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Atlas Hugged posted:Whaling hasn't gone away entirely, but it is a blip compared to what it used to be and is already illegal in most of the world. He's kind of preaching to the choir on this one, whereas the monstrous nature of the displacement of indigenous peoples and wildlife and the climate catastrophe caused by the destruction of the Amazon is still something that a lot of people don't want to acknowledge and it might kill us all before we reach a consensus on what to do about it.
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Dec 27, 2022 03:29
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Vir posted:It's rather ironic that attitudes towards whaling in industrialized nations is threatening cultures - including indigenous cultures - which depend on whaling for their cultural practices and sustainment. The Na'vi are presented not as vegans, but as a hunting culture. It is a hunting culture which lives in balance with nature, which respects nature, doesn't take more what they need, and wastes nothing. They value a clean and quick kill, without unnecessary suffering. So the values shown in this movie aren't "become a vegan pacifist and move to New Zealand", it's more like "live in balance with nature, we have no plan B if Earth doesn't work out" or something like that. The movie does kind of waffle on this as well because it has to balance that the Na'vi are not vegan as you say and that the water tribes had not yet reacted to the killing of the whales in other places with the fact that at the same time the killing of the whales was inherently monstrous. We do get that one line from Spider about how its wasteful that I think is trying to bridge that gap though.
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Dec 27, 2022 03:35
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Atlas Hugged posted:It took him a decade to make this movie specifically because he didn't feel the technology was ready, but I guarantee you if he didn't think that technology was ever coming together, he would have scrapped it and gone in a different direction with a different environmental/anti-imperialist message. This is wrong, actually. They were waiting on the scripts being completed through 4 films before starting any sort of production, not the technology. https://www.polygon.com/23502100/avatar-2-way-water-delay-explained
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Dec 27, 2022 03:36
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teagone posted:This is wrong, actually. They were waiting on the scripts being completed through 4 films before starting any sort of production, not the technology. https://www.polygon.com/23502100/avatar-2-way-water-delay-explained Oh, wow. I thought I had read that he was waiting for the underwater motion capture technology to be ready while at the same time he ended up having to entirely rewrite the script for the second movie. My bad there and I stand corrected. I guess the rewrite on the second movie was more about getting it to fit into the three sequels then.
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Dec 27, 2022 03:44
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Atlas Hugged posted:the water tribes had not yet reacted to the killing of the whales in other places Atlas Hugged posted:We do get that one line from Spider about how its wasteful that I think is trying to bridge that gap though. Wasting an animal is both culturally and legally anathema many places. E.g. in Alaska, if you shoot an animal, you have to eat it or find someone who will take it off your hands, or the police will be after you. Vir fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Dec 27, 2022 |
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Dec 27, 2022 03:45
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Atlas Hugged posted:Oh, wow. I thought I had read that he was waiting for the underwater motion capture technology to be ready while at the same time he ended up having to entirely rewrite the script for the second movie. My bad there and I stand corrected. Cameron spent a year writing the initial script for Avatar 2 before throwing it out. He discusses why he did so in this article: https://variety.com/2022/film/news/james-cameron-wrote-avatar-2-script-and-threw-it-out-1235381140/ -- that thrown out script would be later adapted into a graphic novel (I finished reading the first of three planned volumes the other day, and lol, it's pretty wacky); it takes place in between the time from when Jake and Neytiri see all the RDA ships in the sky and when we see the "one year later" intertitle that precedes Jake leading the attack on the mag lev train we see in TWOW. If you're a turbonerd like me and have kept up with all of Avatar's sequel production over the years, or watched any recent press junket interview clips, you'll have learned that Cameron and his crew didn't think about doing any sequels until around 2012. It was around 2013 when Cameron put together a writing team to help him flesh out the bulk narrative that would span all the sequels. That process alone took roughly 4 years, according to his producer, and in tandem they were doing all the art and design for the sequels as well. By the time they locked in the scripts, it would've been around 2017ish, at which point they probably finalized all the art/design and any other pre-roduction stuff, and then started to shoot Avatar 2 and 3. So yeah, they were never waiting on the technology. That was more for the first Avatar film; it wasn't until Cameron saw Gollum in The Two Towers where he was like, "ok, I can finally make either Avatar or Battle Angel now" after having those films in the development stages for several years prior to The Two Towers release. teagone fucked around with this message at 04:37 on Dec 27, 2022 |
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Dec 27, 2022 04:21
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teagone posted:Cameron spent a year writing the initial script for Avatar 2 before throwing it out. He discusses why he did so in this article: https://variety.com/2022/film/news/james-cameron-wrote-avatar-2-script-and-threw-it-out-1235381140/ -- that thrown out script would be later adapted into a graphic novel (I finished reading the first of three planned volumes the other day, and lol, it's pretty wacky); it takes place in between the time from when Jake and Neytiri see all the RDA ships in the sky and when we see the "one year later" intertitle that precedes Jake leading the attack on the mag lev train we see in TWOW. Interesting stuff. I had seen the quote about "cracking the code" before, but had missed the "spirituality/subconscious" stuff. I think this article actually more supports my point that he didn't set out to tell an antiwhaling story from the get-go, but eventually arrived at that being the logical thing to do after landing on the water setting to tap into the audience's subconscious yearning for a safe place they could connect with in order to recreate the success of the first film. I still don't think it's a particularly hot take to say that film making is an organic and unpredictable process and that conscious decisions are made along the way in order to balance various interests, be they technical, financial, the interests of the film makers, or the needs of the audience and this results in compromises being made or the final product not matching the original vision. I might have to grab the graphic novel for my kid as he's really into Avatar and is the reason I went to see the movie.
