By a happy coincidence, the release of this video has coincided with this channel reaching 10K subscribers. Thank you to everyone who has subscribed. I hope you enjoy the video.
Just when I thought Nerdrotic was the standard....Despot steps into the ring. Great videos bruv, you deserve 1mil subs. You'll get there as long as RUclips doesn't cock block you....which let's be honest. I bet they are
Also if you think about it logically the Navi shouldn't have a snowballs chance in hell after the first movie. Think about it, the guys from the first film weren't the Military but a Security company who did employ former soldiers but were still a Security company, meaning a small but well equipped group However in the second movie, not only has 10 years past for Humans technology to advance even further than it was before, which before included mech suits and a swam of flying jets and fortresses against a bunch of blue cat people armed with bows, arrows, spears and tactics that went out of style more than half a millenium ago. Now however, mankind is basically in desperation mode, so they would be throwing EVERYTHING they have against the Navi. The full military might of the entire planet, likely millions of soldiers with more advanced robot suits and other things. Not to mention stuff we didn't see in the previous movie, tanks, missiles, fortresses like the Helicarrier from Marvel, possibly even larger robots, not to mention things like advanced Napalm and the like. No way the Navi could handle that.
@@jetpilledmyron2056 Really feels like Cameron spent way too much time under the ocean and became another Green Peace Hippie type who thinks every time it rains hard in a state that it's humanitiies, or more specifically the US's fault.
Realistically speaking the Security company should have MOG'd most of the Navi outright and if any competent leader had been running the show they would have torched a 50 mile radius around a minehead site and shot anything stupid enough to intrude on the No-Man's land
@@phoenixrq9139 And we know Cameron has some kind of knowledge of battlefield tactics since he based the Colonial Marines and Aliens in general off the Vietnam War.
Probably another reason there aren't other countries on Pandora, the Navi would become overpowered very quickly and would end up having to side with the least of the evils (The Americans) against the others. Too depressing.
I always supported the humans. Maybe it's just my bias as a native Human, but neither movie really gave me any particular reason to like the Na'vi despite the fact that I do enjoy both movies.
I agree, movies often give the underdog a impossible chance of victory no matter how strong and numerous the humans are and you just end up with scenes of humans falling left and right
The brain of whalium didn’t make much sense to me in the theater either. Why is there only one whaling ship if the entire colony is here for the stuff?
I think I came up with a pretty good solution to how they know about the whalium. During the first incursion a group of humans could’ve broken off and gone rouge stealing equipment and fighting the main force. Since they were a much smaller force they get pushed back eventually finding the sea where they raid nearby tribes for equipment to fish for food somehow catching a whale. They eventually run out of food and as the naomi mount a major offensive they are crushed but the humans manage to capture them he renegades and send them back to earth as prisoners. This solves two problems the first being how the humans know about whalium so quickly which is through some of the prisoners medical checkups showing their lack of aging. This can be then traced back to the whale and can be later found out to be whalium. It also lends to the Naomi’s distrust of the humans as many of their people where killed by a rouge group souring relations between the two groups which is partially why tensions are so high in the first movie.
The entire colony wasn’t there for just the whale juice. It was clearly stated that they was there on Pandora for new human settlement. The Whale Juice seems to be just another industry the humans are engaging in on Pandora. Cameron has stated we haven’t seen the sheer magnitude of the human settlement and military power on Pandora yet. I’m excited to see humans build cities, space bridges etc be pretty cool.
Wait, that was supposed to be the only one??? I assumed there were just more than we saw on screen because of how ridiculous for there be to only one ship whaling for an extremely valuable substance.
This movie can be divided in more or less 3 parts. #1 Indians vs white settlers, including train heist #2 teenage drama; a family with 4 kids moves to another city and the children try to fit in and find new friends, includes a bit of a lovestory #3 greenpeace vs evil whalers, including Moby Dick fighting back and helping the greenpeace activists kill all the disgusting whale hunters
I love your work, but I have to say I would not lower the bar so much by making comparisons to Disney, reminds me too much of comparing politicians, just varying degrees of garbage, but still garbage. The reason The Way of Water MAY seem more tolerable, less "woke" if you will, is because the target of this propaganda is different. Most movies are pushing division, based on race, gender, sexual preference...this movie is actually MORE evil, it is about the devaluing of humans altogether, "useless eaters". This is about the coming climate wars, that will pit the populations against the oligarchs. But just like all their scams, they need a certain percentage of us to buy into their narratives. They need a percentage of the population to think there are "too many people", thus justifying a culling, even if it is called someone else. They want us to see ourselves as a virus, as a disease upon the planet. I always look at war as a great analogy to their evil of their method. Time and time again (Sadam's weapons of mass destruction) people are TRICKED into supporting wars. We are told again and again how humans are war like, NO WE ARE NOT, the oligarchs are, because war is profitable and consolidates their power. IN all things, the crimes of the powerful are wrapped around the necks of the powerless, and we pay while they do. Movies like this that paint humans as a virus, are again, projecting their way of being onto the general population. I would happily do without a cell phone, a high def TV, 5G...I would HAPPILY go back to the 70s and 80s when I had to write letters, have an answering machine and go to the movies instead of streaming it. THEY point out the problems THEY themselves create, but never take responsibility, instead these crimes are used to justify more oversite, more regulation and LESS FREEDOM, "they need to save us from ourselves"....Well, I have said enough, thank you for your work, it is greatly appreciated.
@@DespotofAntrim To add all that good shit would further increase the budget and development time. It kind of is a shame once its a clear win, James doesnt go full George Lucas level modder with his movies, where you get space empires worth of changes over the years. Imagine stacking a well designed trial and error at first array of gene drives and every person spreading them produced James Cameron and Elona Musk with 99.99% certainty. Finally trillions could be far beyond billionaires with their own post scarcity post money economies. Who cares if competition is ded.
If Bridgehead is Jamestown I want to see Plymouth. A human colony that isn’t for profit. They still don’t like the Navi but are willing to work with them. I think it would a good way to show some moral nuance with the humans and Navi. Maybe in the 3rd or 4th movie this “Plymouth” colony is completely destroyed by the Navi because of a misunderstanding or just plain distrust of humans. The survivors who are led by formerly biggest advocate for the Navi become fanatically hateful of the natives and start to employee tactics and operations that are just straight up genocidal. The other humans are even taken aback by how brutal the survivors are and Jake feels immense guilt because a potential ally and former friend want nothing more than their extermination and it’s all his fault.
Or you can do the Spanish take: there's a group of Na'avi who built an indigenous 'empire' that enslaved weaker, smaller Na'vi clans and either sacrificed them to their demonic gods or ate them, and the humans eventually chose to 'side' with the enslaved clans to 'flip over the chessboard', using their more advanced human tech.
@@DespotofAntrim Well, look at the bright side: at least Avatar didn't blow a billion bucks to inadvertently turn Sauron into a Moses like hero figure.
This video, especially the second half, does a great job explaining this movie's problem with portraying the Navi as being virtually perfect people. This movie's human villains are one dimensionally evil and the movie's blue skinned aliens are essentially perfectly good; which is overly simplistic.
I get a kick out of directors like James Cameron and Spielberg and Scorsese in the likes men who in this day and age would be the last people in line for getting hired to direct. These guys who benefited most from the world are in are the ones who tear it down the most and make it hard for people that just happen to be the same color and gender is them. So I think they've lived long enough to become the villain instead of dying the hero
Not one of them would get a directing gig if they were young graduates today, a point I made in another video. Studios will hire incompetent women before they hire competent men, 2022 proved it.
These guys were never heroes though. They've always been villains. They all kissed the ring, bent the knee, and some of them (Spielberg for sure) were born evil. I mean, did his last name not clue you in to his heritage? These people didn't turn from the light, they never served it in the first place. You are only now seeing their true colors and think the illusion they projected is their real selves. Wake up normie! *clap*
What did Scorsese do? He’s done nothing but make movies based on historical events or mafia stories. Not one of his most recent films has been bad and has done nothing but speak upon a historical aspect of the films events.
