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Short take: Entertaining movie, looks stunning (especially the underwater visuals), but the premise of Skypeople vs natives on Pandora PART 2 offers little originality. I kept thinking, will Avatar 3 be a desert of ice Clear_Blue fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Dec 17, 2022 |
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Dec 17, 2022 16:24
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Doctor Spaceman posted:It took me until the water tribe area for me to reliably tell the two older brothers apart, partly because their character designs are quite similar. Once they got a bit more focus I was fine though, and all of the others were distinct enough that it was never an issue. I feel that's probably on purpose, two brothers close in age are gonna resemble each other closely in both looks and personality. Kinda the catalyst is by that point, the younger brother is out of his comfort zone and starting to have middle child syndrome set in. (Probably doesn't help that Spider was left behind, and so he doesn't have his own 'little brother' around anymore) Also still really funny how much this movie has in common with Wakanda Forever, even the protagonist having a spirit journey to the other side where the spirits of the deceased can speak to them. ...also funny how it's not pointed out by anyone that Jake meets his son again in what's clearly Earth's presumably long-gone wilderness. There's probably some meaning there.
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Dec 17, 2022 16:37
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I feel that's probably on purpose, two brothers close in age are gonna resemble each other closely in both looks and personality. Kinda the catalyst is by that point, the younger brother is out of his comfort zone and starting to have middle child syndrome set in. (Probably doesn't help that Spider was left behind, and so he doesn't have his own 'little brother' around anymore) Wait hold up. For your last spoiler: there is no way that was Earth at the end
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Dec 17, 2022 16:48
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The REAL Goobusters posted:Wait hold up. For your last spoiler: Yea I am pretty sure that was the exact area they were hunting in earlier during the growing up montage SuperMechagodzilla posted:(Remember how Eywa the organic supercomputer weaponized the entire ecosystem in Avatar 1? So, like, the baddies couldn't even exist on the planet without being instantly consumed by hyperintelligent swarms of space-rats or whatever?) So to the first point, that was addressed albeit quickly when they are explaining why they Avatarized those marines, they were hoping they could bypass this response and showed their ships being overwhelmed whenever they tried to send aircraft to Sully’s mountains. I admittedly don’t remember the first one clearly enough, it might be a soft retcon cause they kind of imply this is localized to that specific area or whatever (although it might have tied into why the landing craft felt they needed to use their landing thrusters to literally burn away huge chunks of the forest) To the second point: yea this was clearly a subplot they dropped or thinned out a lot. It seems like there was supposed to be a greater ideological conflict between Jake still relying on human science instead of Na’avi wisdom, but even more baffling is that they set up the whole “if she plugs in again under water she’ll die” only to never mention that again. I think the scene with the scientists was really only kept in cause it was a lynchpin moment for how the baddies found their general location, otherwise you can cut straight from the seizure to the water tribe healer working on her. My guess is there’s 3 subplots that had more scenes that were thinned or cut from the second act. One as mentioned is the debate between Jake’s earth science and his wife’s relying on Na’avi tradition; I don’t think this was so much a rejection of Eywa as much as the humans still looking for scientific explanations instead of embracing the spiritual. Two is Kiri’s subplot where after her “diagnosis” of epilepsy there had to be more there, it just gets dropped when logically it should be setting up for the finale where she plugs in despite warnings and summons all the ocean life. Third is just a guess but I think there were probably more scenes of Zoe struggling to adapt to sea life; she’s shown still riding her sky mount in the finale as well as her daughters teaching her how to breathe before diving, I think there were likely more scenes showing this build up.
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Dec 17, 2022 17:25
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Kesper North posted:Cameron borrowed many elements of this series, including aspects of the Soul Tree and Na'vi culture, from the following ancient-rear end novel: When I read Ursula K. LeGuin's The Word for World is Forest a few years ago, I couldn't believe how much it had in common with Avatar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Word_for_World_Is_Forest Evil militaristic capitalists arriving on a rainforest world to drain its resources and enslave its native peoples appears to have been a popular storytelling conceit in 1970s sci-fi literature. Unrelated, but throughout Avatar 2 I kept thinking there is no way Spider is keeping up with any of the Na'vi kids under any circumstance. Especially underwater.
