![](https://i0.wp.com/terribleminds.com/ramble/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/avatar-2-the-way-of-water-or-the-way-of-the-coloniser-v0-t_8FQC9xowClNg048uh4ryp-I_1uRPA3RoVIg7phTys.webp?resize=700%2C369&ssl=1)
I have a theory as to why people kept going back to see the first Avatar in the theaters, and it has nothing to do with the beautiful CGI world or the powerful 3D effects. It has everything to do with simply trying to remember the thing you just spent a lot of money and time to see.
I mean, that’s the joke, right? The first movie was one of the biggest movies of all time, and yet left very little imprint on our pop culture consciousness. We don’t meme it. We don’t talk about it. We don’t think much about it. We can’t remember the character’s names. And so, I’m wondering now, did we return to the theater again and again just to try to recall it? To seek out some effect, some memory, some imprint upon us, because surely such a movie would offer that? Were we cuckoo bananapants? Did the movie even exist? Was it really just a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing?
What I’m trying to say is, I saw Avatar 2: The Next One, and I don’t really have any feelings about it.
I spent three-plus hours in a theater.
I saw a movie.
A movie happened in front of my eyes.
Then I left the movie and now I have almost no feeling about it. Very little impression at all beyond the knowledge that I saw it and it exists. Probably.
Maybe this is just a pandemic effect. Hell, maybe I’m just depressed. But I got into the car with my son and wife and usually, we go see a movie (rarer now because, well, pandemic) and we talk about it on the drive home. That’s part of the great thing about seeing movies with other people: the conversation after.
But this talk? It umm, it wasn’t deep.
Son: “I liked it.”
Wife: “Yeah, it was good.”
Me: “It was certainly pretty in parts.”
And then…
A kind of collective sigh as we sought for more to say but there was no more to say, and so little more was said. We talked about other things.
Still, even now, I’m like, what the fuck. That movie was three fucking hours. More than that. And it cost, what, a hundred billion dollars to make. Surely, surely there’s more to say about it.
In trying to gather my thoughts, though, I’m less Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters certain that his sculpted pile of mashed potatoes means something and instead I’m increasingly aware this unsculpted pile of mashed potatoes means absolutely nothing at all and carries with it no cultural cachet or narrative meaning beyond the plop of pale starch it was, and is, and shall be.
That’s Avatar. A pale plop of narrative starch. Delicious, in its way. Satisfying in its moment. But beyond that, did I get anything more? I am full, but only temporarily. It was calories. I ate them. It is done now.
And yet! AND YET. And yet I try, again flailing for meaning, for memory, for something, for anything. So here are some impressions, some crumbs of thought brushed off the counter and into my cupped hand.
The frame rate change is super weird and doesn’t work.
For those who don’t know, it goes from (I think, I’m not going to look this up) 48 frames per second to 24 frames per second. We are used to 24 frames per second in films and it ostensibly clicks with our brain as it tricks our monkey minds into feeling more authentic, because it’s how our brains interpolate visual data. Or something. I dunno. So 48 is *does some quick math on cool calculator watch* twice the standard frame rate.
Put differently, you know how the very first thing you do when you get a new TV is find MOTION SMOOTHING and hit it with the heel of your shoe until it turns off and never can turn on again, and when you go over your elderly parents’ house and they have that shit still on you find yourself irrationally angry at them even though it’s not their fault, this is how the stupid TV showed up in their house? Yeah, James Cameron turns it back on for this movie. He undid all our hard collective work and said MOTION SMOOTHING IS THE WAY OF THE FUTURE.
Except, he then added as a caveat, I MEAN, SOMETIMES, I GUESS, because the movie never commits to this fully. I do not know how much of the movie is in this format, but I’d guess about… 50% of it. It switches back and forth, often multiple times in a single scene or sequence. Back and forth it flips and you never ever get settled into one frame rate. What that means is, you experience this jarring flip between:
“This looks like the slickest video game cutscene ever”
To
“Wait now this looks weird, like Claymation.”
Because it goes from eerily smooth to half that, which looks jerky, hitching, erratic. To clarify, this switch makes normal filmmaking at 24 frames-per-second look wrong somehow.
And the result is, neither looks “normal” for the movie because one minute it’s one thing, the next it’s another, and it keeps flip-flopping.
And for me this didn’t allow me to ever lose myself in the story. It constantly made my brain re-adjust to the visuals, so every few minutes I was forced to reacclimatize myself and willfully think about that acclimation.