One thing that is never talked about in the avatar movies up to now is how exactly all the mammalian (and perhaps plants) inhabitants of the alien planet are able to connect to each other via their organic "wires." Were the Na'vi originally advanced and modified themselves deliberately before regressing technologically? Or did they have creators that made them like that? Would be kinda funny in a future movie if they learn that there is a creator race out there that come back to see their creations under attack and decide to do something about it. But Cameron is trying to sell an Ayahuasca fueled fantasy of the noble savage that are under attack by "evil" humans so that we all abandon our cities and touch grass so that their property and technology is instead in the hands of his elitist clique.
Man, Pandora literally has sentient hivemind which can control simpler life forms and interacts with Na'Vi, making memory dumps when they connect to node trees and absorbing their brains after death. Not quite Zerg or Tyranids, but close enough.
Every coloniser in history has exploited existing rivalries to their own benefit and often to the detriment of all groups of natives, including those who help the invader. The United States conquered its land by allying with some indigenous nations against others. In the end, it didn't matter whether your nation allied with the US or fought against them. Everyone ended up in reservations on a tiny percentage of their former territory. There was a movie, I can't remember the name of it, about the hunt for Geronimo, the leader of the last major Apache band in the US. In the movie, the US army gets help from Apache scouts in hunting Geronimo, some of whom know him personally. At the end, the scouts get sent away to the reservation on the same train as Geronimo and his men. There was another movie where the rivalry between two Arab kingdoms is exacerbated and breaks out in open warfare due to the presence of an American oil drilling company. It has a happier ending, but a lot of people die on the way there. I find those kinds of stories far more compelling than a story like Avatar, where all the natives join forces as a single monolithic entity to fight the invader.
A lot more informative and thought provoking on the actual human condition and human tendencies, but that doesn't fit the narrative of indigenous people being happy harmonious utopians living an ideal state of life until the wicked, dysfunctional invaders showed up and ruined it all. In reality most native American tribes considered their mortal and main enemies to be other tribes. They didn't like the white people but they were always kind of a third party and interloper, and always convenient to use in their main fights with their traditional enemies. And they didn't need any encouragement to do it for the most part. They also routinely invaded and took land from each other and usually wiped out the enemy tribes given the opportunity (of course this varies, they had different values in different tribes). I always get a kick out of the "who can own the land? The earth belongs to no one." Noble Savage trope when in reality the Indians absolutely claimed land as their own and would kill anyone who trespassed in it, invade it and take it, and fight to defend it. They didn't believe in _private_ land ownership but they definitely believed you could own the land. They didn't just sit back when the next tribe moved into their prime hunting grounds and say "well, who can own the land? We must live in peace and share the bounty of the Great Earth Spirit". They also liked to torture captives to death, although interestingly they considered it a mark of respect to you, an opportunity to prove your manly strength of spirit. If they just executed you they didn't think you deserved that much. If they just took you captive they thought you were not even worth killing.
Great reply, except one point of fact: • The scouts did *not* get "sent away to the same reservation"! Amerindians that served with the army were not compelled to go to or stay within any reservation, as a policy; some might have _chosen_ to, but they weren't _"sent."_ (In fact, they were able to join the army officially and receive promotions-up to First Sergeant, that I know of.)
@@Kveldred Are you referring to the events of the movie, or is that what happened to them in real life and the movie changed the story to have them sent to the reservation for dramatic effect?
Completely agree with a lot of the negative points. Especially the bad black & white moral contrast using the fictional 'noble savage' trope. I see it's still the main gist of the plot once again. Would've been far more interesting to have believable societies, with both good and bad facets, opposing one another. Perhaps that's expecting too much of what's essentially a children's movie level of fiction, though. Thanks for the vid! Your long-form reviews are great.
I've also wondered about the in race clan conflict. I mean if there are other groups or tribe and the man group/tribe live at Hometree which is sacred because the Na'vi can connect with Eywa (their mother goddess) and that Eywa doesn't take side and is concerned about the balance of nature. Than why isn't there other groups in conflict with attacking and moving in to Home Tree since that's what happened in real life.?
Cameron gave the humans very good motivations that I root for : "Earth is dying, we need this place to survive" -> okay then, it's necessity "The whale juice makes humans entirely immortal" -> can I have some?
When the Prawns from district 9 have more characterisation and develop more sympathy despite their increadibly alien appearance, mindset and destructive culture than the big blue beautiful cat eyed people you know you fucked up
Underrated film. I originally wanted a sequel, but I think too much time has passed and I don't trust a single person in Hollywood today to tackle it. Better to be content with the bitter sweet ending we got
I think this movie brought a lot more out of Quaritch. I cant wait to see where his character goes from here. And Stephen Lang is wonderful in the role.
He's the only good part about these awful films. The rest of the characters are complete dogshit. Sam Worthington still can't hide his Aussie accent after 14 fucking years.
Lastly, it really sucks that James Cameron, the guy responsible for some of the greatest Action and Sci-Fi movies of all time, who'd literally went from a broke artist living out of his car and surviving on Mcdonald's burger coupons to one of the richest and most celebrated directors of all time, now feels compelled to insult and deride the very same people responsible for pulling him out of poverty. You'd figure he'd be like JK Rowling who already has more money and fame than needed, so has no reason to bow to the Woke Mob. Instead however, he says such utter nonsense as Testosterone is a poison, despite him literally making movies practically dripping with it for years. Why is he even saying this crap. Dude's almost 70, has more money than he knows what to do with, countless awards, the distinction of creating what many consider the best Sci-Fi action movies ever made...TWICE, creating one of the most successful Sci-Fi franchises ever, along with creating the First movie to make over $1 Billion and then the First to ever gross $2 Billion. The man has more accolades, money and legacy than nearly all the directors in Hollywood, so what could he possibly stand to gain from supporting the brainless idiots ruining it now?
Excellent point, maybe he's trying to buy them off with ballicks about testosterone being poison and guns being evil so they won't come after him while he is in the spotlight with Way of Water. It's very possible that those around him advised him to come out with woke nonsense just to keep the target off his back. Hollywood has become the Soviet Union.
I agree with most of this, except for the take about Rowling. Rowling happily sipped the Kool-Aid and actively retconned her own story and characters multiple times to score brownie points with the Woke mob for years until she inevitably said the "Wrong" thing and the mob turned against her. Hence why she's now anti Woke. But before that she was gladly part of the Far Leftist insanity crowd.
That depends on what you mean by "savage". If you mean it in the context (mostly modern) of "vicious and dangerous" maybe not. But vicious to all and for what? If you mean it in the context of "living outside a state of civilization" (meaning Western civilization mostly) I don't see why both can't be true.
It's not that Cavill is a bad actor. He fits Superman. The problem is they had Snyder make Superman everything he's not. So Cavill didn't get to shine whatsoever in the role. Same problem with The Witcher. Cavill is a big fan of the series but the people behind the production are not.
it shocks me that they’d hire people so incompetent that they would allow their own prejudice of the source material to leak into the show. I understand that writing is a job and you can’t always write for something you like but intentionally hating on the show feels like a way to bury your own career.
You forgot how the Maori wiped out the indigenous Moriori - though to be fair that part of history has now been officially rewritten so they instead gave them citizenship by the Maori and then their genetics were wiped out by interbreeding with the stronger Maori genes 🤐 which is odd as Maori had no unilateral government or leadership organization or unified body of law pre-colonization🤔 🤔 and there were also many rubbish pits found full of Moriori bones with human teeth impressions.... wow that sounds bad when you say it out loud.... but i guess history is full of bad acts we need to learn from
Fascinating, the noble savage perspective on history is unfortunately still very widespread; more than half of Americans believe that Native Americans lived in peace before the arrival of Europeans.
