 

[mash]

Saw this yesterday, watched the paupers 2d version at 24 frames. There was a £15 quid difference in price from watching that version and watching the 3d HFR version. I'm not that much of a fan of Avatar to stump up that much extra. 

 

The problem I had with it was it felt like you're watching a video game. When watching Predator you know the characters are in the jungle or when watching Castaway, Tom Hanks is on a desert island. Everything in this felt sterile, reminiscent of the Star Wars prequels or that Jude Law film  from years ago.   It's nice eye candy but it's just scenery. Nothing feels tangible. 

 

As for the story itself, same beats as part 1 but this time they're at a beach resort. It was okay, the middle act was tiresome and I cringed at all the new age stuff but the action scenes were good. Actually, Cameron does have previous with boring middle acts. Terminator 2 anyone?