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Dec 17, 2022 17:28
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:It's just boggling when they just dropped a line in the first two minutes like "yeah marriage is going well, and the kids are really growing up fast. My friend's corpse had an inexplicable virgin birth, and it's fun to have a date night now and again." Then it was just disappointing that they're like "yeah, must just be epilepsy." Again: after the events of Avatar 1 they're really going with the "hmmm does Eywa really exist?" She generates fully-immersive Matrix virtual realities in this very film! People plug in regularly! kiri by av5 is going to make a amoeba suit and become the Eywa empress
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Dec 17, 2022 17:30
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Avatar 2 fails the basic movie test of "functioning as a standalone film". You're expected to have done your homework to have pre-knowledge and pre-investment in the characters, yet major points from the first film are also completely abandoned. (Remember how Eywa the organic supercomputer weaponized the entire ecosystem in Avatar 1? So, like, the baddies couldn't even exist on the planet without being instantly consumed by hyperintelligent swarms of space-rats or whatever?) Everyone, including the humans, know that the planet is living. The whole plot thing with the villains becoming blue is to avoid the planets auto-immune response. The thing thats not believable for characters is Anakiness being able to communicate differently than everyone else. The Navi were all confused that she was able to directly manipulate things; there were a ton of reaction shots when she did it. She's basically a Jedi, when no Jedi has ever existed on that planet.
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Dec 17, 2022 17:43
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I was waiting for the "guy falling and hitting the propeller" moment and I believe it is when the whaler captain got thrown out the boat with the wire snapping his arm off
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Dec 17, 2022 17:56
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Speaking of the tech, maybe it was the conjunction of hfr with 3d but sometimes I focused on parts of the screen and had a similar feeling to when you're driving a car and focus on the scenery going by in the sides
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Dec 17, 2022 17:57
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The most gripping part of the entire showing was the IMAX preview of that Mission Impossible stunt, but this is a solid action romp and has some neat little scenes. I particularly liked Spider hiding from Neytiri during her rampage - the Na'vi are killing machines and these films are not 'Fern Gully in space' as some idiots have described them.
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Dec 17, 2022 17:57
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Also a big lol at how quickly glossed over within the first few minutes that Sigourney Weaver's avatar magically gave birth to a baby version of herself and the audience is forced to accept "yeah that tracks I guess." my date was so confused and kept complaining that her avatar was never suggested to be pregnant in the first movie. James Cameron rules
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Dec 17, 2022 17:58
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it's already weird these tree people, who apparently are now also fish, are mammals? once you accept that I guess sure yeah, sygnour weaver can voice a 14 yo
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Dec 17, 2022 18:01
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Saw it in 2D HFR, it was very pretty, exceptionally pretty, absolutely gorgeous, but also shallow and boring. The cliche stereotypical dumb blonde supermodel of movies, which was just like the first Avatar movie so more of the same. If you liked the first Avatar, you should like this as well. I personally do not regret seeing it, but it could have been an hour shorter. On the technical front, the frequent switching between HFR and standard was jarring and bothered me throughout the entire film. But I'm probably a bit more sensitive to doubling/halving frame rates than most people as I've been using VRR + High (240) Hz displays for many years and can instantly tell the difference when the frame rate doubles or halves even at higher rates like between 120 Hz and 240 Hz. It took me a few minutes to adjust to it, early on I was even starting to feel a bit of motion sickness from it, a consistent 48 Hz would have been better. The vanishing water clan in the last battle was odd, but whatever it was probably in service of spectacle like most everything else in the movie. The thing that perhaps bothered me the most was that none of the adults took the time to sit down and talk with the second son at any point, maybe he would be less rebellious if you actually acted like adults, stuck around and worked through some actual two-way communication with him.
