'Avatar: The Way Of Water' Isn't A Movie, I'm Not Sure What It Is
#204: "Avatar: The Way Of Water," "Emancipation," "Trading Places," "This Is The End"
Edition 204:
Hey movie lovers!
As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!
This week: A sequel to the biggest movie of all time, 13 years in the making. Plus the new Will Smith prestige movie that fell flat, and a nod towards the Christmas movie offerings. In “Trailer Watch,” it’s the craziest trailer I’ve ever seen in my life, no exaggeration.
Avatar: The Way Of Water
Never doubt James Cameron. Even after the success of Titanic, The Terminator and Avatar, the latter being quite literally the most successful movie of all time, a lot of people thought he had gone off the deep end with his love of the ocean and raging megalomania.
He did it again, or at least did something, scoring $600 million globally and counting as well as overwhelmingly positive reviews for his sequel a full 13 years after the original journey to Pandora.
I’m going to keep it short and sweet here, because it’s the holiday season and I don’t want to spend too much time raining on what appears to be a pretty universal success. I’m not sure what I watched when I went to the theater this week, but I’m pretty certain it was not a movie.
The things one might expect make up a movie, like character development or believable dialogue, are entirely absent, as is anything resembling a plot for long stretches of the eternally long 3hr20min runtime. Movies this long aren’t inherently bad, but when you’re not enjoying yours it can feel like you’re missing birthdays and family deaths and your kids’ entire childhoods while stuck in your theater seat.
Of course, you have to be in a theater seat. A big portion of the appeal of the 2009 Avatar was the thought that you cannot miss the technological achievement happening on-screen. That movie blew people’s minds, including and especially a 14-year-old me. Once again, Cameron swung for the fences here with 3D IMAX cameras and inventing brand new under-water green-screen technology. It’s an overwhelming visual feast.
However, the technical choice to present sections of the movie at 48 frames per second, twice the 24-frame industry standard, makes the movie look to me like a video game cutscene. It’s so hyper-realistic that it’s actually too realistic, to the point where it actually looks bad. And again, it certainly doesn’t look like a movie.
What you’re left with is a story that is both safe — the protagonists, antagonists and central conflict here are the EXACT same as the first movie — and also incredibly self-indulgent, serving Big Jim’s fascination for underwater life to an absurd degree. It’s one of those things that if you were trying to explain what’s happening to someone who hasn’t seen the movie, it would probably be hard to get through it all without laughing at the absurdity.
There’s about 30 different characters, and almost none of them are given any complexity. Because the run time is longer than full seasons of television shows, there’s room to stuff in there more than a couple side plots and themes and the like, but one doesn’t get the sense that lessons learned are going to be entirely useful once the third act devolves into the usual bang-boom fight sequences.
Naturally, Cameron does bang-boom better than just about anyone. We come to his movies for the filmmaking, or put more simply, “to see some really cool stuff.” He delivers on that promise, which is why I suspect the movie has been so well-received by both wide audiences looking for distraction and critics starving for mainstream entertainment in a world of increasingly niche fare. As with most movies budgeted over $200 million, the house of cards only starts tumbling once you dare to apply a single critical thought to the proceedings.
Something New
Emancipation (AppleTV+): A prestige-y movie starring Will Smith (the reigning Best Actor winner, lest we forget) directed by Antoine Fuqua (who will always deserve credit for making Training Day), has all the makings of a buzzy end-of-year event. Yet this slavery drama came and went with little more than a whimper, mercifully sidestepping the awkward scenario where Smith would be banned from attending the Oscars yet receive a nomination.
The first third of the movie, depicting the slave plantation conditions from which Smith would escape, is the kind of gruesome torture-porn that felt like an extension of Blonde from earlier this year. Then it turns into a survival story similar to The Revenant, which we remember helped push Leo DiCaprio to Oscar gold. To put a hat on a hat on a hat, in the final 30 minutes the movie becomes a full-on war movie close to what we saw in Glory. Though the subject matter is no doubt serious, all three of these movies are ones we have seen numerous times on the silver screen. Even the aesthetic quality of the film, which is rich and well-executed, just feels overly familiar. Which all in all makes it difficult to get excited about.
As for Smith, while he’s excellent in just about everything he does, it seems pretty clear at this point that he’s best suited to charismatic, wise-talking movie star parts. Seeing him do grim, self-serious toil was a bit like watching Will Ferrell do drama in Downhill. Is it bad? No. It just feels like you’ve got a Ferrari in the garage and you’re only using it for its stereo system.
Something Old
Trading Places (1983, $VOD): I’m a big fan of Christmas-adjacent movies, coming down on the liberal side of what should be considered a “Christmas movie” — after all, my favorite Christmas movie is Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
So if you’re looking for a movie to watch over the holidays that isn’t one of the classics you’ve seen a hundred times, consider this comedy about a rich man and a homeless man “trading places” (get it) as a social experiment. It might be a flimsy premise if the starring parts weren’t inhabited by Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, peak performers putting in near-peak performances that make the movie quite a bit better than the average low-concept 80s comedy.
Something to Stream
This Is The End (Netflix): There’s movie recommendations for all kinds of circumstances. This movie fills a very specific need — you’re with a group of people (and in this case, I’ll specify mostly or all males) and looking for a movie that’s going to make everyone laugh. It’s sneakily a tough thing to decide on, because everyone’s humor is different. Look no further! I rewatched the movie in a similar circumstance this week and laughed my butt off, physically cackling at each rare time Michael Cera was on screen (it might be the funniest per-minute acting performance ever).
The whole thing is so dumb it almost can’t be called a movie, so much as a grab-bag of comedic moments around the premise that the apocalypses strikes in the middle of a swanky Hollywood party. Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, James Franco, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson and Jay Baruchel play fictionalized versions of themselves, making fun of each other’s lives and careers in everything from Moneyball to Pineapple Express. It’s super, SUPER dumb. But it is very fun.
Trailer Watch: Oppenheimer
You very rarely see a movie getting marketed this hard, this many months before its release. Even Marvel movies! They must know they’ve got a winner, not the least of which because Christopher Nolan is probably the most money-in-the-bank filmmaker on the planet right now. If that’s not enough, take a look at this cast:
Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Robert Downey Jr., Gary Oldman, Kenneth Branagh, Rami Malek, Casey Affleck….I’m not kidding, this might be the best movie cast ever assembled?