James Cameron's Avatar

[Ben]

So since wifey didn’t want to do Guardians 3 this afternoon we started on Avaturd 2, and…boy…the storytelling is sooooo bad!

Wasn’t the biggest fan of the first one, but willing to give this a chance, but it’s just so…simple! First ten minutes essentially undoes the last half hour of the first, and then nothing happens for a while, before we basically just head back into a retread of the first again.

And, predictable, anyone? Ooh, let’s show the new guy a lesson by dropping into danger for a face off with a big bad monster. Any surprise when he turns back up having made friends with it? Any surprise that the super-simplistic storytelling has people knowing things when it’s convenient and not knowing when it’s important…?

Visually, it’s obviously impressive…to a degree, but there are some really surprisingly amateur shots in here and some texture rendering that makes parts of it feel like some kind of high-end DTV title. Wow, wasn’t expecting that after all the hype and certainly not the leap forward in mo-cap processes the first was.

And blue. So many variants of blue, or bluey-green and turquoise. I’ve spotted just two scenes so far that have some reds and yellows. Missed opportunities to present a really colorful underworld coral and wow us for a bit, and that’s all blue too! An hour left, and we’re both struggling with what is or isn’t going to happen (as if we haven’t already guessed).

Just so bizarre that Cameron is putting all his eggs in this one basket. They may make a mint, but these are not great movies. This one in particular is just more of the same, without much or any of the innovation of the first I just lament how many great Cameron movies we are missing out on while he's been inexplicably wrapped up in developing this and looks to just regurgitate the same old thing over and over for the next few years…

[EricJ]

Just so bizarre that Cameron is putting all his eggs in this one basket. They may make a mint, but these are not great movies. This one in particular is just more of the same, without much or any of the innovation of the first I just lament how many great Cameron movies we are missing out on while he's been inexplicably wrapped up in developing this and looks to just regurgitate the same old thing over and over for the next few years…

And even then it seems like we never really got the "old" Cameron back after Titanic, as he embarked on several years of undersea-exploration documentaries--

And so, when he finally returned to Avatar, it's about....WATER!