17:32 I do believe that a good portion of audiences would go for a more realistic and philosophical story about The morality of humans colonizing another world with sentient life on it and how they’d realistically would react to them in the future. But that can’t be the main focus. The audience does in fact mainly want blue people but we also want a story that realistically flows with how humans would actually act. The cardboard cut outs we got in this movie was unappealing and that’s one of the main problem/criticism people have with this but besides that it’s an almost flawless movie just like the review you gave for it
In the first film, the Navi were based on a mix of South American and Native Americans, more so the later. It was basically a combination of "Dances With Wolves" and "Ferngully". In the sequel, the water tribe is easily seen as being purely based on the Maori. Even the tattoos are similar.
The part about giving the na'vi some actual problems and drawbacks is actually very interesting. It would've undermined the purpose of pandora, as pure escapism is perfectly fine and something we honestly need more of, but i definitely see your point. Would've been interesting to explore in parallel universe spin-off type of way; Na'vi that see the unparalleled benefits that humanity can provide, as opposed to their uncivilized and disgustingly savage world.
The trials and tribulations of a group of Na'vi immersing themselves in Human understanding of technology, science, astronomy etc. while trying not to lose sight of what makes them Na'vi could make for a compelling narrative. Of course that wouldn't sit well with explosion-addicted popcorn-munchers so we got this instead.
Perhaps that's one of the reasons it's such a popular franchise, people can watch these divine beings that live in paradise and forget all their troubles.
My mother is the type that just wants something to go, “ohh so pretty!” Lol she HATES watching movies with me now. She loved Rings of Power! I made her watch “Galadriel is a Psychopath” and she huffed at me the whole time. If you literally have millions/billions of dollars at your disposal, how do you not make something that’s both beautiful and meaningful? Like The Abyss? Even if the Na’vi want for nothing, I loved Despot’s point about them having NO culture. That would be interesting to explore.
this movie can be BEST Summarized as.... The best looking house, and when I mean best looking i'm saying its a shtty house too, in a very Very VERY BAD Ghetto Toilet ...... Maybe like a Chicago or Baltimore type neighborhood..
The Avatar movies have shown that James Cameron is a good action/skirmish director, but a terrible war writer. Anyone with a sense for war in charge when corporal Jake rallied the Navi would laugh at his stupidity. An army of 47000 Navi the largest army in the history of Pandora is incredibly easy to defeat largely by doing nothing. The Navi have no logistics or stockpiles they are hunter gatherers Jake’s army would eat the forest clean of food and pollute the water before they got halfway to Hellsgate.
Maybe they had a specific molecule they were looking for. And whalebrainium had it. Let's call it walnut brainium. Or white rabitium. Or Adrenochromium
Just found your channel this last week. Honestly I was expecting more of the parody material in the vein of Galadriel demon-beast, but this was a seriously good review. Keep it up king, you've got my sub.
It was created by people who had nothing to do with the colonies. Much like those who most love mass migration are those completely insulated from the consequences of it that the working class are being crushed by
I think another important thing people may not be considering about this movie is expectations. I watched Avatar 2 with my mom, and my expectations were in the dirt. I expected it to be horrible garbage, but was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I knew the writing wasn't going to be great, but i was able to enjoy the other elements. And seeing how much my mom loved it as well and knowing she wants to watch it again also helps me enjoy it. Long story short, Avatar 2 captured what so many movies have been missing this year. Fun. It's just dumb fun. Not so stupid it's mind numbing, but it won't change your life. Also, I enjoyed seeing two strong male characters going at it. They hate each others guts, want to kill each other, and fight tooth and nail for victory. I enjoyed seeing Jake be a strong and responsible father figure and general. In my opinion, he improved massively in this movie from the first.
Jake was definitely an improvement, and the movie beats the hell out of the vast majority of dross Hollywood has released over the past year; it frustrated me though because the movie could have been a masterpiece.
@Despot of Antrim Completely agree. You also made a lot of good points in your video. I'm aspiring to do my own writing, so I like hearing the opinions if different RUclips critics.
I'm trying to force myself to see this film in the theater before it's too late. I have a feeling 90% of it's majesty will be non-existent on my meager 65" TV.
As majestic as it looks, I don't remember any aspect of the movie that could only work, or be compelling, with 3D. And I'm a huge Cameron and theater stan.
While Avatar 2 (and the first one) isn't woke, I still think, it presents a potentially dangerous message. Especially because it has so little nuance. As you described in the your video, the Na'vi are absolutely flawless beings, while humans are presented as mostly evil. Back in 2009 this might have been not as dangerous, but in nowadays world we have several groups of climate change fanatics who are becoming more radical every year. Since the Avatar movies are also aimed at very young people, I think they will fuel this Gen-Z radicalization even more. Because what those movies are showing is exactly how those fanatics are viewing humanity (especially white western culture). Greetings from Germany :=)
Since Na'vi are a fiction, what this conflict represents is a struggle between green environmentalism and rampant consumerism. Na'vi do kill, hunt and apparently even had a massive war in the past. But they try to live in balance with nature, while for industrialist humans nature doesn't even exist. But you are right as well, people tend to take everything literally and on-the-face, so this sort of message is dangerous, but only because of how thoughtless the masses are.
Movies like this are more dangerous because that are actually decent as films. For propaganda to be effective it has to engage the audience, and much of the slop they put out fails, and thus fails as propaganda. Films like this are far more successful in influencing minds.
Besides the basic sci-fi war elements, this series, is essentially ThunderCats fused with Smurfs with humanity, taking the place of Mumm-Ra and Gargamel. Think about it 1.) Villains that is two dimensionally evil with goals that are constantly shifting and unclear while also being needlessly destructive. 2.) A race of two dimensionally good & also primitive people that have a seemingly supernatural powers and connection to nature itself, also whose design is something out of children’s folklore. 3.) there’s also the fact that despite constant interactions and fighting, the bad guys, can’t seem to remember where the good guys base is or least approximate it.
@@Bionickpunk the only ones that are media illiterate are the writers not the viewers, because the movie series itself has been nothing but visual noise with writing that’s barely existent to the point of naming something unobtainium etc.
27:20 Lol, as much as this review is excellent, the sheer conviction with which you stated your position on Kiri's conception was fucking hilarious. You sir have just earned a sub for that.
I'll play that game. In 150 years, everybody may have cameras in their eyes recording everything they see, and saving it all on some future-tech cloud. Therefore, while it wouldn't necessarily be saving the memories themselves, it would be saving all the images which created the memories, which would fairly easily allow the mind to fill in the blanks and work with it. Hell, you can trigger memories through sight and smell and taste anyhow. It would pretty much be the same, only in a more focused and tech-based way.
Very good point, a cloud based AI could certainly take on the task of recreating someone's personality based on their data, however it would inevitably be incomplete (inner thoughts / missing data / trauma), good point though.
@@DespotofAntrim However, *Regardless* of how much Memory (Data) is captured & put into a new body, it wouldn't be YOU. Just a COPY. The show 'Black Mirror' a show on its bad days 10x smarter than either 'Avatar' film, also dealt with supposedly transferring consciousness to a new environment (Most Notably in the episode, 'San Junipero'). However, as with nearly all fiction and with most discussion in the real world, the true problem is sidestepped, if not outright ignored. The Problem is this- As I said, creating a COPY of you, may one day be possible. I doubt it, but let's be generous. That's all that's been done. The Copy may have your memories, it may look like you, act like you, etc... but if you are living right beside that copy, how does this benefit YOU? If you die and the copy goes on, how does that help YOU? Most stories just have the original conveniently die to avoid showing this. If you watch Black Mirror- San Junipero closely they confirm this by saying that the main character's bodies have to be killed. Why do they acknowledge the problem, but obscure it at the same time? I don't know, though it is more than a tad creepy. Any technology that could actually transfer your consciousness would kill your body by THAT PROCESS ALONE. As the body cannot live without the Spirit. Of course materialists do not acknowledge the existence of 'Spirit', which creates a serious problem for them. I guess that since they believe consciousness is only a by-product of the Brain, the only way they could see to extend life would be to preserve that specific brain by any means necessary. Surprisingly, one popular Sci-Fi series, 'Sword Art Online' DOES acknowledge a non-material aspect to our existence, by means of what they refer to as, 'Fluctlights'. They are sort of a Materialist's version or compromise to acknowledging Spirit, but still, far better than most, especially slick-looking garbage like Avatar.