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Dec 27, 2022 04:39
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Finally saw it in wonderful HFR 3D. I liked it! Give me more Stumpy in the sequel.
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Dec 27, 2022 04:41
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Just saw it with my wife in 3d: honestly loved it I feel like Colonel Quaritch coming back is a bit of an rear end pull, but honestly he's such a good hateful prick as a villain I didn't even care. Between recreating Platoon and Predator scenes and crushing his own loving skull (the skull poo poo in particular is metal as hell, who loving crushes their own corpse?!) he's insane. Man gets reborn into the body of his enemy, most people would have some serious crisis of faith or allegiance; this motherfucker get's right back to genocide that day like it's his passion. Why the gently caress would you save him, Spyder you wierd dumbass? Gonna be an awkward family discussion when Neyteri finds out!  Shout out to Payakun, the greatest of Whale-Friends and a total badass, and Neyteri for wiping out like all of Blue Squadron and the marines on the boat by herself One of my only gripes: why does Quaritch continue to blame Jake Sully for his death? It's Neyteri that utterly wrecks his poo poo every loving time. Is it just a macho space marine misogyny thing that he can't admit a blue warrior woman kicked his rear end repeatedly, it MUST be Jake Sully?
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Dec 27, 2022 08:16
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TulliusCicero posted:One of my only gripes: why does Quaritch continue to blame Jake Sully for his death? It's Neyteri that utterly wrecks his poo poo every loving time. Is it just a macho space marine misogyny thing that he can't admit a blue warrior woman kicked his rear end repeatedly, it MUST be Jake Sully? He doesn't. He's quite aware of who killed him, and calls it out in the movie, and recognises her arrows. But he sees Jake Sully as the leader of the opposition and the one responsible for starting the battle that lead to his death and the human expulsion from Pandora, and thus the primary target.
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Dec 27, 2022 09:14
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SadisTech posted:He doesn't. He's quite aware of who killed him, and calls it out in the movie, and recognises her arrows. But he sees Jake Sully as the leader of the opposition and the one responsible for starting the battle that lead to his death and the human expulsion from Pandora, and thus the primary target. He also took it personally that he took Sully under his wing (ie groomed him to play a key role in the genocide of the Na'Vi) and was eventually betrayed. He sees him as a race traitor, which in his eyes is worse than any individual Na'Vi.
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Dec 27, 2022 09:26
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MLSM posted:Looks like avatar 2 wont make 2 billion to break even. film has legs, just like jake sully anyway, i just saw this again in imax 3d and holy gently caress, it's entirely different experience to 2d and a lot of my criticisms just vanish. utterly immersive and spellbinding.
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Dec 27, 2022 09:28
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The first Avatar iirc wasn't quite a box office smash at first but had ridiculous legs. Bit of a trend with James Cameron actually, going back to Titanic.
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Dec 27, 2022 09:58
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Yeah, look it's sort of like I said from the outset: It's far from being a perfect movie but when you just let yourself soak in the full experience it's just this brightly coloured roller coaster ride that explodes into your brain and mostly overrides critical faculties. This is a wild digression, but the above is true to the extent that I think it's one of the first films that exemplifies what could be a very real concern, especially in coming decades as technology only makes this sort of content more readily available - it's so much more intense than most of what reality has to offer that if this is what entertainment is going to aim for across the board it really is a plausible stride towards the kind of Wall-E human who just sits in a chair and has content delivered to their face. Adrenaline and dopamine and a pretty good simulation of going places and seeing new sights and impressive landscapes and hanging out with cool people. All without even requiring the level of input and engagement that a video game does. It doesn't hold up quite so well on the second watch but it's still very, very good and there's enough detail crammed into every scene that you can start appreciating that on a design level. It won't win any script awards and if you're a 'story first' movie appreciator then I can really see how it might not be your thing, but in every other respect... man.
