Year 15, Day 225 - 8/13/23 - Movie #4,520
BEFORE: Just four films this week, all in the sci-fi or fantasy genre, then I have to take a little break. Next weekend my parents are leaving their assisted living apartment and moving down to North Carolina to live with my sister, and we said we'd be there to help supervise the packing or keep them company or whatever. So we have to leave on Thursday, and I won't be back until Sunday, so I'm losing four days, but that's OK, the schedule allows me some free days, as long as I watch 26 films in August, I'll be fine. And then after I get back, my second job re-opens just four days later, with staff meetings and orientations for the different departments of the college, so I could be very busy in September, I'll have to wait and see. I applied for several jobs this summer, and only one of them came through with an interview and a job offer, but as it turns out, I may be so busy that I'll have to turn it down. Of course.
Edie Falco carries over from "The Mother". I feel like I'm sort of catching up now, this "Avatar" sequel was in theaters last December, and of course by then my schedule was set for the year and I couldn't work it in - it started airing on HBO just a couple of months ago, fortunately before I set my summer schedule. And "The Mother" started airing on Netflix in May, same deal, I was able to work it in, so there my response time was down to just three months. Not too bad. And I'm going to get to "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3" this week, and that just started on Disney Plus on August 2, just two weeks before the date I planned to view it. It's almost like I knew when it was going to be streaming...
Oh, yeah, since this is a relatively recent film (released within the last 12 months) standard SPOILER ALERT tonight, I can't possibly point out what doesn't work in this film without giving some major details away. Don't say I didn't warn you...turn back NOW if you haven't gotten to see this one yet, but based on the box office, it seems like maybe everybody who wanted to see this managed to make it to the movie theaters this past winter.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Avatar" (Movie #807)
THE PLOT: Jake Sully lives with his newfound family on the extrasolar moon Pandora. Once a familiar threat returns to finish what was previously started, Jake must work with Neytiri and the army of the Na'vi race to protect their home.
AFTER: Maybe it's all the Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom that my wife is playing, but this film looked just like a video-game to me. Maybe it was different if you shelled out the big bucks to go see it on an IMAX screen. The best thing about video-games, though, is that you can control the actions of the characters, and make them do stuff, but this was more like a completely passive video-game where you have no control at all. Why do we still have movies when we have such incredible video games these days? I mean, I guess there's a place for movies still, cars replaced horses but some people still ride horses somewhere, they didn't get completely phased out...
It's a bit funny, this film has almost the same story as yesterday's film, "The Mother" - well, same plot points anyway. In that film, an ex-military sniper had to fight off the evil people she thought were gone from her life in order to protect her daughter, and she did this by hiding out in Alaska, but then she had to fight the evil people when they tracked her down. Here an ex-Marine has to fight off the evil people he thought were gone from the moon of Pandora in order to protect his children, and he does this by hiding out with the reef people, but then he has to fight the evil people when they track them down. See, same story, only this one was way more expensive to make and had more attractive CGI scenery.
First film was so ridiculous, the way that the Earth people had to go to another planet to mine its resources - OK, that I can believe because we're likely to use up all of the Earth's resources if we keep going on the way we are. But then the substance they needed to get from Pandora was called "unobtanium", as in "it's unobtainable", meaning you can't get it. Who the hell calls something that, it's like naming a character in a mystery "Mr. MacGuffin" or having a company named Deus ex Machina fix everything at the end of a story.
This is also much, much longer than it needed to be, clocking in at 3 hours and 12 minutes, but if I'm being honest, it felt like there was maybe half an hour of story here that just got stretched out beyond belief. It's a simple idea, as I said before - bad people come back, the good people have to fight them off again. Everything with the Tulkuns and the other water creatures, the mystical trees and the visions and learning to adapt to the ways of the Reef People, that's all filler.
But Cameron's ecological message is so strong that it feels like he's hitting us all over the head with it. Humans suck, I get it. After we use up all the fossil fuels on Earth, and after we pollute the entire atmosphere and all the water, we'll be so desperate that we need to start strip-mining other planets. But I'm not convinced this would make sense, because it takes a lot of resources to build spaceships, it would take a lot of energy to get those ships to another star system, and also it would take a lot of TIME to get there and back. So, yeah, umm, major NITPICK POINT, if the Earth is out of resources and there's a ticking clock on saving the planet (in other words, it's too late...) then how the heck do these humans build the spaceships to get to Pandora, and how do they have enough time to get the resources back to Earth to save it? Something's just not adding up here. It's a standard N.P. among space travel movies, since we can't travel anything close to the speed of light, it would take decades for a crew to get from Earth to another star system, and decades to get back?
So this is set, when? Sixteen years after the first movie? That's just not enough time for news of what happened in the first film to get back to Earth, or enough time for people to travel back, and then gather up a new army and new spaceships to come back and menace the Na'vi again. Even if you factor in cryo-sleep for the astronauts/soldiers, that means Jake Sully would be much older, he wouldn't have kids but maybe grandkids by the time the Earth soldiers could make it back to that alien moon. Unless Earth scientists also invented hyperdrives, but there's no mention of that. So the one Earth baby who couldn't get on a spaceship and go back is Spider, the son of the first film's villain, Miles Quaritch, so he's 16 now, that makes some sense, but still, no explanation of how the Earth army got back in just 16 years.
There's some good news, the evil soldiers from the first film died in battle, but the bad news is that human science cloned their brains or something, they put the memories of those dead soldiers into Recombinants, which are Na'vi avatars, just like Jake from the first film, only they think like human soldiers but in bigger, tougher alien bodies - and there's a whole platoon of them. Their mission is to quell the insurgents among the Na'vi, and also find and kill the avatar of Jake Sully, who betrayed them years ago. Yeah, this can't end well.