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Dec 17, 2022 18:05
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Indiana_Krom posted:On the technical front, the frequent switching between HFR and standard was jarring and bothered me throughout the entire film. But I'm probably a bit more sensitive to doubling/halving frame rates than most people as I've been using VRR + High (240) Hz displays for many years and can instantly tell the difference when the frame rate doubles or halves even at higher rates like between 120 Hz and 240 Hz. It took me a few minutes to adjust to it, early on I was even starting to feel a bit of motion sickness from it, a consistent 48 Hz would have been better. You would think this would make it easier for you to adjust to/not even have to adjust. I've been gaming on 144-240Hz monitors for several years now and had never found the HFR to be jarring, so YMMV. Everyone is sensntive to that sort of thing in their own way I guess. I didn't know if the theater I saw it at was able to project HFR before the movie started, but immediately knew once the production company logos were being displayed in the higher frame rate; at that point I was like "oh hell yeah, lets gooo" lol.
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Dec 17, 2022 18:22
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Honest Thief posted:it's already weird these tree people, who apparently are now also fish, are mammals? once you accept that I guess sure yeah, sygnour weaver can voice a 14 yo Speciation. The reef na'vi adapted to their environment presumably over the course of thousands and thousands of years. Think of it like how the pelican evolved from other birds or something.
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Dec 17, 2022 18:26
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teagone posted:Speciation. The reef na'vi adapted to their environment presumably over the course of thousands and thousands of years. Think of it like how the pelican evolved from other birds or something. It's shown on screen. They have wide forearms and larger tails which make them more adaptive to swimming. The other Navi are lankier, etc., which are more useful for forests.
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Dec 17, 2022 18:37
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Comrade Fakename posted:Anyone know the best way to see this in London? None of the cinemas delineate HFR or not, only 3D. From reddit: u/bigmovieguy "BFI IMAX is gonna be good for 4K HFR due to the single laser, although it might be dimmer due to the single laser and 3D combo. It may also be more "immersive" due to the shape of the auditiorium being a GT 1.43. Cineworld Leicester Sq IMAX is gonna be super bright, dual 4K laser, really good screen, but it may or may not be 4K due to heating constraints of running HFR in a dual system. 3D will look better and brighter, though. I guess we shall wait and see. Odeon Leicester Sq Dolby is gonna be the sweet spot. Arguable quite a small screen for its auditorium, but if you sit on the front of the circle, or close enough in the stalls, it's really good. Plus, Dual 4K + better 3D + HFR."
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Dec 17, 2022 18:50
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teagone posted:Speciation. The reef na'vi adapted to their environment presumably over the course of thousands and thousands of years. Think of it like how the pelican evolved from other birds or something. Yeah but it's more of a weird concept because for such big communal species they're very conservative in their social relationships. But I guess tail dicks was already pushing it
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Dec 17, 2022 18:53
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The Saddest Rhino posted:Also a big lol at how quickly glossed over within the first few minutes that Sigourney Weaver's avatar magically gave birth to a baby version of herself and the audience is forced to accept "yeah that tracks I guess." my date was so confused and kept complaining that her avatar was never suggested to be pregnant in the first movie. James Cameron rules I like this because its like yeah that happened, don't worry about it (but have it in the back of your mind).
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Dec 17, 2022 18:56
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Darko posted:Everyone, including the humans, know that the planet is living. The whole plot thing with the villains becoming blue is to avoid the planets auto-immune response. Despite that one line, the whalers are able to operate just fine without being blued, and goodguy human characters like Spider don't trigger any 'immune response'. And, like, ok: it's a retcon. Eywa in this particular film is dumber and less powerful. It's directly stated that she's not intelligent, and implied that the "immune response" is entirely localized around one mountain. But it's just one example of the movie doing a poor job of establishing stakes. Two hours into the runtime, they finally reveal the antagonists and say "oh yeah, BTW they're hunting whales to make humans immortal now." And, like, what? Selling the space drugs for 80 million dollars is the Austin Powers joke. Sure, it's space currency in the future so we have no true frame of reference, but 80 million dollars per whale means killing 40 whales just to earn as much as Avatar 1's box office. 5000 whales per year just to keep up with Apple. And that's their biggest source of profit? Isn't this an absolutely ridiculous operation, in terms of cost and scale? (Where are they shipping trainloads of guns?) (Is there deflation so extreme that you could buy a minivan for two bucks?) The Saddest Rhino posted:Also a big lol at how quickly glossed over within the first few minutes that Sigourney Weaver's avatar magically gave birth to a baby version of herself and the audience is forced to accept "yeah that tracks I guess." my date was so confused and kept complaining that her avatar was never suggested to be pregnant in the first movie. James Cameron rules It's the specific combination of "miraculous virgin clone-birth", the clone displaying extremely blatant psychic powers, a team of geneticists studying the clone for over a decade, and them somehow not being aware that she's a clone with psychic powers. Like, "yep, just a normal kid with epilepsy. I wonder who her father could be???"
