Movies & TV

What. Avatar was trash from the get go.

James Cameron makes films so that he can get someone else to finance his real passions. He made Titanic so he'd have an excuse to build a submarine. He fully understands how to make good films, but his objective is to get an excuse to do technically-interesting things in a big-production setting. His most reliable path to that is to make big key-jangling films that do well commercially so that they keep giving him more money to do whatever he wants.

Lucas cares about the art, he just sucks at it. The prequels were his ego project where he thought he knew better than everyone else about how to make Star Wars. Cameron knows how to make art, but it's not what he's after. He just makes the thing that he knows will work so that they keep giving him carte blanche to make new cameras and whatnot. The comparison between the prequels and the Avatar films is reasonable, but I think Lucas and Cameron arrived at those places in different ways.

Cameron never made another Aliens or Terminator or Titanic because he didn't have to. Lucas never made another decent Star Wars movie because he didn't know how.

This is not meant to be lionizing Cameron too much, just that he very clearly knows how to make successful films, and he also very clearly enjoys playing with technology more than he cares about art. Art is no longer a useful vector for his success, so he's not going to waste his time with it.

no fucking joke.

i started trying to watch Fire and Ass or whatever it's called, and i legit got bored 15 minutes in. it's just sitting there in my queue like "continue watching" and i can't bring myself to select it.

oh no, traumatized soldado can't let go of his shit (again) and traumommy is a dick to the human adopted kid. this cultural divide is tearing us apart, lisa!

it's literally the same tension & conflict all over again. didn't we do exactly all this already? can't characters grow and find new challenges while fending off militaristic expansionist exploiters? seriously, they're going to spend a billion and burn a ton of carbon to tell a story with crazy visuals, can you at LEAST find a story to tell? i know there's only one archetypal hero story, but if i recall, it's supposed to have many faces in the retellings.

it IS totally like star wars, because holy shit the sequels were totally the original trilogy all over again. i was so jazzed to see who the new Big Bad would be: whoops, we said it was this weird guy, but it's literally a CLONE of the old bad guy. but they've got a new super weapon! it's pretty much the old weapon but bigger. oh and the fight of good v evil is really just a family conflict between kids and their parents. AGAIN.

come the fuck on.

i did give Avatar: Fire Stuff only like 15-20 minutes, so maybe i acted too hastily, but i just felt it all happening again with stale tropes and hit the eject button because i lack the fortitude to sit through the same 2.5+ hour story.

the second movie was something of a major letdown

James Cameron has spent more time underwater than most people have spent on boats. I wanted a no holds bared blatant depiction of coral bleaching, of oil spills and industrial fishing nets and garbage in the oceans. Instead we got Free Willie. Which is fine, but we've already had Free Willie.

Constraint is the conductor of good art

Yes, but have you considered it's like poetry. They rhyme