Avatar 2 (2020)

This was like two different movies stapled together, the eco-terrorists vs the cartoonishly evil mega-corp and the national geographic magic of the ocean special.

Both of them were actually not that bad, the national geographic special half in particular had the most convincing alien animals I have ever seen on screen - the painstaking love and quality that went into every aspect of the underwater biome was on full display in almost every scene.

Jamming them together left it long, meandering and unfocused though. It probably pissed off people who were fans of a particular style too - the action fans yelling 'booooring, why has nothing exploded in the last hour !' and the national geographic fans yelling 'what the fuck, leave the cute critters alone'.

I thought it was decent overall, although my main complaint is that none of the economics or motivations make the slightest bit of sense, including casually brushing off the revelation that they had invented immortality like it was no big deal ( so many questions ! Why is the guy still a colonel ? Is he still getting paid ? What is he spending money on ? He's just stuck there indefinitely now ? Is he annoyed that his retirement is now indefinitely in the future ? ).

$80mil for a jug of whale juice ? The fuck ? That wouldn't even get you a downpayment on your boat, let alone the cost of shipping it to a different fucking star system ! Sure, maybe it's actually $80 million galactic standard gigacredits or some shit, but why even put that in in that case ? As for mass migration to Pandora to escape Earth, that is just stupefyingly dumb.

i didn't really have any desire to see this, but mom wanted to watch it for christmas so i went. my ex-wife and her sister LOVED the first one and she dragged me along with her like 5 times in the theatre and then she bought the dvd and my son (who was like 5 at the time or something) LOVED watching the movie with the blue people... so i was AAAAALLLLL done with avatar a long time ago. but i actually enjoyed this one way more than the first one. the story was simple, but it wasn't derivative the way the first one was.

it's not a perfect movie by any stretch, but i did feel the pacing was really well done. it was a long movie but i don't think it ever FELT like a long movie. but... i think the first one balanced the visuals a lot better. what i mean is, in the first one there was a good balance between all the stunning visuals and the regular human stuff. the same way a story has a certain rhythm to it, with peaks and valleys that allows you to sort of gather your wits... the first avatar gave you moments of visual wonder and then moments of familiarity so you could sort of center yourself agian. with this one, there was so little human familiarity... everything was visually stunning all the time, so there was never a sort of reset point...

maybe that doesn't make sense, but i just mean that, visually, if everything is wondrous, then nothing is. after like 30 minutes everything i was seeing was normal, despite the movie CLEARLY telling me to be in awe. i just couldn't get there because EVERYTHING was awe-inspiring, so nothing became awe-inspiring.

i know that visual and special effects artists say that the best compliment you can give them is while watching the credits and it starts listing off the special effects team, you say, "what? this movie didn't have any special effects..." they WANT you to think everything they did wasn't even noticeable, that it blended in perfectly with the rest of the scene...

but with this movie i just kept feeling awful about all the time and effort that those people put in to make this movie visually stunning and i couldn't even process 90% of what they were actually doing. i missed SO much because the baseline the movie presented was that all these amazing, woundrous things are normal. the story didn't necessarily say that, but visually that's what i got. anyway, this is too long.

It does kind of stretch believably when they can literally clone Navi bodies (that can reproduce, by the way) and have figured out how to upload memories to those bodies, but can't make artificial whale juice.

They could have made it a bit easier to digest by maybe just adding "We haven't fully decoded how they produce this fluid - our scientists suspect there is something they eat in the oceans, but we haven't isolated it yet and we have yet to make synthetic versions that have the same potency"

lgarthy said:

honorable mention: "The blacks were green. Why are there no gay Navi?"

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Same reason there are no gay Ducks. or gay Pumas. Being gay is against the reason you exist, which is to further the population of the species. We have a lot of people, so now its okay to break the mold. But that was unheard of when the population was still growing.

Xarpolis said:

Same reason there are no gay Ducks. or gay Pumas. Being gay is against the reason you exist, which is to further the population of the species. We have a lot of people, so now its okay to break the mold. But that was unheard of when the population was still growing.

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Lol. There's lots of homosexuality among animals. And ducks, of all examples you could've picked, are notoriously famous for it. Mallards have a homosexuality rate of around 19%, lol.

Zweischneid said:

Lol. There's lots of homosexuality among animals. And ducks, of all examples you could've picked, are notoriously famous for it. Mallards have a homosexuality rate of around 19%, lol.

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They are also rapists.

Xarpolis said:

Same reason there are no gay Ducks. or gay Pumas. Being gay is against the reason you exist, which is to further the population of the species. We have a lot of people, so now its okay to break the mold. But that was unheard of when the population was still growing.

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while i understand your point, it's verifiably false. ancient greece was absurdly famous for having tons of homosexuality. it's a pretty famous saying back then that a man could only find true love and companionship from another man. and then they took that a step further and said a man could only find true love and companionship from a boy. where do you think that left he women? to congregate and find love and companionship between themselves.

and to add to what zweishchneid said, while i wouldn't call it a common occurrence, there have been plenty of documentation of homosexuality in the animal kinddom, though i'd argue it's more a dominance thing than an attraction thing, like with ducks.

Cybsled said:

It does kind of stretch believably when they can literally clone Navi bodies (that can reproduce, by the way) and have figured out how to upload memories to those bodies, but can't make artificial whale juice.

They could have made it a bit easier to digest by maybe just adding "We haven't fully decoded how they produce this fluid - our scientists suspect there is something they eat in the oceans, but we haven't isolated it yet and we have yet to make synthetic versions that have the same potency"

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ya you would think if you are going to steal the plot from Dune you would atleast steal the entire thing so it makes sense

Through Monday, the split is $293.2M domestic and $661.9M at the international box office

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Everyone expected this much, see if it has the legs for 1.5 or 2

Xarpolis said:

Same reason there are no gay Ducks. or gay Pumas. Being gay is against the reason you exist, which is to further the population of the species. We have a lot of people, so now its okay to break the mold. But that was unheard of when the population was still growing.

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God damn, everything you just said is wrong

wild animals are just instinctual automatons. calling them gay is misleading. they some times put their dick in strange places because their brain is switched over to 'fuck' but they don't profess a preference for one gender for lifelong relationships. they just fuck anything they can catch when they are in fuck mode.

they are horrible cruel rapists and torturers though!

Yeah, my mother-in-law's dog likes to hump stuffed animals. Guess he's a furry!

Using animals as your metric for sexual morality

Rape and incest perfectly acceptable too then eh? lol