@@torikazuki8701 Me, me, me, me, can you ever not think about yourself? Let me start by saying that you are COMPLETELY RIGHT in your observations. Mind transfer is impossible and copying data is no way to capture souls. Nevertheless, even that data is potentially useful. Perhaps not immediately useful, but imagine if it were used to prolong one's legacy, if not life. Imagine if you could advise your progeny even beyond death, would you not? It may not be alive, it may not be YOU or even a person, but if it holds accurate representations of one's memories, thoughts and feelings at the time of scanning, ca it not be used by posterity to get in touch with their roots, us? To know us not through the often-sanitized interpretations of the history books, but by our own recorded memory? What do you think?
@@Oera-B If it were openly acknowledged to be merely a Person-Flavored Software Database of everything that person knew, I'd have no problem with that in *principle*. Aside from the additional issue of that data being manipulated, as any data can be, my only other real issue would be- Does this database have anything valuable to SAY? Most of us can talk, some of us know things, but how often do we have real understanding and true wisdom to impart?
My assessment of the narrative in this movie is that it is decent enough but built on a mountain of contrivances. I wish that the movie had more realistic motivations in the humans and more realistic flaws in the Navi but I do like the idea of humans colonizing an alien world and having to fight the natives for it and the movie is gorgeous and doesn't throw the contrivances in your face so much that it becomes annoying. Also if the humans can grow Navi with mixed human DNA why can't they take the whale DNA and grow something with the immortal juice producing gland? One could already grow a younger body and upload themselves into it and if they make an immoral human this could solve the problem without the need to hunt whales.
@@DespotofAntrim They've already established themselves as having pretty advanced genetic technology. I don't see why they cant do a lil' sploicin' and grow the glands in other creatures.
This is a really fair review. It gives the movie credit where it's due, points out things that are enjoyable, and yet also points out issues and things that could be made better from a logical standpoint rather than an emotional one. I like all your videos, but this one is especially excellent. Great work!
If they have to make the humans one-note bad guys to make the Na'Vi interesting by comparison, I think some mistakes have been made in the writing room.
Not really because uploading your memories to a clone would just create a copy of yourself, but you would still die, you would not be able to transfer your consciousness to the clone.
Wow! Excellent in-depth profound review or better examination of Cameron's Avatar 2. I especially like your constructive criticism. You make some really good creative suggestions. Great! And congratulations for your first 10k subscribers! Oh, and please allow me one little technical complaint: have mercy with headphones users and (try to) level all audio volume with your voice volume - the first third gave me a few jumpscares :)
@@DespotofAntrim imagine Jake Sully’s fear when he finds massive pyramids with Na’vi blood stained stairs. Or, even a Na’vi “blood eagle” (I’m Norwegian, we all had our ‘noble indigenous/savage’ phase.) but, they’re “so in touch with nature” (rips out heart) or, a statue of a multi armed warrior woman, tongue out and fangs bared. Either way, the Na’vi seem to be lacking certain aspects of culture. You should do a serious dive into it. I enjoy the content by the way.
ruclips.net/video/RGQ1x5r-LCQ/видео.html For your consideration, just a piece of tangible culture, that is not only an instrument but also a psychological warfare tool, that gives an insight into the society and thoughts of the beyond of a culture. Or, how come none of the Na’vi tribes build their bow & arrows differently? On earth, almost every culture has developed archery, but have varied it up, like a sort of technological and cultural convergent evolution, or homologous structures of thought. I believe, that the Na’vi are left culturally inept and shallow for a reason. But, I’m very into sociology, so that’s why I’m bouncing these ideas at you, and Avatar always seemed shallow, and needed that sort of true world building that Cameron is seemingly shying from.
There was a math done about uploading memories of a dog. Apparently there is not enough storage in the world just to do that, for a single creature. So we shouldn't be afraid of AI just yet, and definitely there is no way to copy a single human brain on to the hard drive like device.
I really enjoyed your review, which you obviously put a great deal of thought, and effort into! It is encouraging that a strong male father figure was included. The physical appearance of bad guy Col. Quaritch was an interesting choice. Instead of a stereotypical big, bald, ugly, empty-headed, loud drill sergeant type, turn back the clock to when he was a teenager, and he would have been boy band material. In some mannerisms and facial expressions, he can even come across as androgynous. When you refer to the ugliest urban space ever, it is not unlike the background for the ski and snowboard jump events at the Olympics in chn last year. Your balanced approach to modern Western civilization is as appreciated as your balanced approach to the true history of native (primitive - sorry) people. (I agree that native Irish should count as native, and same for other Europeans although there's also a lengthy history of population displacement, so trying to figure out who was native to which area first could become tricky. Eg Celts used to live in Bavaria before being pushed northwest by Germanics.) Your assessment of the Navi, and their lack of culture, is a definite weak point in the world building. When you were talking about what recreational, sporting, competitive, musical, etc activities they could have had, I felt I would love to create a culture for them! I doubt James Cameron would have had the guts to single out specific countries that are responsible for ongoing current colonization, recent colonization, genocide (or attempted) or whale hunting. Western civilization is such an easy target because, as you pointed out, the sins in question ended decades ago, and the Western elite refuses to fight back. In fact, they encourage Western self-loathing. Thank you again for an excellent video!
He didn't need to single any nation out, but realistically, the whalers would have been a very international gang of mercenaries, total and utter scum of the earth led by corporate types, like the buffalo hunters of the wild west.
Honestly, I would pay you to remake avatar if i was James Cameron! You telling me that Spider KIss wouldn't be one of the best and funniest movie plot twists ever? Get us the product! hahah
At one point, when the clone commander was trying to ride his first dragon thing,he fell down. Right after we see Jake riding his new fish thing and I said to my gf : ohh no I got flashback of a deja vu of the commander hitting the water in front of them, then kinda loosing his memories and being rescued by bringing him back to the village. Then you know what would happen next and would be looking forward to the great reveal of who he really is when the memories are coming back. You could if you want as well change his reaction or goal after living,learning,fighting and maybe fall in love with them, being torn between his new life and old human self. The reveal could be triggered by crossing the clone soldier that would be happy to find him.
You, sir, I have made an epic video! You've hit all the pros and cons of the movie. I've not seen either avatar, and I don't plan to, but it sounds like you did this one justice. The whale thing is so stupid. Arguably, some of the most intelligent aquatic mammals on Earth are dolphins and orcas. Both are well known for their needless cruelty, to members of their own species and to other animals. Rather than giving up killing, they have become Masters at it thanks to their intellect.
There's a reason Orcas are called "Killer Whales." They butcher sharks just for the liver and waste the rest of the body (Oddly enough, something Spider bemoaned the evil humans doing to the space whale), slap seals into the air as hard as they can for fun and murder baby humpback whales because they like hearing its parents being sad. ...They are some really Fucked up animals sometimes XD
I think you're actually very kind to this movie. Surprisingly so. The dramatic beats were flat, the characters were annoying with sleep-inducing dialogue, the story makes little sense, and many character decisions are rock stupid. And this all has the effect of making the action scenes into over-indulgent tripe, because as we all know, a cool action that doesn't make sense or emotionally resonate is basically just a kid slamming his action figures together. As for it not being political propaganda...okay Despot, I know we're all so used to this that we're basically numb to it, but the incessant bashing over the head about how mankind is the destroyer of the environment and we "civilized people" need to learn how to live in harmony with barbaric nature is 100% political propaganda. It's just the propaganda of 15-20 years ago, not the propaganda more fashionable in "modern audiences."
