That ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’ is going to be a success is something that practically no one doubts today. Not even the high cost of the movie James Cameron it will be an impediment to it. Things change when it comes to determining whether or not it is a good movie. There, each viewer will have their own opinion of him and in my case it has served to make it clear that not even the director of ‘Terminator’ or ‘Risky Lies’ is infallible.
For now, it’s true that ‘Avatar’ is probably my least favorite movie so far, but it had something unique, it presented a universe with many possibilities and it was an impressive visual spectacle. For this reason it was easier to ignore a story too simple for its bulky footage, but with ‘Avatar 2’ the time had come to take a step forward and that never stops happening.
Cameron’s misleading advertising
Cameron himself has acknowledged that it was very difficult to live up to ‘Avatar 2’ and that he even discarded a first version of the script because it did not have all the necessary elements for it. However, what made me more hopeful was the fact that he himself stressed that the story was going to be much more ambitious and that “The goal is to tell an extremely absorbing story in emotional terms.“. That’s where the first failure of ‘The sense of water’ comes from.
It is true that in ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’ there are more characters with a certain weight in the story, but that does not mean that they are well developed. There is not even the fact that Cameron does not write the script alone -here he has the help of Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffathe same duo behind the script for ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’- has served to make the protagonists hook.
There the film suffers an alarming lack of naturalness and even destroys one of the few virtues of the first installment at this point, since that warrior nature of Neytiri is conspicuous by its absence during most of the story to relegate her to the role of concerned mother. Logical for the story raised but totally unsatisfactory in its execution.
This is something that ends up being transferred to history itself, where There comes a time when ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’ almost seems like a covert remake of the first installment. Yes, the world of Pandora is expanded, both in terms of society and the creatures that inhabit it, but it ends up feeling too similar to what we already saw in its predecessor.
And in the end everything ends up being reduced to an inevitable confrontation against the human oppressors, relapsing again into that apparent contradiction into which the saga continues to fall, since on the one hand it is a celebration of nature and on the other a military fantasy. Worst of all at this point is that ‘Avatar 2’ It ends up feeling like a transitional adventure to prepare for the inevitable third installment.
Also, the excuse that it is a blockbuster is not valid here and there is still a need to make the story as simple as possible so as not to confuse the public. This same year ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ has arrived, a film that has shown that you can have a simple script in terms of what it proposes but in which everything flows instead of constantly getting stuckwhich is what happens with ‘The sense of water’.
unjustified duration
A bit of a consequence of the above is the problem that ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’ in no way justifies having to last more than three hours. And it is a serious problem, because Within those 190 minutes you could find an exciting adventure of 2 hours or less.
That’s what I thought about especially during the spectacular last act of the film, in which Cameron redeploys his entire arsenal for action scenes, proving that there is no one like him for it. The downside is that many viewers are going to arrive exhausted at the best of the show and probably don’t enjoy it as much as they should.
That is also where Cameron seeks that the visual impact does not eat up the most emotional part, but certain previous script decisions -for example, there is a totally delusional explanation to explain why the Metkayina clan had avoided the conflict until now- lead to ends up feeling more like a repeat but to the beast of what we already saw in the final stretch of the first that as a really new experience.
Also, nor does it offer so many stimuli to leave for more than three hours. There, too, this year we have an example of a film of a similar length -barely three minutes less- that constantly manages to outdo itself and always thinking of the viewer’s enjoyment above the message it seeks to convey. It’s titled ‘RRR’.
3D doesn’t impress so much anymore
One thing that Cameron does wonderfully in ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’ is all about shooting underwater scenes. Nobody has come even remotely close to the brilliant work that he does here in these types of scenes, but then even some of these sequences shine less than desirable for your decisions regarding 3D.
That ‘Avatar’ made history with this technology and made it fashionable is undeniable, as is the fact that it may still be the film that has used it best. However, Cameron could not limit himself to more of the same at that point and ended up coming up with a curious trick to avoid having to sacrifice his enormous aspirations. I wish I had.
Cameron’s plan was to use HFR technology to enhance the 3D in some scenes and use a speed of 48 frames per second, which forced him to “eAnywhere in the scene we want at 24fps, we just double the frames“. A great solution on paper, but when push comes to shove is one of the factors why ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’ looks worse than its predecessor in this regard.
With that I don’t want to say that ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’ isn’t going to be an important film when it comes to introducing technical progress in the seventh art, but it does mean that the result is very uneven. There are moments in which it is a totally immersive experience and makes you believe in the existence of that other universe, but in other is dangerously close to that soap opera effect of some televisions that annoys certain viewers so much. I know that there is a sector of the public for which this is not a bother, but I am among the great detractors of it.
This leads to situations that completely expel you from what is happening on the screen and give ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’ an unexpected visual ugliness. There could have something to do with the quality of the screening that I attended, since in no case were they the ideal cinemas for it, but even that does not justify those strange ups and downs. And in a movie where experience is so important, it’s a major problem.
In summary
Cameron arrived at ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’ with the unbeatable endorsement of having directed two of the best sequels in film history. Unfortunately, we cannot say that here he has achieved the same milestone. Without being a bad movie, it falls short of its predecessor and at the same time that it leaves people curious about the future of Pandora, it sows doubts about whether we really want to keep going back to that planet. Let’s hope she stays in a little stumble before we can deploy her full arsenal.
In Espinof: