When I walked into a musty theater in my hometown to watch Avatar: The Road of Water, I found myself swimming through a series of strange emotions and lost thoughts. There was some childlike excitement, some curiosity, and at least one question that somehow only popped into my head as I sat down in the creaking leather chair: Er, should I rewind the first one? The movie that I haven’t seen since 2009 and barely remember it?
I was in college when James Cameron invited the world to Pandora for the first time, and I remember mocking it on the drive home from the theater. I mean, come above— blue cat person? All those feelings of betrayal?
The glowing trees are beautiful, but those 3D glasses give me the most headache of my life, me and my friends at an age where it’s sometimes easier to laugh at anything that could be perceived as silly than it really is. let yourself accept it. We giggled on the drive home and raised our fists Space jam theme song as we stepped out of the parking lot – you know, because of the college. Oh, how wrong we were.
Over the years, Avatar has occupied an unfamiliar place in our culture. The original was an undeniable success, grossing $77 million in its first week and fueling the wave of 3D filmmaking. Like new stories started popping up about people trying to start real-life Na’vi communities and LARPers start painting in blue, all too easy to mock.
Zoe Saldana and Sam Worthington in Avatar.
20th century fox
Obviously there’s more Avatar in our future—Cameron speak early he conceived the idea of a movie trilogy—but as a snobby English major, I couldn’t imagine this (this movie?!) can extend its relatively basic concept (isn’t this just Pocahontas with blue people?) into two more films. Being undeniably successful, even influential, as this property can be, its achievements always come with an aspect of surprise.
And yet, I was there, in our lord 2022, wandering into a theater to do the inevitable: I was watching the damned Avatar movie, this time with my mother in tow. We stopped at the theater, which hosted most of the midnight shows I attended as a teenager—appropriately, because Avatar: The Road of WaterAnyway, our three and a half hour run would have us leaving around midnight.
water path is, in many ways, Avatar navigation; Many reviewers have quite noted that it plot To be basically re-reading of the original on a new setting, with a twist of destroyer and a splash of Titanic. (Avatar takes place in the middle of the Na’vi forest, while water path finds Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully and his family running away from their home to live among an island tribe.)
Its thematic work is not as subtle and complex as the original, a harbinger of spiritualism and interconnectedness to reject the inhuman but extremely human temptation to impose domination of one person over another. We cheer when the Na’vi triumph over their soon-to-be colonists, and we cringe as heartless Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) terrorizes the Na’vi and harpoons the Na’vi. massive whale-like creature called tulkun in his quest. capture and kill Jake Sully.
The teenagers in this movie are about like two-way (and stupid) when they come, and I don’t know what to do with the fact that it seems all Jake’s cubs have very different regional accents. I almost lost my mind when I discovered that the Na’vi queen in the film was actually Kate Winslet making a very bold choice, but again, here it is. Avatar— what else do we expect?
Director James Cameron and actor Sam Worthington backstage at 20th Century Studios’ avatar 2.
Mark Fellman’s photo
For more than ten years since Avatar When it first launched, the entertainment industry has undergone a radical transformation towards major brands. Martin Scorsese can no longer give interviews without being asked how he feels about the Marvel movies, and it seems every major release is now closely connected to the pre-existing IP.
Cameron’s rare achievement was when his first film was released, water path—a wildly eerie film based on nothing but the filmmaker’s own imagination, shot at an inconceivably large budget — feels downright magical. And it really not like shit?! Who would have thought that, in this age of tired old backdrops, such a thing could still happen?
Maybe that’s the way Avatar: The Road of Water managed to raise 1 billion dollars in just two weeks, despite Covid. The real miracle of Avatar it’s James Cameron, a filmmaker who brought the world the highest-grossing film with Titanicdecided to use all of my creativity to make it happen this—a brand of blue cat people with a simple, truly innocent message.
In both Avatar In the film, ruthless, greedy humans ravage entire ecosystems and mass slaughter in the name of rare materials—unobtanium (lol) in the first movie and plasma tulkun in the latter. As the Na’vi weep and cry out for any shred of humanity, they remind us that the fastest disappearing thing on our planet is compassion—a magical feeling that allows We connect with the world around us and everything in it.
When the cinema first went dark at the start water pathIn a movie theater where I’d been lost in so many fictional worlds, I remembered a magical duel that had taken place during one of those midnight screenings—between the disguised Dumbledore and the previous Voldemort. Harry potter and the Prince. All of us who were watching at the time were super excited to discover a local camera crew.
Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) in 20th Century Studios’ Avatar: The Road of Water.
Courtesy of 20th Century Studios
Like water pathMy opening scene started to play out, I remembered my friends and I was excited to read about the duel in the local newspaper the next morning. Now, J.K. Rowling has become a fighter against transphobia, and that newspaper has been gutted like so many local media—a cost-effective company that has no place in the media. Its pages allow such magic.
Maybe it’s the pandemic, or maybe it’s how it feels decades after the first time Avatar launched, the destruction of capitalism it describes sought to conquer even more territory. How can supply, water path strike like a tsunami. Besides, who needs to be skeptical anymore? Give us one, two, three or even five more movies — and please, for the love of Eywa, never change the fact that regardless of budget, despite all the creativity , these movies are still based on the corny font we call Papyrus.