Thanks for the review, I mostly agree with what you said, though I like that you at least gave a reasonable explanation for Quartich and Sigourney having children lol. I didn't dislike the exile whale, I actually liked that he finally makes the only intelligent decision and starts stacking bodies, but everything else involving the whales was pants on head ridiculous. Supposedly in the third, there will be Navi that side with the humans (finally), but given Cameron has lost all creativity, they're probably going to be Captain Planet villains on par with the humans, or have been tricked by the evil humans and corrupted by YT space magic. It won't be remotely plausible and will be more noble savage fantasy tripe meant to demonize the people that have improved our planet beyond a question of a doubt. Also thanks for pointing out the BLATANT anti white message in this. About halfway through I noticed that not a single bad guy was brown, and that didn't change at all throughout the run time. About as subtle as a hammer to the head, all as more anti white rhetoric. Maybe in the future the white man takes their nations back? Also what's that anime game where you're braining people with a fire extinguisher?
Improved beyond a question of a doubt? How can you be so sure? Doubt can certainly be cast into it. Are you sure you're not the one indulging on a myth?
ow yeah, with a continent of plastic in pacific ocean, plastic particles everywhere, destruction of all sorts of lungs of the planet (forest, plankton), rampant consumption of an oceanic fauna, global warming - our planet has been so improved by consumerism driven industrialists! if Avatar was anti-white, then this review is pro-cancer.
What I probably hate most about These movies is how weak the humans are, they make them out to be these ruthless animals, but can barely put up a fight and have shit equipment and fighting tactics
One interesting thing i found to be immediately glossed over is that the humans (Mantids) accept the sudden influx of a squad of navi supersoldier immediately, In opposite contrast to the way Jake was an outcast that had to earn it among the actual navi, as well as spider as you say being shown to not be accepted yet either by whatsherfasce holding him hostage. Possible its just glossed over along with the entirety of the human side of things, but thought it was interesting when i noticed it, General empowered woman even shakes his hand etc (though with her exo suit instead) Might have even been interesting to see soldier Mcbluedude et al having to come to terms with being treated differently and might even foster some conflicting thoughts in themselves, can even be a bonding thing with spider who is similarly an outcast species among another now, not to mention maybe spider would be pissed his evil grr dad got to be a Navi, something which he so desperately wants to be
Personally I just interpreted Spiders acting as him being social inept and using old human media or something/stalking navi to learn how to talk to people.
Huh you know I was expecting a long, somewhat angry rant similar to Rings of Power where while you do break things down sensibly still rip into the movie with a level of anger yet also clever jokes, but here your focus more on the logical problems with the movie without too many wisecracks yet I wasn't bored listening to this at all. Nice work.
Thanks, this movie deserves a fair review, I have listened to many reviews and only one was good. Hating this movie is undeniably fashionable, both for left wingers (because of the presence of a traditional father hero) and for edgy RUclips critics (because it's not cool to like Avatar), but it is nowhere near the level of shite spewed out by Hollywood over the past year.
43:03 I disagree with this take of Jar Jar... George's original idea was to do a slow burn Yoda Sith...a funny, clumsy character as a facade, later on the story he was supposed to show his true colors...like Yoda. This plotline is well documented and you have to pay attention of what George was doing on film, then the fans backlash came, and Lil' George didn't dare to go all the way with his original idea. Set up with no payoff.
1:01:39 Also their anime and manga kick the crap out of the shit we have here in the west regarding animation and comics. Seriously, give me Demon Slayer, One Piece and Yu Yu Hakusho over any of the garbage coming out of Hollywood these days.
For anyone interested, the memory upload device was a key thematic concept explored in Michael Crichton's Timeline. He definitely went down the path of the problematic - as manifested by the story's quaritch-like villain. Cameron instead took the glossy approach to the scifi concept, where it's just assumed every kink gets worked out with sufficient time (and guinea pig sacrifices).
I don't even remember that one, although I know I read it. I have been a big fan of Crichton since I was a kid, he does a great job of writing actual _science fiction_ that isn't just space fantasy. I will have to read that again. Although I remember being less impressed with his later books, and I wondered if his health wasn't already suffering at that point. Wasn't that where the guy like goes back to medieval Europe, kind of like Stargate but it's a time machine? Shit yes, the last time I read that I was in like 6th grade reading on the bus ride home every day. Like 25 years ago, time flies. I'm going to go order that right now.
The whale plot is stupid. The last thing Earth needs is schlubs living forever, it needs a nice new planet, then a good cleansing with neutron weapons. We had resources in the first movie. Why not make the whales, and their gigantic brainz, the nodes of planetwide wi-fi for the spirit of Pandora? They're distributed, mobile hardware. That way they're a critical strategic target for the military, potentially to capture, suborn, exploit, and control. This could lead to interesting plots with spies, subterfuge, treachery, betrayal and so on. Maybe have some Na'vi traitors get sciency with the humans too. Anyway, more like leaning in to Harry Harrison's Deathworld, with the psionic connected planet fighting the humans. More interesting than Brain Goo Long Life (TM), which is kind of .. trivial.
One of the most interesting reviews on this movie I've found so far. Didn't want to click on it at first, because I'm pretty much done with Avatar 2, but I'm glad I watched it. This channel has become one of my favorites very fast. Greetings from Germany :=)
Your channel is a repository of sanity in a (media) world gone mad. I've name dropped your name in the efap superchats. Consider giving them (mauler) a dm on Twitter. Your content is right up their alley, and they have a huge audience that would gobble up your wonderful content.
I didn't really mind the concept of uploading your memories. After all, the first movie had already shown a halfway technology with commanding avatars, and a biological one with Eywah transfering Jake's mind into another body. Thanks for this well made video, there were a lot of points I didn't think about that much. I enjoyed watching the sequel, but felt like I was let down, not because of the noble savage trope, but mostly because of the tired trope of the military father having a troubled relationship with his hotheaded son, as well as a lack of consistency with the first movie. Jake literally culturally converted to the Navi culture, but seems to have forgotten all of it. He trusts only a conventional human diagnosis for his daughter's epilleptic episode when he knows firsthand that Eywah is real and tangible. He also seems to be the only one deciding how to raise his kids and does it in a very classical American way. Neitiri used to actually be more of her own person but completely fell in the background, doesn't question her husband's way of raising her kids (when she was very protective of her culture), and constantly gets treated as an unruly kid by Jake when they joined the other tribe. I don't mind her getting a traditional role, it's just not typical for her. Regarding your point on bad sides of different cultures to stray away from the noble savage trope, this reminded me of the webnovel The Deathworlders, in which the author took the time to give an actual culture (good and bad) to the alien species. For example, the Gao (space racoons) are fiercely loyal, but they also are quite aggressive and lethal duels are not uncommon. They wear their battle scars proudly, decide of some leader positions through violence, and their current highest leader is, through necessity, a ruthless dictator who has a right of life and death over his subjects and castrates or skins alive the worst criminals. The Tengewek, an actual tribalistic people of space gorillas, follows a culture of balance and giving/taking, but live in a dangerous hunter-gatherer world where a caste of naturally superhuman members and de facto leaders follow an initiation rite where the initiate is hinted at being beat to near-death before becoming a new man. The strongest of them all, in the goal of uniting all tribes after near extinction, conducted ethnic cleansing where diplomacy couldn't work.
