Avatar: The Way of Water is an incredible film

Over the holidays, James Cameron released Avatar: The Way of Water in theaters. I really loved the first Avatar, so I was excited to see it despite the trolls online that seemed to want it to fail (I'll never understand that mindset). I took a bunch of friends with me on opening night, and we had seats at the IMAX theater here in Sandy, Utah (a suburb of Salt Lake City). In just a few short words, the film was a stunning sequel, and I honestly want to see it again though I've yet to find the time to do so. I also want to say a few things about it that I don't think are spoilers.

I knew going into this movie that James Cameron was going to film the thing in 48 frames per second. When filmmakers decide to do this, it creates a kind of hyper-realistic effect on the screen. Many people think of it as a kind of "uncanny valley" where everything is perhaps too clear and for some reason, doesn't look right. This is because we are used to seeing films that do not have this built in resolution even though we float through our lives by looking at things in this kind of clarity. When we see it in a film, it kind of jerks us out of the moment.

So, I was expecting to maybe not like the film in places because it might look "too good." However, James Cameron performed a trick that I'd never seen before. He combined the latest in 3D technology with the 48 frames per second, and the combination of those two things was absolutely magical. I found myself suddenly inside the film. There was a submarine sequence that was underwater, and I'm telling you, I thought I was inside that submarine. In another scene, a character races to the edge of a cliff, and I literally grabbed my armrests because I thought I was going over. I've never done this in a movie before.

This week marks a threshold for the film in which it has become profitable a little less than its one month anniversary. That just blows my mind that something like what Cameron has done could actually make money (it needed to basically make 1.7 billion dollars). This isn't too strange nowadays though, as (I guess) there are now fifty movies that have made over a billion. So if you don't make the billion dollar club, you're kind of a loser where movie box office receipts are. I do wonder if Avatar: The Way of Water will topple the original Avatar and become the highest grossing film of all time. But none of that matters. I enjoy the story and the "experience" of seeing these films in big theaters equipped with the latest technology. It's worth the price of admission and then some. And I'm glad that the whole saga is going to be coming out in the years to come. There is no question though that James Cameron is the most powerful director of films that has ever lived. 

I'm going against popular opinion here and saying that M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender is actually not terrible.

My friend Meg has a teenaged daughter that loves a Nickelodeon series called Avatar: The Last Airbender. I'd seen the movie, which mother and daughter both despised with vitriol that is seldom-seen unless talking about the atrocities of concentration camps in World War 2. Nevertheless, she and her mom convinced me that my life just wasn't complete until I saw the series (which is way better than the movie "The Last Airbender"). So I've been slowly making my way through it via Amazon, and to be honest, although it is enjoyable it's also really childish. And when I say childish...I mean it's really not all that good. Is it still watchable? Yes. But every episode clearly has a moral of the story to it, and because its Japanese animation the eyes and exaggerated emotions get kind of silly after a while.

So out of curiosity, I watched The Last Airbender again on television. This movie by M. Night Shyamalan almost killed his career. It is not a great movie by any means...but a career killer? I fail to see why people were so outraged that they literally spit on it. Sure, they cast a bunch of white people as Asian characters. However, this happens all of the time and has been happening for years. And for what the movie disregards in the form of silliness (for me) seems to streamline the story to make it more interesting...so that more things are happening faster. In the cartoon, it takes forever for Aang to reach the water bending people. In the movie, it happens within the breadth of a couple of episodes.

I think if people could get past the liberal outrage of having white people play Asian characters, they could actually see that the effects and the work that went into the film qualify it to be an average film. Sure, it had aspirations to be this amazing blockbuster, but it made too many mistakes to ever qualify for that. This, I gladly caveat to the eviscerating critics of the movie.

I'm a little disappointed that we'll never get to see sequels to the movie. There were supposedly three that had been planned, and perhaps there would have been opportunities to include more of the things that people loved about the cartoon into those movies. But there's a part of me that wonders if anyone even understood why people went nutso over Avatar: The Last Airbender. Again, it's plot doesn't strike me as all that original in the vein of fantasy, and the incessant "smacking one over the head" with a moral was kind of annoying. Maybe kids just liked the cartoon because 1) kung fu has always been "cool," and 2) anything Japanese like "Hello Kitty" is also cool, and 3) combining kung fu with magic is somehow the most amazing thing ever.

Or maybe I'm just too jaded to see the sorcery at work here. Yeah, maybe that's it.