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Dec 17, 2022 19:09
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I took the whale juice as just that guy's operation in particular, but 80 million does seem a bit low for "Turns you onto an elf" potion
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Dec 17, 2022 19:17
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Roth posted:I took the whale juice as just that guy's operation in particular, but 80 million does seem a bit low for "Turns you onto an elf" potion Yeah the whale juice was just that company's niche. Not sure how much 80 million avatar world bucks are worth but a single ship clearing 10 whales a day would seem insanely lucrative. They had no resistance up to that point. MixMasterMalaria fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Dec 17, 2022 |
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Dec 17, 2022 19:20
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Despite that one line, the whalers are able to operate just fine without being blued, and goodguy human characters like Spider don't trigger any 'immune response'. he's got quotas to meet
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Dec 17, 2022 19:48
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Whaling and poaching still exist today despite making no one millionaires. Doesn’t take much to get us to wreck things
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Dec 17, 2022 19:49
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Is there a way to find out if a theater is showing this movie in high frame rate? I remember when The Hobbit came out they had a website with all the locations doing HFR showings but I haven’t come across it for this yet.
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Dec 17, 2022 19:56
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Uh oh, Variety says Avatar 2 was only the 6th highest grossing opening day of the year... Variety: Box Office: ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ Breathes in $53 Million Opening Day. https://variety.com/2022/film/box-office/avatar-the-way-of-water-projected-opening-weekend-domestic-1235463927/
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Dec 17, 2022 20:25
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Darko posted:Everyone, including the humans, know that the planet is living. The whole plot thing with the villains becoming blue is to avoid the planets auto-immune response. The thing thats not believable for characters is Anakiness being able to communicate differently than everyone else. The Navi were all confused that she was able to directly manipulate things; there were a ton of reaction shots when she did it. She has Bluetooth for the animals while everyone else is still plugging in.
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Dec 17, 2022 20:26
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SMG ditches the Zizek gimmick and is now just bog standard bad at watching movies. Sad to see.
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Dec 17, 2022 20:28
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Darko posted:It's shown on screen. They have wide forearms and larger tails which make them more adaptive to swimming. The other Navi are lankier, etc., which are more useful for forests. Oh yeah I know. Even one of the younger metkayina (I forget their name) explicitly points out Lo’ak and Neteyam’s thin tails when they first arrive, wondering how they’d be able to swim. They also have a second membrane or whatever under their eyelids. You can see it when they blink. Was just responding to the post I quoted saying the na’vi are apparently fish now.
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Dec 17, 2022 20:55
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I like to hold my breath during the underwater scenes in movies, and this one def had me making the Zelda drowning gasp sound so I had to stop to not bother other moviegoers
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Dec 17, 2022 21:01
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smoobles posted:Uh oh, Variety says Avatar 2 was only the 6th highest grossing opening day of the year... Don't Cameron movies usually follow a different trajectory, where they don't open huge but stay in theaters making money forever?
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Dec 17, 2022 22:05
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That was the case with Avatar 1, also it was the foreign markets that went bananas and made all the money.
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Dec 17, 2022 22:06
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Was same with titanic too. Also limited showings of imax/Dolby could create bottleneck.
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Dec 17, 2022 22:55
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Roth posted:I took the whale juice as just that guy's operation in particular, but 80 million does seem a bit low for "Turns you onto an elf" potion 2.2lbs of unobtanium was worth 20m
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Dec 17, 2022 23:40
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Enjoyed the movie quite a bit! Sure it retreads ground but overall it was a thoroughly engrossing experience that certainly did not feel like 3 hours and ten minutes. Though honestly as soon as I saw that Jake had a bunch of kids, it just felt like "who gets the axe before the credits roll". Action was fantastic, immersiveness was wonderful, honestly the only time I was really brutally torn out of it in the sense of "Oh this is all cgi, that's right" was when that one boat gets chucked up onto the rocks and everyone goes flying off it. Just looked super Garry's Mod to me.
