Avatar: The Way of Water

Scott Hardie: Great point about this being an animated film. I guess the presence of a couple of non-CGI characters like Spider make it qualify as "live action" despite 99% of what's on screen being animated? The Academy's distinction is confusing, but then, so is society's.

And yeah, it's annoying watching the movie do illogical things in order to keep bringing back Stephen Lang's villain so that he can continue to be such an asshole. I don't get the choice to make that character such an important load-bearing pillar of the series. It doesn't make sense unless you work backwards to what caused all of this in the first place, which is Jim Cameron's desire to push filmmaking technology forward.

The villain is terrible, but they keep bringing him back because they need a consistent presence across all of the sequels rather than new antagonists. And they need that consistent presence because multiple sequels are filmed simultaneously and out of order and with scenes re-shot as arcs develop and so on. And the multiple sequels are being made because it's the only way to recoup the billion-dollar investment in technology necessary to produce one of them. And that technology is necessary because the challenge of inventing it is nearly the only thing attracting Jim Cameron to the project in the first place; there's no way that he would make this using conventional means (ordinary CGI or actors in blue body paint).

What I want to ask Cameron is, was it worth it? Making the first Avatar was an enormous technical challenge and financial risk, just like many of your movies, but you pulled it off and earned all of the critical accolades and box-office receipts. You could have stopped there and chosen a different project. You didn't know that this sequel project was going to balloon and consume this many years of your life, but you had to have known that there was not a compelling story or artistic raison d'être here. Was this project worth several thousand days of work and a decade and a half of your life?

(I know that I'm oversimplifying. Cameron did work on other projects in the interim, like co-writing and co-producing Alita: Battle Angel and Terminator: Dark Fate, and there were other things that must have appealed to him about making a sequel to Avatar, like getting to invent the oceanic side of Pandora's very detailed and exobiologically-plausible flora and fauna.) − March 10, 2023 • more by Scott

Evie Totty: I 100% believe he'd say it was worth it because he got to populate his ocean with his own flora and fauna, making him a god. − March 10, 2023 • more by Evie