The most important movie to the long-term health of the movie business is finally here! Does it deliver??
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy
Premise: Jake Sulley must relocate his family to a far away water tribe on Pandora in an effort to hide from the humans, who are determined to find and kill him.
About: Avatar 2 is finally here. From the time it was conceived til today, the entertainment landscape has changed drastically. Superstar director James Cameron has never had to deal with this particular box office landscape yet. So everyone’s holding their breath to see if his newest film can bring people to the theaters in droves, like the old days. The film started out slightly underperforming with 135 million. But we won’t know how this film is going to do until the numbers come back for next weekend. Cameron is famous for having movies that can play in theaters for months. If the hold is 25% or less, expect Avatar 2 to be a monster hit. If the drop is 40% or more, we’re probably only getting one more Avatar film. — Avatar 2 was conceived in a writer’s room with a group of writers (like television). Cameron had them all break the stories for 2, 3, 4, and 5 together. Only after they figured out the details of what was going to happen in each movie did he assign the writers to their respective sequels, as he wanted to make sure they were invested in the entire story arc before assigning them individual movies. Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) were assigned the first sequel, this movie.
Writers: James Cameron and Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver
Details: 3 hours and 2 minutes (according to Cameron)
Whatever your opinion is on James Cameron, you gotta admire the guy’s chutzpah. A billion dollars of production costs all in. 800 pages of notes. Thirteen years. Five writers. Four sequels. Reinventing special effects. The guy doesn’t just want to make a movie. He wants to change the very experience one has while watching a movie. It’s amazing to watch and my admiration for him has only grown during these interviews he’s given to the lead-up of this film.
But you know the rule here at Scriptshadow. Doesn’t matter if I hate the story behind the movie or love it. It all comes down to one question: IS THE MOVIE ANY GOOD?
Is Avatar 2 any good?
Let’s find out.
It’s been about 15 years since we left Pandora. Jake Sulley is now a permanent Na’vi. He and Neytiri have a full family on their hands. And it’s a weird one. They’ve got two teenaged boys, Lo’ak and Neteyam. They’ve got a weird pre-teen girl, Kiri. They’ve got a young girl, Tuk. And they’ve got an adopted human son, Spider.
When a reborn Colonel Miles Quaritch, who’s been placed in a Na’vi body, arrives on Pandora, his sole mission is to destroy the leader of the Pandora resistance, his old nemesis, Jake Sulley. After he locates Jake, Jake and Neytiri decide to take their family and hide out on the other side of the planet, with a tribe of water aliens called the Metkayina.
Once there, the family learns the ways of the Metkayina, mainly how to live within and around water. The majority of this section belongs to Lo’Ak, who has a series of spats with the local teenagers, turning him into a bit of a lone wolf. He eventually finds friendship with a mysterious beat-up whale creature named Payakan.
Kiri seems to love her new surroundings although she’s such an oddball that she’s often caught staring into the horizon. But you get the sense that, in future movies, she’s going to become a bigger deal, because she has an almost superhuman ability to connect with the planet, which gives her extreme control over her surroundings.
When the kids are finally caught by Quaritch, he uses them as bait to lure Jake and Neytiri to his giant battleship. The Metkayina agree to help Jake, and it’s another Na’vi versus humans showdown. What follows is one of the greatest action sequences ever put to film, one that rivals the ending of Return of the Jedi. But do Jake and Neytiri rescue all their children? Or is the military too strong this time around?
Years ago, when HD televisions first started showing up at TV stores, the makers of these TVs had a phenomenal promotional stunt. They floated this story whereby someone came in to look at the first HD TV in action, and was so thrown by how clear it was, that he vomited on the spot. He wasn’t prepared for that level of realism.
This was back in the day where you could just make things up and nobody would fact-check you so, no doubt, this was a made-up story. At least, that’s what I thought until Friday, when I saw Avatar 2.
I watched the movie in IMAX 3-D over at the Grove and within the first two minutes, I considered leaving the theater because the 3-D and the level of clarity and the 48 fps (which makes the image look super-smooth) was such a potent combination that I initially couldn’t handle it. I literally felt like I was going to throw up.
Luckily, I got used to it. But there was a fork in the road moment there where I was at risk of missing a movie that I’ve been waiting 13 years to see. Needless to say, Avatar 2 is unlike any movie you’re ever going to see in your life. It’s its own thing. And when people talk about it being more of an experience rather than a movie, I don’t begrudge them that assessment.