On mind uploading as depicted in Avatar, there are reasonable arguments to be made that the data can be stored and put into a new body. The new body one is easiest. We're only shown mind uploading to newly cloned bodies. If the brains were printed, cell by cell, from an imprint and then implanted, the process seems plausible and doesn't contradict anything shown in the movie. On storage, this mostly boils down to the observation that much of the brain's mass isn't used for information processing, and most of what is used for processing doesn't govern higher brain functions that we care about preserving. >90% of cells are present in densely packed, almost crystalline structures near the center and base of the brain. The precise structure doesn't vary much from person to person, and so can be made on the spot rather than preserved. A substantial amount of the brain's volume is dedicated to logistical cells; blood vessels that distribute resources and "house cleaning" cells, like glial cells, that clean up dead cells. These, obviously, don't need to be preserved. And all the cells have cell nuclei that don't contribute to processing, so they don't need to be preserved. The dendrites themselves don't need to act as actual channels for neurotransmitters in a scan and so can be made smaller as a result. Taking an image but editing these listed things would lead to an image, not some abstract format, but an image of the mind that's several orders of magnitude smaller than the full brain. How such a scan could be done is, of course, a mystery. But storage on its own on a small card as depicted in the movie is not wholly unrealistic.
Agree on Mr. Despot's assertion that Jake Sully is portraying a strong family man but let's remember that Jake is not a Homosapien....he is a tall blue skinny dude who needs to eat a cheeseburger.
I appreciate that. I have only seen one fair review of this movie on RUclips, Cameron made a massive effort with this and it has earned a fair assessment.
Thank you for mentioning oppression of white people. That's absolutely true. The Western world knows about Holocaust, but doesn't seem to care about Slavic people, who were oppressed due to their alleged ethnic inferiority. Slavs were granted the right to live (unlike Jews or Romani people) but they were only good enough to serve the "master race", according to that ideology. I'm Polish and I guarantee you, there's no Pole without a relative that was either killed, imprisoned, tortured, or forced to do slave labour during the occupation. I literally cried hearing some of the stories, especially those concerning torturing and murdering little children. So thank you once again, it's really important to me that the Western world hears about this, even a tiny little bit.
The writing is terrible and the antagonist is so lazy. Plus Cameron doesn't like me because I have testosterone and he flips fans off that waited for him likely for multiple hours
To be fair, Cameron probably didn't think that the immorality whale brain juice was too much of a stretch because he partakes in the human version of such extraction rituals if you believe the tin hatters, which each year I seem to be leaning towards more and more...
Dude I found your channel after your appearence on The Drinkers channel, Open Bar stream. So glad I did. Your videos are awesome and your attention to acurate historical detail is spot on. Well done and thanks for the content.
I loved the way you described the realistic whaling. Certainly that how it would look like. Instead of that we get a bunch of ideological crap soaking wet with cgi
My guess is that the weapons are stocking an outpost defending one of their mines. When Spider rescues Quaritch that was so, gah. Makes it feel like the final battle meant nothing as Quaritch is just going to keep popping back like a recurring cartoon series villain.
I got more enjoyment from this than I did from the two films, it made me think rather than the key gangling the films gave, don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the films.
Don’t forget in the first film, the line given during the briefing “they’re very hard to kill” has detailed that the Na’vi had tendons and bones are reinforced. Quote: "They’re like animals. They’re very quick. Their bones are reinforced with naturally occurring carbon fiber. They are very hard to kill." Theyre much bigger too, I like to imagine with carbon fiber like tendons and bones, they will deliver much higher caliber strikes and motions than human technology even though it takes place in the far future. Having arrows the size of a man being shot at with significant speed and newtons, at high speeds of both vehicle and the archer on a much bigger moon vs Earth so I’m assuming gravity will also be higher would mean I’d like to imagine standard bullet proof glass that withstand handgun fire (2k newtons) won’t handle it. Space sci-fi can ignore laws like this and usually be fine if the movie is fun enough. I have mixed feelings on this film but overall was nice. Predictable as all hell but still fine, i personally didn’t like them recycling two major characters/actors in the new movie but it makes sense.
Personally I thought it was atrocious. Not even “bad but fun.” I could not get behind a single decision made by any character because they were all forced and idiotic. - Why would Jake abandon his tribe that he’s seemingly spent decades with and has married into? - Does the war just end when Jake leaves or is he just letting the tribe deal with it without him? - Id the war is not off, then why would his wife allow her people to just continue to die without her help? - Why was Colonel Q brought back just to spend the movie hunting Jake. - If the war is off, and Jake is in hiding, why would the military awaken colonel Q just to hunt him when he’s gone and now they can focus on the whole “terraforming.” - If the war is not off, and they think sully is just in hiding but commanding the war still, why only give him a civilian corporate whale hunting boat as his backup? Why not give him a real ship with real soldiers? - Why does Jake seemingly not understand that they want to conquer the whole planet and will eventually reach the sea people anyways? - Why can’t they just clone the whales for the goo instead of hunt them? - Why is the adopted daughter just the fucking Messiah of mother pandora for no reason. - Why in the hell would Spider save colonel Q knowing he just tried to murder his entire adoptive family? - Why THE FUCK did they not swim under the fire on the water? That’s how water works, it’s just at the top of the water that’s on fire not the bottom. WHY? So many dumb decisions and choices that are never explained and ultimately leave me angry at the narrative. No amount of pretty picture can make up for how utterly shit the story is and how beyond dumb the characters become.
I agree, I regard this as perhaps my worst video, I went way too soft on this movie, I think I just really wanted to like something at the time. The movie is shit and I have never had anything even approaching a desire to rewatch it, if I did, I'm sure I would hate it.
@@DespotofAntrim I think people just managed to ignore the story because it is pretty. But frankly the graphics stop being interesting after every single frame being this immaculate over designed/over crafted shot.
the ships burning the landing sites isnt even intentional, just a helpful side effect of how goddamn powerful realistic spacecraft have to be in order to get to planets in other systems
1:55 😂😅 Actually it is. Being the mouth of the regime - is the main idea behind Avatar franchise. 1st film was about racism, colonialism and bad whities; 2nd about Greta Thunberg stuff and bad whities; Plus there were Cameron's statements about patriarchy, masculinity and white. One of those was that testosterone is a poison and no man should have it. Others also lay in this line of thinking. 1:02:31 😑 I look at how US stealing resources from Iraq & Syria; via military bases and economic warfare trying to subjugate Middle East, Far East and even most of Europe. I look at France in Africa & french child labour program for uranium mining.
Not only did the sequel negate most of the important plot points of the first, including the importance of Avatars, but had the villains making incomprehensibly stupid decisions from beginning to end. "Sir, the natives are retreating into jungle, we have them on the ropes" "Ignore them. Focus all our efforts on the human traitor running the other way"
27:49 Nice video but here the railroad would make more sense than a road which would be a river of mud in this rainforest unless paved, which would be much more expensive than rails.
Good review. I did not expect there'd be an actual hour+ of fresh, insightful commentary but, happily, I was wrong. I will disagree with the final statement though; I'm pretty sure that #2 is already generally considered to be a mediocre sequel. If for no other reasons than 1. there's no way it could ever have the same visual impact that the groundbreaking first film hand, and 2. it essentially doubles down on so many of the faults of the 1st film. There are other reasons, as you point out, but those alone are sufficient. What's relevant, though, is that we are all fine with that. Avatar 2's simplistic yet overwhelming positives so outweigh the negatives that we are prepared to forgive the movie for its trespasses on the too often cartoonishly bad plot choices and heavy handed, misguided moral positioning. In short it's entertaining as heck and so impressive that the word itself feel utterly inadequate. End of story. Frankly I put off seeing it because I didn't want to end up having spent the entire runtime wondering over how 3 1/2 hours can feel like an eternity. But never did the film feel too long, and especially given the 2nd act that is a real surprise. Could Cameron have made a bunch of cuts and the film not suffer? Undoubtedly so. But I honestly don't think it would have markedly improved the movie either. Even the god awful Save The Whales plot is handled adroitly enough that we are sufficiently entertained despite also wanting to claw our faces off due to the cringe. Thanks, Desport, for pointing many things that I either missed or that never would have occurred to me. Watching this video after having freshly seen the film definitely added to the experience. Well done.