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Dec 27, 2022 10:19
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SadisTech posted:This is a wild digression, but the above is true to the extent that I think it's one of the first films that exemplifies what could be a very real concern, especially in coming decades as technology only makes this sort of content more readily available - it's so much more intense than most of what reality has to offer that if this is what entertainment is going to aim for across the board it really is a plausible stride towards the kind of Wall-E human who just sits in a chair and has content delivered to their face. Adrenaline and dopamine and a pretty good simulation of going places and seeing new sights and impressive landscapes and hanging out with cool people. All without even requiring the level of input and engagement that a video game does. There's a growing movement with young parents to try and limit screen time for young kids as much as possible because even iPads are so vibrant these days that kids can easily end up more interested in them than in the real world. So as technology progresses it seems like a very real concern, especially as poo poo goes to hell around the world. Weren't there reports of people developing depression like symptoms after the first film came out because they didn't want to go back to their real lives or was that just sensationalized reporting? I'm reminded of Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" where people are either cosplaying a Victorian lifestyle or are strapped into VR to ignore their degenerative lung disorders.
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Dec 27, 2022 11:31
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Atlas Hugged posted:I never said it wasn't. I just think more than one thing can be true at the same time. It's using whaling as a metaphor for the messages that imperialism is bad, humanity is cruel, and that we won't solve our problems through pacifism. At the same time, being about whaling let's him make another wild aquatic adventure, which is something he seems to really enjoy doing. Avatar is going to get a lot more eyeballs than any documentary about saving the planet. Getting millions of people to feel that the it’s not worth hunting alien whales even if doing so stopped aging is more impactful than a smaller audience agreeing that killing whales on Earth is wasteful compared to the benefit of doing so.
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Dec 27, 2022 13:32
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teagone posted:I said it in one of my earlier posts, but there's an argument there where Quaritch 2 isn't really Quaritch, in that he hasn't physically committed the atrocities his human origin had done. His reincarnate form has a chance at atoning for sins made in a past life. We don't know if Cameron will even go that route though, but we'll see. I think it'll happen though. I think Cameron is going to have it both ways. Quaritch will come around to the Navi way, the corporation will create a new evil version of quaritch. Just like Terminator 2 basically.
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Dec 27, 2022 14:41
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This movie is beautiful (in the non hfr scenes anyway) but incredibly boring. I sincerely hope the next few have better scripts or at least characters.
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Dec 27, 2022 15:14
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ghostwritingduck posted:Avatar is going to get a lot more eyeballs than any documentary about saving the planet. Getting millions of people to feel that the it’s not worth hunting alien whales even if doing so stopped aging is more impactful than a smaller audience agreeing that killing whales on Earth is wasteful compared to the benefit of doing so. Yep. Cameron isn't an idiot. I don't necessarily agree with every decision he makes in the film making process, but he puts asses in theaters and entertains people.
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Dec 27, 2022 15:51
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Every single person I know who saw this in 3D (some at my encouragement/begging) is planning to see it again. I think it's gonna have legs, and am looking forward to Evil Na'vi.
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Dec 27, 2022 15:58
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Ash People is definitely an ominous name. Also not helping the comparisons to the other Avatar indeed.
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Dec 27, 2022 16:54
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Atlas Hugged posted:I think this article actually more supports my point that he didn't set out to tell an antiwhaling story from the get-go The bigger giveaway is that the whaling thing is just a subplot that's introduced late in the film and then dropped long before the extended knife fight. The whale and whalers are both very minor characters. It's like when people ITT are saying this is the most anti-colonial movie ever made, because Coffee Mug character has a line of dialogue like "I'm a colonialist and my goal is to 'pacify' the hero, Jakesully." While she does certainly say all that, Jakesully ends up "pacified" in the first act, when he permanently retires to a fishing village. Coffee Mug then pretty much disappears from the film because the narrative isn't about her. Like, if the film were about the colonial project, people wouldn't forget that the water people are turbofucked at the end. They're certainly now as big a priority target as the forest people, but without any of protections (military training, swarms of dragons, etc.). Helicopters buzz around the ocean with impunity, and they have zero anti-aircraft capabilities. And what even happened to the forest people anyways? The film simply isn't about the Navis - their subjective experience, their fate, etc. 'A planet being colonized' is just the setting for the story of Quarritch's personal vendetta against the Sully family. It explains why he has carte blanche to do whatever he wants, and a helicopter budget, but the specific goals he's supposed to accomplish for his superiors are never elaborated upon. (I don't think it was ever said whether he was trying to capture Jakesully or kill him. They certainly pass up dozens of opportunities to just shoot him in the head.)
