One of the thoughts contained in the picture was also heard in the first Avatar: people are predatory creatures, ready to do anything for profit.
The phenomenon of “Pandorian depression” has long been described: fans of the first “Avatar”, released in 2009, experienced a terrible longing to return from the cinema to everyday life. It seemed too dull and gray compared to the colorful world created by James Cameron. Unfortunately, Cameron himself seems to have fallen victim to this sadness: after the release of his excellent film, he rushed to write the scripts for four sequels at once, and will now shoot them for the rest of his life. The fictional world has absorbed and is slowly digesting its own creator.
The first and magnificent “Avatar” is now remembered as a very elegant story. At the center was a classic conflict between duty and feeling: the hero belonged to the human race, he was obliged to protect them, but suddenly he liked Pandora so much (NB: this is not a planet, but an inhabited satellite of a gas ). giant), and a beautiful alien. And then suddenly he realized that his native people supposedly embodies evil, while truth, beauty, goodness and tenderness are on the side of strangers. And he spat on duty, choosing a sentiment.
There were critics who called him a traitor, but surprisingly, millions of viewers turned out to be the same misanthropes as Cameron and his hero. The audience realized that the mundane world is not just imperfect, but very often disgusting, and it is people who make it so; that this world cannot find the holy way to truth; that Cameron’s dream is golden, with fantastic landscapes of Pandora and the pious morality of the Na’vi -the best they have seen in the cinema in many years (and some, especially unfortunate and impressionable-, and not only in the cinema , but in general throughout his life).
It was a beautiful melodrama: the shot of a huge blue alien holding a gasping little man named Jake Sully in his arms and looking into the true face of the person he first fell in love with is hard to forget. It was a good fantasy with a clear and carefully thought out plot. It was a brilliant action movie, in which during the action scenes the viewer involuntarily clenched his fists.
So, there’s nothing like this in the new movie.
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Marine Jake Sully, who received a new blue body with a tail, and his heavenly wife Neytiri gave birth to children, plus they adopted a blue girl (in an incomprehensible way, the avatar of Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) gave light to Whom could this avatar, lying in a special glass crypt, get pregnant by?” “So no one knew,” Jake’s voice says sadly.) Also, a human child nailed to the family, the son from the main villain of the first part, Colonel Miles Quaritch (here, on the contrary, the question arises who is the mother, but well, let’s assume that in the first part it was somehow explained in passing, after 13 years it did not you will remember.) In general, everyone joyfully jumps through the jungle of Pandora, and then they see a new star in the sky – this is a new detachment of spaceships flying from Earth, in order to additionally suck some resources from the unfortunate Pandora.In particular, it announces something like Miles Quaritch himself: of course, he died in the first part, but all of his saved memories of him were inserted into a new blue avatar body (this is called “recombinant”).
The old Jake Sully leads the Resistance, the revamped Miles Quaritch wants to catch and kill him at all costs, and as a result, Sully and his family are forced to retreat and seek refuge in a completely different Na’vi clan: reef, life. on the coast and spend all your free time in the water. For about an hour, Cameron describes how the blue Na’vi get along with the teal ones, arguing and jeering. And then a team of earthling bastards arrives in paradise, who have not lost hope of finding and neutralizing Jake, and a bloody battle begins.
Cameron once directed two epic sequels that rank among the best in movie history: “Aliens” (the sequel to Ridley Scott’s “Alien”) and “Terminator 2.” In both cases, he turned the events of the first film on its head, changed its scale (and in the case of Aliens, the genre), created a beautiful new film on the ruins of the old one.
Poster of the movie “Avatar 2: The Way of the Water”.
The first “Avatar”, in general, did not expect a sequel. The ending of the fairy tale “… and they lived happily ever after” should not be followed by a description of the everyday life of the prince and princess or a story about their children. But “Terminator” and “Alien” did not expect sequels either, but how well it turned out. Unfortunately, this is not the case now: The Way of the Water is a classic Hollywood sequel that is many times worse than the original, and the saddest thing is that it offers almost nothing original. In addition, it lasts for three almost unbearable hours.
Cameron, in the 13 years that separate the two films, has become a scrupulous grandfather. Recently, he confronted Marvel and DC movie comics for the fact that their characters are not serious and behave like college students: they do not have children or serious relationships, there is “no thing that depresses us, gives us love, strength and purpose”, and from the point of view of such flagrant irresponsibility, it is impossible to make a film. Well, here we have a film of Cameron’s father of many children, and all he can say about fatherhood or motherhood is that parents love their children, and vice versa. Sometimes resentment takes hold of both, but love still wins. This is the only “family thought” during the three hours of the film, and Cameron, with the serenity of a pioneer , drives it into the viewer’s brain with a jackhammer.