Jake has a whole big blended family now, two sons and two daughters. One daughter is adopted and seems to be the child of Sigourney Weaver's character from the first film, and she's got a few special ESP powers that the others don't, but nobody can quite figure out who her father was. Somehow her mother's avatar gave birth, which wasn't supposed to be possible, only it happened, and she and Jake's kids are some kind of half-breeds, as evidenced by the five fingers on their hands, where most of the Na'vi have only four.
But then all the stuff with the whales - I mean the Tuklun, which are like big Pandora whales that can talk to the Na'vi or understand sign language or something - admittedly this is a bit unclear, because the Tuklun don't have hands, they have flippers, so how can they speak Na'vi sign language? They make whale sounds, but how do those translate to signs? And why can the Tuklun talk to the Na'vi but the other sea creatures can't? Oh, right, they have bigger brains and a gland that somehow secretes a substance that prevents humans from aging - this is the "unobtanium" of the second film, or maybe it's like ambergris or whale oil from the 1800's, it's something humans want, so that's enough excuse to hunt and exterminate an entire species. Man, we humans suck. OK, Mr. Cameron, we GET it. I feel bad for all the whales that died in the 1800's so we could have lamp oil, but there's no bringing them back, plus we all KNOW better now, the campaigns to save the whales worked, Japan was the last holdout, and we no longer kill whales with harpoons, instead we're killing them with all the plastic we're still dumping in the ocean. I feel guilty enough about the sea turtles inhaling straws, and now Cameron's bringing back the anti-whaling campaigns, only they're in space now.
And then once the "sky people" finally find the right tribe of Na'vi that is sheltering Jake and his family, this leads to the big climactic battle with Na'vi on flying sea creatures against the Earth soldiers on giant sea vessels and those flying helicopters with the drone-like blades. Jake's kids keep getting used as hostages again and again, there were a bit too many reversals here, and too many times when Jake's kids disobeyed him by taking actions he forbid them to do. (Again, there's shades of yesterday's film, the conflicts that arise when a parent wants to train their children to be warriors or have survival skills, but also, they want to keep them safe, and you can't have it both ways.)
The final battle with Col. Quaritch takes place on a sinking ship, one that overturns and traps several key Na'vi inside, and I'm guessing I'm not the only viewer who got major "Titanic" vibes from some of the final sequences. Well, I guess if Cameron's going to steal from someone, he might as well steal from himself. Right? Still, for all its faults, story-wise and effects-wise (why did the Tulkun look so damn fake in the close-ups? Was this a practical floating model, and not CGI?) this film was a major accomplishment, 13 or 14 years in the making, costing about $350 million dollars to make, and that's more than the GDP of some small countries. And it made over $2.3 Billion, so yeah, somehow that's very profitable, and it was the latest film (after "Top Gun: Maverick") to "save" the movie industry. So kudos for that, even if it wasn't the greatest story ever told and essentially wasted over three hours of my life.
Supposedly there are at least three more "Avatar" films in the works, but since this one got delayed time and time again, first by Cameron's availabilty, then by technical issues and then once again by the pandemic, who knows exactly when the next film will come along, it could be three years from now, or ten or twenty years down the line. But Cameron has said that there are 15 clans among the Na'vi and so far we've only seen two, so whatever happens, there will be new elements to the story as it continues, but also I'm guessing it will be more of the same, over and over.
One last note about the cast, as listed below - I know a lot of these actors and actresses were filmed in motion-capture, so that their alien characters would be based on their likenesses and movements. But for my purposes, that doesn't count as a physical appearance in the film, just a vocal appearance. Not a big difference, perhaps, because I count voice acting credits as well as on-camera ones - I just don't get behind mo-cap as a good enough likeness, for some reason. So I feel the need to separate out those actors who appeared live on film from those that played aliens, where CGI created their appearances - maybe I'm behind the times, but as long as those actors' voices were used for the dialogue, I suppose it doesn't much matter. Or does it? Isn't this what the SAG actors are striking about, the use of A.I. and CGI to replace actors? Maybe not, because I'm sure these actors were well-compensated either way, but I understand this is a complicated issue that's only going to get more complicated as the CGI tech improves.
Also starring Sigourney Weaver (last seen in "The Fault in Our Stars"), Stephen Lang (last seen in "Val"), Joel David Moore (last seen in "Savages"), Brendan Cowell, Jemaine Clement (last heard in "DC League of Super-Pets"), Jack Champion, Giovanni Ribisi (last seen in "Contraband"), Dileep Rao (last seen in "Inception"), Matt Gerald (last seen in "Freelancers"), Phil Brown, Jocelyn Christian, Joel Tobeck (last seen in "Mortal Engines"), Cruz Moir,
with the voices of Sam Worthington (last seen in "Last Night"), Zoe Saldana (last seen in "Amsterdam"), Kate Winslet (last seen in "Iris"), Cliff Curtis (last seen in "Columbiana"), CCH Pounder (last seen in "Godzilla: King of the Monsters"), Jamie Flatters, Britain Dalton, Trinity Jo-Li Bliss, Bailey Bass, Filip Geljo, Duane Evans Jr., Robert Okumu, Jennifer Stafford, Keston John (last seen in "The Trust"), Kevin Dorman, Alicia Vela-Bailey (last seen in "The Purge"), Sean Anthony Moran (last seen in "Avatar"), Andrew Arrabito (last seen in "13 Hours"), Johnny Alexander, Kim Do, Victor Lopez (also last seen in "Contraband"), Maria Walker, Scarlett Fernandez, Chloe Coleman (last seen in "My Spy"), Jeremy Irwin, CJ Jones (last seen in "Baby Driver")
RATING: 6 out of 10 daily eclipses
No comments:
Post a Comment