There are times when it breaks through and that hyper-smooth filmmaking approaches actual beauty. But it doesn’t last for long and you ultimately realize none of this is real anyway and all of this is a big tech demo.
A thin, thin narrative gravy.
There’s the (approximated, paraphrased) saying of, “Trying to fit a 100-pound pig in a 10-pound bucket,” meaning a thing is overstuffed, crammed in, trying to do too much. Avatar 2 does not have this problem.
It has the opposite problem. There is a little baby piglet inside a cauldron. It is bleating. Its bleats echo in the hollow iron. The piglet is sad.
Cameron has crafted a huge storytelling container — a three-hour tour, so to speak — of Pandora. And he brings very little story to fit in it. The story is… fine. It’s there. Things happen, but when you chart the broad strokes, you can count them on the fingers of one hand. And the narrow strokes, the smaller character arcs, there aren’t many. They’re usually two-beat arcs. “This character is THIS, and now they’re THIS, the end.” Some have one only one beat. A narrative arc that is less an arc and more a single blip on a radar screen: ping.
When you chart out the story, it doesn’t even make sense in its entirety. In revisiting the story with my wife, I was like, “Wait, why did they do that again? Why did they go there?” And the response is mostly a shrug. “Because the movie wanted them to?” Which is probably a pretty accurate answer.
A lack of stickiness?
Some books, shows, movies — they’re sticky. Meaning, they stick to us. Good or bad or whatever, they live with us and it’s the thing that makes us care about them. We remember certain parts, certain characters, the way it made us feel. And I think the first film suffers in a way from a lack of that stickiness. Nothing really gets under your skin or buries itself in your mind — for good or ill, it just doesn’t resonate deeply. That’s okay, I guess, sometimes things are that way.
I think the sequel is even less sticky than the first one. When later my family talked about the movie more, we tried to discuss it — as one does — by using character names. And we had almost none of them. We remembered Jake Sully and Neytiri. We remembered the tiniest child. And the rest… no idea. I just looked them up now and without the CGI blue goat cat fish people faces to go with them, I couldn’t tell you who they were. I mean this with all seriousness: I have no memory of their names. Or the names of locations. Or any of it. It just slid off me, a fried egg from a non-stick pan. And I try to think, maybe this is just me, maybe this is the pandemic, certainly my brain has felt weird since all of this began — but I think back to movies this year I did like and I find them to have had a pretty sticky factor. I remember scenes and names and lines of movies for the most part. But this one I’m like, “The older brother. Wait, was he the younger brother? And the girl. The one who is Sigourney Weaver Junior for some reason. And the village elder. Him. That guy. No no the other one. And the bad guy, you know, the guy from Don’t Breathe, yeah, Commander Cumsack or whatever they call him. Colonel Quiddich? No. QUARICH. Right right right.”
It’s made all the worse that this movie is clearly a setup for the next 47 of these. Stuff happens but leaves little impact. And this movie undoes the larger Pandora-global effects of the first film without exploring what that even means. I dunno. It’s a movie. It happened. It was fine? It was fine.
This does not sound like a winning endorsement, Wendig.
Well, see, here’s the thing. I really like James Cameron and even when I don’t like a movie of his, I still appreciate the work that went into it. And some of his movies are some of my favorite movies.
This movie was made with an impeccable attention to detail and craft. I don’t know that it adds up to much, but it has some moments of genuine beauty and emotion. Maybe not as many as the movie intends, but they’re there. (The space whale storyline is proabably the one that stays with me. I remember the space whales, I remember the one’s name, even. Payakan! I might be spelling that wrong! But that’s the name!)
So, people ask, should I see it? Should I not see it?
My answer is —
If you’re intending to see it ever, then seeing it in the theater with the full 3D frame-rate big sound big screen IMAX or RPX thing — that’s the way to see it. Probably the only way. Maybe it’s better without all that dressing, but this is, I believe, Cameron’s intended way for you to see it, so if you’re going to see this movie one way or another, then you might as well skip out on a mortgage payment or two and take your family to check it out.
If you genuinely do not care, and I don’t blame you if you don’t?
Don’t go.
It’s fine? It’s fine. It’s perfectly fine. It’s a movie that exists and you will not be harmed by it (insert some conversation here about the problematic nature of this movie and how it even more than the first one appears to be co-opting specific indigenous cultures and though it’s certainly not my place to make assertions please note there is a boycott of the movie which is worth reading about here). It’s even quite pretty. It’s fine. It exists. It’s fine.