Captain Invictus fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Dec 18, 2022 |
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Dec 18, 2022 00:06
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The whale stuff tries to do two things at once: depict the wastefulness of the humans with how they only get the tiny amount per whale but also replace the unobtanium from movie one as an evil scifi macguffin. Hard needle to thread and it would have been better if they just were eating them. Dunno what to say to you folks who are thinking the movie glossed over kiri's birth. It gets brought up multiple more times, is the focus of her ehwa connection scene, and will certainly be revealed in an underwhelming ripoff Vader/luke scene
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Dec 18, 2022 00:26
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Avatar 2 fails the basic movie test of "functioning as a standalone film". You're expected to have done your homework to have pre-knowledge and pre-investment in the characters, yet major points from the first film are also completely abandoned. (Remember how Eywa the organic supercomputer weaponized the entire ecosystem in Avatar 1? So, like, the baddies couldn't even exist on the planet without being instantly consumed by hyperintelligent swarms of space-rats or whatever?) even just going off avatar 1, smg, i don't think this is correct. eywa's response was limited enough/slow enough after the initial charge of the space rhinos that there was time to have a fairly orderly evacuation of everyone in the human base complex.
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Dec 18, 2022 00:28
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Ratios and Tendency posted:SMG ditches the Zizek gimmick and is now just bog standard bad at watching movies. Sad to see. There’s not much point in getting into a full analysis before even establishing what’s even going on in the movie. Avatar 2’s got the Rise Of Skywalker disease, in the sense that we’ve got five hours of plotting into a three-hour bag. (Glossing over the virgin birth is just the most blatant example, but note all the extremely clumsy exposition about the whale society and how it’s okay for them to kill but taboo to hang out with a whale who’s (falsely?) accused of murder, etc.). In this case, it seems like it was less studio interference that Cameron was afraid to kill his darlings - but, somehow, Palpatine has returned. With Avatar 1, everything was coloured by the basic irony that Pandora is entirely artificial. Not only is it all a construct of the giant space brain in the plot, but it’s of course also meticulously designed by Jim Cameron so that the ‘aliens’ are thin, buff anime women with cat ears. Then we shown enough presumably-unintentional details about the society to put together a critique - like the general lack of elderly people, implying shortened lifespans due to lack of medical care. The scene in A2 where they try to cure epilepsy by ‘pulling out the bad spirits’ must be seen as an unsettling reminder of this, but we’re otherwise shown less than ever before. Eywa is practically absent, and what was Jakesully doing for nearly two decades as king? What’s he done to shape that society? Cameron’s simply dialled back what little weirdness there was in the first Avatar movie, and I’m struggling to be interested in the remainder. The numbing repetition of all the helicopter crashes? It just gets me wondering about the helicopter-pilot recruitment process. Horizon Burning posted:even just going off avatar 1, smg, i don't think this is correct. eywa's response was limited enough/slow enough after the initial charge of the space rhinos that there was time to have a fairly orderly evacuation of everyone in the human base complex. Yet still, the attack by the space-rhinos is far more advanced than anything we see in A2. If we were to see an escalation, Eywa certainly had the ability to just have everyone consumed by hyperintelligent swarms of ants or something. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Dec 18, 2022 |
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Dec 18, 2022 01:41
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Cameron’s simply dialled back what little weirdness there was in the first Avatar movie, and I’m struggling to be interested in the remainder. The numbing repetition of all the helicopter crashes? It just gets me wondering about the helicopter-pilot recruitment process. The thing that got me - if we’re 150 years in the future, why do we even have pilots for helicopters? We can save a back up a human brain but we can’t make remote control helicopters.
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Dec 18, 2022 02:11
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:With Avatar 1, everything was coloured by the basic irony that Pandora is entirely artificial. Not only is it all a construct of the giant space brain in the plot, but it’s of course also meticulously designed by Jim Cameron so that the ‘aliens’ are thin, buff anime women with cat ears. This is the best description of the Avatar franchise, so thank you for this.
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Dec 18, 2022 02:13
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