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Dec 27, 2022 17:04
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The bigger giveaway is that the whaling thing is just a subplot that's introduced late in the film and then dropped long before the extended knife fight. The whale and whalers are both very minor characters. https://youtu.be/rDjG9596Uw8
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Dec 27, 2022 17:29
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I understood SMG's post just fine. And it is weird that Coffee Mug just spouts a paragraph and disappears. I really liked the movie but stuff is moved around quite a bit. This is a very imperfect comparison, but I just saw Bullet Train and while it was not really my jam I had to admit that every single thing in it was setup and paid off and looped back. It's a well constructed story as a technical exercise. That's not the end-all be-all of a movie - I liked Avatar WoW a hell of a lot more than Bullet Train - but Avatar WoW has got a janky story where people just sort of show up, disappear, halfway through the movie we meet a cool new character who does one cool thing and whose fate in the overall metaplot is left sort of hanging, entire platoons of fighters just vanish, setups and conflicts are repeated and then nullified (and then lampshaded), etc. Having said that, handing out plot coupons and then cashing them in is just a part of what makes movies effective, so I'm not too bothered about it.
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Dec 27, 2022 17:39
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What did you have trouble with?
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Dec 27, 2022 17:40
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:It explains why he has carte blanche to do whatever he wants, and a helicopter budget, but the specific goals he's supposed to accomplish for his superiors are never elaborated upon. (I don't think it was ever said whether he was trying to capture Jakesully or kill him. They certainly pass up dozens of opportunities to just shoot him in the head.) There is a logic and clear purpose to the mission: Kill or capture Jake Sully. Remember, since the end of the first movie, the planet's spirit has become hostile to the humans, so going as avatars makes sense. There is also something to be said for hunting an insurgent with a small team on the ground - you can't really find him from the air, and a manhunt might become too large and resource intensive. I remember stories of insurgents or special forces operators who joined the search for themselves because the counter-insurgency mounted a massive manhunt. Quarritch goes off-mission by making this a personal revenge against Jake, since he feels personally betrayed, and is offended by Jake's betrayal of both his race and the Marine Corps. If Quarritch had done as the RDA expected, he should have sniped Jake and Neytiri as soon as they could. He got too emotionally invoved, especially after discovering his son. For the greater mission, though, Sully's insurgency is a bother, but not a main effort. The general is focused on mining and 3D-printing the future habitats for the human colonization.
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Dec 27, 2022 17:46
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https://twitter.com/GiteshPandya/status/1607787675897167875 Why would you ever bet against Jim
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Dec 27, 2022 18:29
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this movie, like the first, is technically very nice-looking but so, so boring. when they stop for a beat at the end and Quarritch goes, "you know you have to stop me now or I'm gonna keep coming" I almost groaned when Jakesully goes "yeah you're right let's do more fighting" nooo! that's gonna add 20 more minutes! he didn't even die, so he'll be back anyway! it's beautiful, I understand and agree with the politics and themes, but someone else should write these based off of Cameron's outline or something so I end up caring about what's happening to any of the characters and not bored during an action scene that's as long as a feature-length movie in itself
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Dec 27, 2022 18:56
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Vir posted:Remember, since the end of the first movie, the planet's spirit has become hostile to the humans, so going as avatars makes sense. That's bringing in stuff from a different movie. In this movie, Quarritch 2 needs to be blue to avoid the hostile forest creatures - but that plot point is dropped once they leave the forest. The human whalers and their (fragile diving equipment) are never at risk of being chomped to death by swarms of gigantic alien sharks, so the Avatar thing doesn't really have much justification. The plot point that the animals were hostile because a gigantic hive-mind was controlling them isn't even in this film at all. Like, it's neither shown nor stated, because Cameron changed the Eywa character significantly. This was presumably to give Kiri something to do, and to explain how the baddies could hope to control the planet where literally every animal is a fanatical suicide bomber. Eywa was retconned to be both weak and nonconscious, so Kiri can think and act on her behalf - and Kiri's psychic powers are severely limited in scope. (Even the claim that Jakesully beat the villains in Avatar 1 is a retcon; the Navi were getting their assed kicked until Eywa intervened.) In effect, Avatar 2 is a sequel to a film that doesn't exist - a version of Avatar 1 with a different ending. The characters don't even believe Eywa exists! The problem with franchise thinking is that it smooths over differences, discrepancies, incompatibilities, changes. Like, as we've seen in the Alien thread, fans imagine an 'Alien Queen' lurking somewhere offscreen in Alien 1979, when the Alien Queen character didn't exist until 1986. (Ridley Scott's original concept, as shown in his "director's cut" and prequel films, was that the alien was born from an amorphous mass of fungus.) James Cameron's Aliens was based on his interpretation of someone else's film - and what if he misinterpreted it? In the case of Avatar, what if he missed something in his earlier work? (These are rhetorical questions.)