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By a happy coincidence, the release of this video has coincided with this channel reaching 10K subscribers. Thank you to everyone who has subscribed. I hope you enjoy the video.
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One of if not my favorite channels on RUclips rn. Keep it up man
Love your channel
Keep up the good work! So funny
Just when I thought Nerdrotic was the standard....Despot steps into the ring. Great videos bruv, you deserve 1mil subs. You'll get there as long as RUclips doesn't cock block you....which let's be honest. I bet they are
Also if you think about it logically the Navi shouldn't have a snowballs chance in hell after the first movie. Think about it, the guys from the first film weren't the Military but a Security company who did employ former soldiers but were still a Security company, meaning a small but well equipped group
However in the second movie, not only has 10 years past for Humans technology to advance even further than it was before, which before included mech suits and a swam of flying jets and fortresses against a bunch of blue cat people armed with bows, arrows, spears and tactics that went out of style more than half a millenium ago.
Now however, mankind is basically in desperation mode, so they would be throwing EVERYTHING they have against the Navi. The full military might of the entire planet, likely millions of soldiers with more advanced robot suits and other things. Not to mention stuff we didn't see in the previous movie, tanks, missiles, fortresses like the Helicarrier from Marvel, possibly even larger robots, not to mention things like advanced Napalm and the like.
No way the Navi could handle that.
Yeah I don't like Avatar at all too, especialy after some Mining company showed a way to mine unobtanium safely and Cameron just went full Banana
@@jetpilledmyron2056 Really feels like Cameron spent way too much time under the ocean and became another Green Peace Hippie type who thinks every time it rains hard in a state that it's humanitiies, or more specifically the US's fault.
Realistically speaking the Security company should have MOG'd most of the Navi outright and if any competent leader had been running the show they would have torched a 50 mile radius around a minehead site and shot anything stupid enough to intrude on the No-Man's land
@@phoenixrq9139 And we know Cameron has some kind of knowledge of battlefield tactics since he based the Colonial Marines and Aliens in general off the Vietnam War.
Probably another reason there aren't other countries on Pandora, the Navi would become overpowered very quickly and would end up having to side with the least of the evils (The Americans) against the others. Too depressing.
I always supported the humans. Maybe it's just my bias as a native Human, but neither movie really gave me any particular reason to like the Na'vi despite the fact that I do enjoy both movies.
Same, the humans are the good guys.
even russians?
@@birgbirg111 😁
I agree, movies often give the underdog a impossible chance of victory no matter how strong and numerous the humans are and you just end up with scenes of humans falling left and right
@@birgbirg111 Even the Russians
The brain of whalium didn’t make much sense to me in the theater either. Why is there only one whaling ship if the entire colony is here for the stuff?
I think I came up with a pretty good solution to how they know about the whalium. During the first incursion a group of humans could’ve broken off and gone rouge stealing equipment and fighting the main force. Since they were a much smaller force they get pushed back eventually finding the sea where they raid nearby tribes for equipment to fish for food somehow catching a whale. They eventually run out of food and as the naomi mount a major offensive they are crushed but the humans manage to capture them he renegades and send them back to earth as prisoners. This solves two problems the first being how the humans know about whalium so quickly which is through some of the prisoners medical checkups showing their lack of aging. This can be then traced back to the whale and can be later found out to be whalium. It also lends to the Naomi’s distrust of the humans as many of their people where killed by a rouge group souring relations between the two groups which is partially why tensions are so high in the first movie.
The entire colony wasn’t there for just the whale juice. It was clearly stated that they was there on Pandora for new human settlement. The Whale Juice seems to be just another industry the humans are engaging in on Pandora. Cameron has stated we haven’t seen the sheer magnitude of the human settlement and military power on Pandora yet. I’m excited to see humans build cities, space bridges etc be pretty cool.
It wasn’t in the budget.
Corner cutting
Wait, that was supposed to be the only one???
I assumed there were just more than we saw on screen because of how ridiculous for there be to only one ship whaling for an extremely valuable substance.
This movie can be divided in more or less 3 parts.
#1 Indians vs white settlers, including train heist
#2 teenage drama; a family with 4 kids moves to another city and the children try to fit in and find new friends, includes a bit of a lovestory
#3 greenpeace vs evil whalers, including Moby Dick fighting back and helping the greenpeace activists kill all the disgusting whale hunters
That's why it came off to me as bizarre, it was like watching 2 movies.
I love your work, but I have to say I would not lower the bar so much by making comparisons to Disney, reminds me too much of comparing politicians, just varying degrees of garbage, but still garbage. The reason The Way of Water MAY seem more tolerable, less "woke" if you will, is because the target of this propaganda is different. Most movies are pushing division, based on race, gender, sexual preference...this movie is actually MORE evil, it is about the devaluing of humans altogether, "useless eaters". This is about the coming climate wars, that will pit the populations against the oligarchs. But just like all their scams, they need a certain percentage of us to buy into their narratives. They need a percentage of the population to think there are "too many people", thus justifying a culling, even if it is called someone else. They want us to see ourselves as a virus, as a disease upon the planet. I always look at war as a great analogy to their evil of their method. Time and time again (Sadam's weapons of mass destruction) people are TRICKED into supporting wars. We are told again and again how humans are war like, NO WE ARE NOT, the oligarchs are, because war is profitable and consolidates their power. IN all things, the crimes of the powerful are wrapped around the necks of the powerless, and we pay while they do. Movies like this that paint humans as a virus, are again, projecting their way of being onto the general population. I would happily do without a cell phone, a high def TV, 5G...I would HAPPILY go back to the 70s and 80s when I had to write letters, have an answering machine and go to the movies instead of streaming it. THEY point out the problems THEY themselves create, but never take responsibility, instead these crimes are used to justify more oversite, more regulation and LESS FREEDOM, "they need to save us from ourselves"....Well, I have said enough, thank you for your work, it is greatly appreciated.
@@DespotofAntrim
To add all that good shit would further increase the budget and development time. It kind of is a shame once its a clear win, James doesnt go full George Lucas level modder with his movies, where you get space empires worth of changes over the years. Imagine stacking a well designed trial and error at first array of gene drives and every person spreading them produced James Cameron and Elona Musk with 99.99% certainty. Finally trillions could be far beyond billionaires with their own post scarcity post money economies. Who cares if competition is ded.
You could apply this to any movie. This doesn't make you sound as smart as you think it does.
You forgot the most important part, Nat Geo 😆
If Bridgehead is Jamestown I want to see Plymouth. A human colony that isn’t for profit. They still don’t like the Navi but are willing to work with them. I think it would a good way to show some moral nuance with the humans and Navi.
Maybe in the 3rd or 4th movie this “Plymouth” colony is completely destroyed by the Navi because of a misunderstanding or just plain distrust of humans. The survivors who are led by formerly biggest advocate for the Navi become fanatically hateful of the natives and start to employee tactics and operations that are just straight up genocidal.
The other humans are even taken aback by how brutal the survivors are and Jake feels immense guilt because a potential ally and former friend want nothing more than their extermination and it’s all his fault.
Or you can do the Spanish take: there's a group of Na'avi who built an indigenous 'empire' that enslaved weaker, smaller Na'vi clans and either sacrificed them to their demonic gods or ate them, and the humans eventually chose to 'side' with the enslaved clans to 'flip over the chessboard', using their more advanced human tech.