The second (of two) thoughts contained in the picture sounded in the first “Avatar”: people are predatory creatures, ready to do anything for the sake of profit. But also, for the sake of the boring thrill of the hunt. One illustration is the scene of the hunting of innocent tulkuns, cetaceans from Pandora, from whose brains “amrita” can be extracted, a yellow liquid that permanently stops a person from aging. Amrita is what earthlings value most in the world, a glass is worth one hundred billion. While the Tulkuns are highly intelligent beings who form a brother-sister relationship with the Na’vi, they are intellectually and emotionally superior to humans, having developed their own philosophy and mathematics…
The word “math” in connection with these ugly underwater hippos instantly ages the viewer for a year. It’s clear what Cameron means, but… do the Tulkun by any chance dominate architecture? Didn’t they build underwater cities with their fins?
In terms of the number of borrowings and repetitions, the second part of “Avatar” is much higher than the first, which at one time made a splash.
However, Grandpa indulges in a flight of fancy, and you suddenly think about what you didn’t think about in the first Avatar: that his fantasy is, in fact, very limited. In the first movie, everyone was captivated by the fluff floating in the air, somewhat similar to dandelion seeds, but compressed in the air like jellyfish. Now you realize that Cameron’s artistic method is exactly this: he takes a dandelion and a jellyfish (any hedgehog or snake in general) and creates a hybrid. The Na’vi Reef tribe (called the Metkayina, though that’s completely irrelevant) ride amazing sea creatures that can move underwater or through the air with equal ease. So this is just a combination of a crocodile (more precisely, a Ghanaian gharial, with an extremely long and narrow mouth) and a flying fish. Nothing more. (In general, the miserable zoo from the second “Avatar” can only impress a person who rarely watches popular science films about wildlife: believe me, there are such wonderful creatures on land and in the sea that even the most director does not ambitious will bear it. with them the competition).
And the Na’vi themselves are a hybrid of a human and a cat with very soft hair, painted blue. A human boy named Spider, who grew up in Na’vi society, found happiness with them and almost considers himself one of them, actually already in puberty; I wonder who he dreams of in sexual fantasies. Is it really about blue ladies with tails and yellow eyes? Does this question interest you at all? Thin psychologist (unlike Marvel’s juvenile idiots) Cameron is definitely not interested in all this, just think, what nonsense. It is more important for him to share a revelation with the viewer: parents love their children!
Another big problem with The Way of Water is that the images in which the Metkayina clan lives are unlikely to wow anyone’s imagination. In one scene, angry Earthlings with flamethrowers destroy an entire settlement of peaceful reef dwellers. “Vietnam!” – only the viewer will have time to think before remembering the advertising posters “Visit Vietnam” and realizing that absolutely all the fantastic rocks protruding near the coast are copied from them. Literally zero – these are the rocks of Southeast Asia popular with tourists. Yes, and the reefs will look like they were copied from somewhere in the brochures. Yes, and some water with coastal sand is completely earthy, cartoons with tails just splash. Don’t look at the fact that the Na’vi were played by live actors using performance capture technology – they look drawn and, for example, Kate Winslet, who played the clan leader’s wife, didn’t have an ounce of Kate. Winslet is gone (for such a role, if you call things by her name, she might agree with an obscure actress with nothing to lose, or a complete doofus).
Repeating the first “Avatar” simply by adding water, Cameron reaches an absurdity in the last half hour: he starts repeating his own “Titanic”. No one really thought they would live to see Titanic 2, but they did!
And all this will continue for three more movies. “Avatar: The Way of Water” will obviously collect more than two billion at the box office (viewers delighted with the first “Avatar” want to repeat the pleasure, like drug addicts or alcoholics, although the effect is clearly not the same). So there are still nine hours left on a bloodless Pandora. Though the only thing you really want to know (and even then you don’t really) is what kind of villain got blue-tailed Sigourney Weaver pregnant.
PS It so happened that I watched “Avatar: The Way of Water” on vacation, in the sunny and completely frosty (-12) city of Bukhara. In Uzbekistan, it is displayed for completely legal reasons. But it is also shown in hundreds of Russian cinemas without the knowledge of the copyright holders, in discreetly borrowed copies from Kazakhstan or from Uzbekistan itself (it is dubbed into Russian for these countries). Apparently, it will raise a lot of money in Russia, of which Disney will not get a penny.