Anyway. I have a number of plot holes and spoilers I could talk about, but I honestly don’t know that I can muster the interest in understanding them, or even asking them in the first place? Suffice to say a number of things didn’t really make sense for me, but that’s probably not the point of the movie anyway, so it really doesn’t matter. If you’re one of those people who goes onto YouTube and enjoys watching like, video game graphic engine tech demos for Unreal Engine 9, then this is your movie. Enjoy the goat cat fish people movie.
Also buy my book Wayward or I die in the abyss. I hope it’s good. You might like it. I hope it’s quite sticky, narratively speaking, and even if it’s not, I covered it in strawberry jam so it is definitely actually sticky. Okay thank you goodbye.
Amarand says:
I’ve spent a lot of time wondering when I’m going to venture into a public, enclosed space for more than 15 minutes, and sit with other people. Also, doubling the frame rate on a movie you see in the theater is going to create the “soap opera effect” and I’ve seen that enough to know: do not want. I don’t think we’ll ever get used to the change. I mean, we might? But probably not. Maybe in 10 years they’ll have Avatar 2: The Criterion Edition and we can watch it in the original film frame rate?
December 21, 2022 — 10:57 AM
terribleminds says:
The home version will likely be at 24 frames per second and if you want that off I guess you can just turn MOTION SMOOTHING on on your TV? Shrug.
December 21, 2022 — 11:11 AM
FMD17 says:
Sadly, this is how I felt about “Wakanda Forever.” It was fun to look at and the performances were good (although Martin Freeman with an American accent still seems off to me). But the story? At the end, one of the characters says something like, “this whole thing could have been avoided” which was my reaction from the beginning. I just didn’t buy the entire premise of the movie. And I’m really tired of the Big Fight Scenes at the end of all of these movies.
Give me “Andor” for characters I cared about and a story worth following. Yes, I know it was 12 hours rather than 2 or 3, but I was hooked after the first two episodes and wanted more. I haven’t felt that way about some of these big budget movies–I know it will end with a battle and I don’t care because I the story is contrived and many of the characters interchangeable. I hadn’t planned to see the blue-people-watery movie because I suspected it would be the same; your review reinforces my suspicion.
And I’d rather spend my Christmas holiday reading Wayward!
December 21, 2022 — 11:30 AM
tjaffe says:
I’m gobbling down the sweet stickiness of Wayward. Thank you. “…no answers were forthcoming…”
December 21, 2022 — 11:42 AM
Jeff Xilon says:
Oh my god, Chuck the thing about Motion Smoothing. Yes. Yes. It angers me in every way, but the true tragedy, the great tragedy, is my 14 year old thinks it’s normal and ok and maybe even better doesn’t understand my hate and even takes active delight in it. It is truly, truly the greatest failure of my parenting.
December 21, 2022 — 11:50 AM
Seth G says:
We recently rewatched the original, and I found I didn’t remember much of it. What I remember from when it came out was that it was groundbreaking quality CGI at the time, there were some neat fight scenes, and a tiny bit of character development, but yeah, otherwise unremarkable. Also, why choose this for the title? Anyway, I’ll probably wait for it to come out on streaming.
December 21, 2022 — 11:51 AM
tcinla says:
One of these days, I’m going to have to tell you why when you get to the very end of the credits of every Terminator movie, you see “The producers wish to recognize the work of Harlan Ellison,” since I am the only person who knows the story who wasn’t asked to sign an NDA. It’s a story that reveals why it is that every James Cameron movie after “Aliens” suffers from there being no “there” there when it comes to the screenplay.
December 21, 2022 — 12:48 PM
AmbTheCreative says:
I agree and disagree, but just slightly. I find this one more sticky than the first. This one, the characters actually became people to me and I actually CARED about them and what happened to them. Spoilers, but when that one character died, I actually felt bad. I actually felt really sad about it, which is LEAPS and bounds better than the first movie which was the most “Its a movie” movie Ive ever seen in my life.
I never thought about the first Avatar movie after it was done. But this one I kept reliving the scenes in my head at night, particular about the oldest son. I just…really liked him and they did him such a shoddy deal T_T And his mother’s reaction really stuck with me as well.
This one DID actually stick with me. However, theres no real deep meaning, theres no discussion to be made. Its just a movie. I like your comparison to starchy meal. It was definitely tasty, but didnt really give me anything meaningful. That said, I am looking forward to the next one, which is 1000000 times of an improvement from the first one.
Until I watched this one, I didn’t see any reason for a sequel. Now I’m curious where this will go cause I care about this stupid stupid family damnit T_T
December 21, 2022 — 1:19 PM
Willow Croft says:
I’ve at least made it to the TBR stack with Wanderers in it! (I know that doesn’t sound very promising, but…I’m excited! Hooray!)