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Dec 27, 2022 19:17
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grieving for Gandalf posted:this movie, like the first, is technically very nice-looking but so, so boring. when they stop for a beat at the end and Quarritch goes, "you know you have to stop me now or I'm gonna keep coming" I almost groaned when Jakesully goes "yeah you're right let's do more fighting" For me it is the moment that the daughter got sucked into the sinking ship and we went into Titanic 2 that I really gave up caring.
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Dec 27, 2022 19:28
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grieving for Gandalf posted:this movie, like the first, is technically very nice-looking but so, so boring. when they stop for a beat at the end and Quarritch goes, "you know you have to stop me now or I'm gonna keep coming" I almost groaned when Jakesully goes "yeah you're right let's do more fighting" That was awesome
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Dec 27, 2022 19:35
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Yeah "Let's get it done then" was a hype moment for me, but I was feeling the movie's length during the following sequence. It was really good from a technical aspect though. Honestly it's just nice to have good-looking and competently shot disaster/action movie stuff happening again rather than a bunch of weightless CGI poo poo.
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Dec 27, 2022 19:46
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:That's bringing in stuff from a different movie. In this movie, Quarritch 2 needs to be blue to avoid the hostile forest creatures - but that plot point is dropped once they leave the forest. The human whalers and their (fragile diving equipment) are never at risk of being chomped to death by swarms of gigantic alien sharks, so the Avatar thing doesn't really have much justification. Having just re-watched the first movie this week in prep for going to see Way of Water on Friday, the bolded part does actually happen in the first movie. Everyone is falling back and it's starting to seem hopeless until the big rhino shark things start trampling the human ground troops in the forest.
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Dec 27, 2022 20:12
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https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1607761499178557440
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Dec 27, 2022 21:42
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So we're gonna get the director's cut with the 30 minutes that was cut for time, and the anti-directors cut with the parts Cameron hated?
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Dec 27, 2022 22:01
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Cameron's just gonna replace gun violence with Payakan bodyslams instead, and I'm all about that.
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Dec 27, 2022 22:17
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The bigger giveaway is that the whaling thing is just a subplot that's introduced late in the film and then dropped long before the extended knife fight. The whale and whalers are both very minor characters. For me, Avatar 2 feels like the first half of a 3 hour film stretched out to 3 hours itself. I'm curious if Avatar 2 will work better if watched back-to-back with Avatar 3, being that they were shot together. By the end of the film, I couldn't help but feel like I had only seen half a story. We have no resolution to any of the major plot threads. Nothing has been resolved.
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Dec 27, 2022 22:31
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Based on the way Lo'ak was really jazzed about the rifles, I'm going to guess there was some very specific stuff about Lo'ak geeking out over a gun maybe his dad's, playing with it, or something. Maybe even that pulse rifle scene between hicks and ripley in Aliens, only with Jake and his son.
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Dec 27, 2022 22:34
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Lord Wexia posted:Having just re-watched the first movie this week in prep for going to see Way of Water on Friday, the bolded part does actually happen in the first movie. Everyone is falling back and it's starting to seem hopeless until the big rhino shark things start trampling the human ground troops in the forest. It's not really retconned in TWOW. The High Ground graphic novel is canon (takes place during the time period between Jake and Neytiri seeing the humans come back and the one year later scene in TWOW), and the Na'vi war council acknowledges that it was Eywa who defeated the Sky People, not Jake.  But yeah, yeah, you can argue no one's gonna read a comic or shouldn't have to fill in the gaps and whatnot. Whatever, I don't give a poo poo lol.
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Dec 27, 2022 22:38
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Eywa needs to do some Frank Herbert bullshit to make projectile weapons obsolete. CQC knife fights are incredibly in and I was pissed off we didn't see one navi-sized mech squaring off.
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Dec 27, 2022 22:58
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