Look, I had some fun with this movie - but not very much.
The movie in question is Avatar: The Way of Water, of course. Stuff that I enjoyed or found exciting can be concentrated in 20 minutes of completely silent, wordless material, the rest is crap. At moments mildly entertaining laughable crap. At moments equally laughable tragic family crap made to jerk a tear or two out of you through a series of soulless, uncreative old cliches. At moments just standard blockbuster crap. All in all, there is a nice variaty of colorful, expensive kinds of crap for an audience made of people trained to consume them, trained to let their feelings flow with the bad writing, appropriately uninspired acting, and always reliable, easily recognizable simplifications that are regularly ending in boring cliches.
The only good, and even great at times, work here was done by the people who designed and animated the machines, the creatures, and the plants. The ecosystem of Pandora, both on the land and under the sea. That's the only saving grace of the movie. The rest is rarely mediocre, mostly laughably to irritating bad. And boring. Not because is slow. Slow things are fine. It's boring because it is shallow and formulaic like something made for daytime television. No magic whatsoever.
And even some of the creatures. The most important ones in the movie, for example. I mean, they do look and move great, but they also have such clear parallels here on Earth. You can call them whatever you like, but these are whales. The flora & fauna in the first movie, which partially appears here as well, was less obvious. More surprising. Often inspired by underwater life that we know here on Earth and created to be functional on the land of another planet. Here the things are already in the water, so at least half of the magic and creativity is lost.
That in itself wouldn't be a problem in a better movie that has something interesting to say. But in this one, in this vision of a distant planet where tribal alien teenagers go through all the routines of an American high school behavior seen in tons of uninspired teen stuff, everything piles up to destroy the feeling of space adventure.
Some action scenes are fairly good. Fast and colorful enough to induce a sense of theme-park excitement. But they aren't really tense. Because characters and what's going on with them is just some stupid, recycled, and manipulative family fluff. Look! The kids are cute! Love them! Look! The tribals talk some vague New Age shit! Love them, they know the way! At moments, during some wide-eyed, close-up shots, I thought that a Na'vi will start talking to me and try to sell me the Kangen water.
In the dumb script at the base of this new Avatar, the word family is told, screamed, and repeated ad nauseam.
And then. There is the human cub among the Na'vi. A kid. A teenager. A little Tarzan-bro. Something like that. If I understood correctly he should be the son of the main villain. Or like, you know, the final boss, since this is more a non-interactive video game, not so much cinema. Anyway, that kid was annoying as hell. And don't try to convince me that it's OK, and lecture me about how kids in real life can be. This one is annoying primarily because the poor, young actor was given only stupid shit to talk about and even more stupid situations to react to. The movie was teasing the audience with the possibility of some kind of son-father bond and understanding between him and the main antagonist. That subplot, in my opinion, led to the most stupid, awkward, badly written & performed wanna-be cute conversations ever heard on Pandora.
Like most blockbusters movies in recent years, especially those from various cinematic universes, the entire Avatar: The Way of Water is essentially a series of subplots, coincidences, and contrivances that are unsuccessfully mimicking a solid narrative structure.
There is an ugly, wannabe tense scene near the end of the movie, in which the heroin has a knife at the throat of the villain's son, and the villain has her son in the same situation. The moment is so overblown and artificial. It wouldn't be out of place in some stupid soap opera. The scene oozes the worst kind of cheap pathos. Very, very ugly. It tries so hard to be serious and emotional but is only tasteless, and shallow.
Since the writing and acting aren't worth mentioning, I won't mention actors and writers here. It's my review and I do it how I like. This is a super popular movie and you can find that information everywhere on the Internet. I'll mention only some of the behind-the-scene creatives who made the movie look good despite the poor work of the best-paid part of the crew.
Russell Carpenter - Cinematography. Cool.
Neville Page was the lead creature designer in the first Avatar. (The good one) Some of those creations can be seen in this movie as well.
Constantine Sekeris designed the underwater fauna for this movie.
The only way I can stand Avatar: The Way of Water is if I look at the movie as a gallery in which the creations of those passionate visual artists are displayed. Everything else is a million-dollar garbage.
OK, the music in the movie is also OK. I mean, the instrumental, orchestral music. Na'vi singing in their alien language? No, thanks. That's background music for commercials. The song that plays when the closing titles are on the screen is also garbage. It could win the Eurovision, maybe ... which is not a compliment. Generic, soulless pop. It tries to sound refreshing like the water but is only uninventive and cold.
And that's it. Once processed through my sophisticated rating system, made of "I highly recommend", "I highly recommend ... but ..."," I recommend", "I don't care, but you may like it", "Do whatever you please", "Don't tell me this shit is good", " Barely watchable", and "What a piece of crap", Avatar: The Way of Water gets a surprising "I don't care, but you may like it" because Pandora is a beautiful planet and its flora and fauna are worth seeing.
Fortunately for this movie, we live in the universe in which, since 2010, Avatar: The Last Airbender exists, so I can't even say that this is the worst Avatar.
The images in the post are screenshots I took while watching the movie ... won't tell you where.