December 21, 2022 — 5:24 PM
Ed Muller says:
Spot on.
When a movie relies on “cruelty porn” to get the viewer to feel…anything, it’s not good. The 20 minute whale torture, the shooting of the “other” fish tribe animal, burning down the “other” fish tribe village. These all exist with no character depth or history at all. Their only intent is to infuse at least a little feeling into the audience.
Aside from that, the fact that this was the SAME MOVIE as the first remake of Dances with Wolves, is embarrassing. Same story about learning to fit in. Same story about finding a place in the new culture. SAME FREAKING VILLAIN, even though he died already. It’s the same damn movie.
The only discussion our family could muster after the movie was about how we were bamboozled into seeing it.
December 21, 2022 — 5:31 PM
Beepbeep says:
For me, this aptly describes the majority of blockbuster films and TV shows these days. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
I blame the screenwriting by committee that’s rampant now. In so many tv shows, the plot is all over the place, trying to do a little bit of everything, so unfocused. Looking at credits, I’ve noticed that each episode was written by around 5-7 screenwriters! So there’s no overall vision. The days of Showrunners like Vince Gilligan are gone. And in movies, the days of one screenwriter and a director with a specific vision, and producers who stay out of their way are long gone.
Writing by committee is like mixing all your paint colors together thinking you’ll get the most amazing color ever, and all you end up with is a poopy brown.
December 22, 2022 — 11:04 AM
Jeanne Felfe says:
I actually had some “sticky” with the first movie. Certain scenes. Certain moments. I went to buy tickets for the current movie and a message popped up that it contains scenes with flashing lights. Nope. Not gonna do it. Flashing lights are a migraine trigger. And now that you’ve described the weird frames, I’m thinking that might just mess me up too. I’ll send the guys since they want to see it and I’ll stay home with some hot cocoa.
December 22, 2022 — 11:10 AM
janinmi says:
I knew it. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it. Thank you for the confirmation.
December 22, 2022 — 11:12 AM
janinmi says:
My previous comment was in response to tcinla’s post, but it didn’t nest there. Oh well.
When I first heard what the initial film was about, my immediate reaction was “That sounds like a rip-off of Le Guin’s The Word For World Is Forest.” Nothing I’ve seen since has changed my opinion. First movie is white savior complex, second movie looks like the “going native” complex. The latter can be done without a heavy hand or smarminess toward the “alien” culture; I think CJ Cherryh did a decent job of it more than once in her works. But Cameron tried to pass off his film as an original concept when it was anything but, and that’s what made me angry.
December 22, 2022 — 11:21 AM
Anton says:
Why.. why is he switching the frames?!?! What? I had very little desire to see this movie but that has killed it completely for me. Do not want! Like maybe… maybe if this was part of the film’s artistic and narrative statement and it was a film about the perception of reality maybe I could cope but for this? No. Much like you the original left no impression for me. I saw it, in a theater even. I could not tell you anything about it.
December 22, 2022 — 2:39 PM
Spofforth says:
The Abyss is a pretty good film. Can’t find the download on iTunes or Amazon. Never been enticed by the Avatar films. James Cameron I feel, is up his own arse. Ridley Scott is that way too.
Btw Chuck, I was playing PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake album earlier, and it occurred to me that the album cover looks like your Miriam novels. The original ones. Take a look!
December 22, 2022 — 3:48 PM
Ginille Forest says:
I thought I was the only one! I haven’t seen #2 yet, mostly because I felt like #1 was just, meh. I call it Avatar: The Blue People because to me Avatar will always be The Last Airbender. And the plot of the first was basically Dances with Wolves on a different planet, so I was just unimpressed. But I’d never thought about the fact that I couldn’t name any of the characters or really, truly recall scenes from the first. Thanks for pointing that out too!
December 23, 2022 — 2:16 AM
tcinla says:
Cameron has a long history of not being very original in his plagiarism of screenplay ideas. That’s why you see at the very end of every “Terminator” movie the following statement: “The producers wish to recognize the work of Harlan Ellison” because the first Terminator ripped off Ellison’s “Outer Limits” stores “The Soldier” and “Demon With A Glass Hand.”
December 23, 2022 — 2:57 AM
susan1859 says:
You mentioned Close Encounters- even after all the years since seeing it, I remember way more of it than the first Avatar. No intention of wasting the time to see the sequel.
January 15, 2023 — 11:11 PM