I think what surprised me about Avatar 2 was that it was kind of a soft reboot of Avatar 1. Just like we had this character who’s been thrown into this new world and he has to learn about the world before dealing with the military threat late, now we have this entire family who’s thrown into this new world which they must learn about before dealing with the military threat late.
Your final opinion on Avatar 2 is probably going to come down to whether you enjoy that “learning about” section of the story. Because it’s the entire second act and it’s, mostly, conflict-free. It’s more about experiencing what living this “water-focused” tribal life is like. In that sense, it mimics real life for anyone who’s ever had to move somewhere new. You’re thrown into this uncertainty but you gradually figure out how to exist in your new environment.
I thought all of that was good. I do, however, wish there had been more conflict in this section. Because if you’re going to have a 90 minute middle act, it’s hard to keep an audience engaged for that long by only showing them your characters learning about their world. Audiences need more. There’s no doubt Avatar 2 lost some story momentum in that section.
With that said, there were several cool subplots in the second act that kept things afloat, the most successful of which was Payakan, the injured whale creature who befriends Lo’ak. You immediately fall in love with the gentleness of the creature and are devastated when you learn his history. I got so attached to this thing that I was ready to riot if he was killed. Honestly, I was going to walk out (for a second time!). The friendship between Payakan and Lo’ak almost made up for the lack of conflict in the second act all by itself.
Quaritch’s hunt for Jack Sulley was the one area of genuine conflict in the second act. This was actually a clever screenwriting move on Fox and Silver’spart. Whenever you place your characters in a safe area where conflict is light – you’ll sometimes see this in narratives where characters are in a witness protection situation – you want to intercut the bad guy getting closer and closer to finding them.
At least, that way, the audience gets the feeling that the safe habitat is only temporary. They know a reckoning is coming. And if an audience knows a reckoning is coming, they don’t care as much that the A-story is a slow burn.
Another way to stave off a slow burn is to give the audience a great show in the third act. And boy does Cameron deliver in that department. The third act battle is insane. I’ve never seen anything like it. When I made the grand declaration that Cameron was going to show Marvel what special effects could be when they’re not rushed – when they’re given the proper amount of care and attention – this is what I imagined.
There wasn’t a single muddy shot. Everything was clear. The geography of the action scenes was flawless. I was never once confused about where I was or what was going on, which happens constantly in Marvel films these days. And the level of creativity in the final action scene was light years ahead of all the Marvel stuff.
That moment where Payakan jumps onto the boat and flails around – wrecking everything, allowing the Na’vi to attack – was just so cool. That moment where they try and shoot a grenade-rocket at him he puts his head down, deflecting the grenade up and over to another part of the ship, which explodes. The battle felt so alive in a way I haven’t seen action set pieces feel alive in a long time.
It really was top-level stuff and it was confirmation that your money was well spent. Yes, the middle of the movie is a little slow. But that ending showdown completely makes up for it.
Despite the amazing experience I had going back to Pandora, Cameron made one critical mistake that kept this from being an “impressive.” Which is that he doesn’t have a main character in the movie. He doesn’t have an entry-point for the audience, someone we can latch onto and root for as our own avatar in this adventure.
Jake and Neytiri are sidelined in this movie, so much so that it actually shocked me. They don’t have much to do once we move to the water village. The story is more about the kids. And in Cameron’s technically correct choice to build up all the characters, he lost sight of the fact that we’re not sure who this movie is really about. Who has the most important journey? It’s not clear because of how spread out the focus is.
That really hurt the film, in my opinion, because after the final battle, when we start getting into the personal stuff, I found myself unclear on what the ultimate goal was here. And the reason for that is because we didn’t have a main character with a main goal.
It’s frustrating because there are some characters who come out of this fairly memorable. Spider comes to mind. Lo’ak to a certain degree. But I would argue that the character who’s the most memorable in the movie is Payakan, the whale. And as much as I loved that darned whale, I don’t think your best character in an Avatar movie can be a whale. It’s got to be one of the Na’vi or humans.
This issue pre-dates the movie because Jake Sulley and Neytiri were never standout characters, even in the first one. So the sequel kind of came in handicapped in that sense. But as a collective experience, it was still an amazing adventure. You can truly say that, if you watched Avatar 2 in 3-D, that you’ve never, in your life, seen anything like it. And that’s saying something.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you focus on everyone, you focus on no one. Movies are not TV shows. They need a clear main character. Heck, even TV shows need a main character. They’re just better equipped to spread the wealth. But movies need that one person we can latch onto so that we feel like we can navigate this large intimidating adventure. By jumping around to so many different characters, the audience was left with no one to truly connect with. And that, ultimately, prevented us from emotionally connecting with the film.