Outstanding, don't know if it would sell $2 billion in tickets but definitely a side mission for the video game if nothing else.
@@DespotofAntrim Well, look at the bright side: at least Avatar didn't blow a billion bucks to inadvertently turn Sauron into a Moses like hero figure.
@@nickmitsialis Love it. Will never get made because the xenophiles want to worship the in-jins now
This video, especially the second half, does a great job explaining this movie's problem with portraying the Navi as being virtually perfect people. This movie's human villains are one dimensionally evil and the movie's blue skinned aliens are essentially perfectly good; which is overly simplistic.
I get a kick out of directors like James Cameron and Spielberg and Scorsese in the likes men who in this day and age would be the last people in line for getting hired to direct. These guys who benefited most from the world are in are the ones who tear it down the most and make it hard for people that just happen to be the same color and gender is them. So I think they've lived long enough to become the villain instead of dying the hero
Typical of old white men.
Not one of them would get a directing gig if they were young graduates today, a point I made in another video. Studios will hire incompetent women before they hire competent men, 2022 proved it.
These guys were never heroes though. They've always been villains. They all kissed the ring, bent the knee, and some of them (Spielberg for sure) were born evil. I mean, did his last name not clue you in to his heritage? These people didn't turn from the light, they never served it in the first place. You are only now seeing their true colors and think the illusion they projected is their real selves. Wake up normie! *clap*
That's the whole point. White and asian men are competition, so boomers made their lives 10x harder.
What did Scorsese do? He’s done nothing but make movies based on historical events or mafia stories. Not one of his most recent films has been bad and has done nothing but speak upon a historical aspect of the films events.
One thing that is never talked about in the avatar movies up to now is how exactly all the mammalian (and perhaps plants) inhabitants of the alien planet are able to connect to each other via their organic "wires." Were the Na'vi originally advanced and modified themselves deliberately before regressing technologically? Or did they have creators that made them like that? Would be kinda funny in a future movie if they learn that there is a creator race out there that come back to see their creations under attack and decide to do something about it. But Cameron is trying to sell an Ayahuasca fueled fantasy of the noble savage that are under attack by "evil" humans so that we all abandon our cities and touch grass so that their property and technology is instead in the hands of his elitist clique.
Man, Pandora literally has sentient hivemind which can control simpler life forms and interacts with Na'Vi, making memory dumps when they connect to node trees and absorbing their brains after death. Not quite Zerg or Tyranids, but close enough.
@@ThorneyedWTTyranids are what happens when Eiwa discovers wifi
Every coloniser in history has exploited existing rivalries to their own benefit and often to the detriment of all groups of natives, including those who help the invader. The United States conquered its land by allying with some indigenous nations against others. In the end, it didn't matter whether your nation allied with the US or fought against them. Everyone ended up in reservations on a tiny percentage of their former territory.
There was a movie, I can't remember the name of it, about the hunt for Geronimo, the leader of the last major Apache band in the US. In the movie, the US army gets help from Apache scouts in hunting Geronimo, some of whom know him personally. At the end, the scouts get sent away to the reservation on the same train as Geronimo and his men. There was another movie where the rivalry between two Arab kingdoms is exacerbated and breaks out in open warfare due to the presence of an American oil drilling company. It has a happier ending, but a lot of people die on the way there. I find those kinds of stories far more compelling than a story like Avatar, where all the natives join forces as a single monolithic entity to fight the invader.
A lot more informative and thought provoking on the actual human condition and human tendencies, but that doesn't fit the narrative of indigenous people being happy harmonious utopians living an ideal state of life until the wicked, dysfunctional invaders showed up and ruined it all. In reality most native American tribes considered their mortal and main enemies to be other tribes. They didn't like the white people but they were always kind of a third party and interloper, and always convenient to use in their main fights with their traditional enemies. And they didn't need any encouragement to do it for the most part. They also routinely invaded and took land from each other and usually wiped out the enemy tribes given the opportunity (of course this varies, they had different values in different tribes). I always get a kick out of the "who can own the land? The earth belongs to no one." Noble Savage trope when in reality the Indians absolutely claimed land as their own and would kill anyone who trespassed in it, invade it and take it, and fight to defend it. They didn't believe in _private_ land ownership but they definitely believed you could own the land. They didn't just sit back when the next tribe moved into their prime hunting grounds and say "well, who can own the land? We must live in peace and share the bounty of the Great Earth Spirit". They also liked to torture captives to death, although interestingly they considered it a mark of respect to you, an opportunity to prove your manly strength of spirit. If they just executed you they didn't think you deserved that much. If they just took you captive they thought you were not even worth killing.
Great reply, except one point of fact:
• The scouts did *not* get "sent away to the same reservation"! Amerindians that served with the army were not compelled to go to or stay within any reservation, as a policy; some might have _chosen_ to, but they weren't _"sent."_
(In fact, they were able to join the army officially and receive promotions-up to First Sergeant, that I know of.)
@@Kveldred Are you referring to the events of the movie, or is that what happened to them in real life and the movie changed the story to have them sent to the reservation for dramatic effect?
Completely agree with a lot of the negative points. Especially the bad black & white moral contrast using the fictional 'noble savage' trope. I see it's still the main gist of the plot once again. Would've been far more interesting to have believable societies, with both good and bad facets, opposing one another. Perhaps that's expecting too much of what's essentially a children's movie level of fiction, though.
Thanks for the vid! Your long-form reviews are great.
In all fairness, that is the plan apparently for Avatar 3. The main villains of the movie are gonna be an evil tribe of Navi.
avatar the last airbender had that
I've also wondered about the in race clan conflict. I mean if there are other groups or tribe and the man group/tribe live at Hometree which is sacred because the Na'vi can connect with Eywa (their mother goddess) and that Eywa doesn't take side and is concerned about the balance of nature. Than why isn't there other groups in conflict with attacking and moving in to Home Tree since that's what happened in real life.?
Exactly, Home Tree is prime real estate surround by plentiful natural resources, it's the perfect target for a raid, if not for full on conquest.
@@DespotofAntrimIt should've been like the Gaza Strip!
Literally 2 warzones
Cameron gave the humans very good motivations that I root for :
"Earth is dying, we need this place to survive" -> okay then, it's necessity
"The whale juice makes humans entirely immortal" -> can I have some?
immortality is a curse
When the Prawns from district 9 have more characterisation and develop more sympathy despite their increadibly alien appearance, mindset and destructive culture than the big blue beautiful cat eyed people you know you fucked up
Underrated film. I originally wanted a sequel, but I think too much time has passed and I don't trust a single person in Hollywood today to tackle it. Better to be content with the bitter sweet ending we got
I think this movie brought a lot more out of Quaritch. I cant wait to see where his character goes from here. And Stephen Lang is wonderful in the role.
Quaritch was hot
He's the only good part about these awful films. The rest of the characters are complete dogshit. Sam Worthington still can't hide his Aussie accent after 14 fucking years.
@@thebatman4279 Get lost.
Lastly, it really sucks that James Cameron, the guy responsible for some of the greatest Action and Sci-Fi movies of all time, who'd literally went from a broke artist living out of his car and surviving on Mcdonald's burger coupons to one of the richest and most celebrated directors of all time, now feels compelled to insult and deride the very same people responsible for pulling him out of poverty.
You'd figure he'd be like JK Rowling who already has more money and fame than needed, so has no reason to bow to the Woke Mob. Instead however, he says such utter nonsense as Testosterone is a poison, despite him literally making movies practically dripping with it for years.
Why is he even saying this crap. Dude's almost 70, has more money than he knows what to do with, countless awards, the distinction of creating what many consider the best Sci-Fi action movies ever made...TWICE, creating one of the most successful Sci-Fi franchises ever, along with creating the First movie to make over $1 Billion and then the First to ever gross $2 Billion.
The man has more accolades, money and legacy than nearly all the directors in Hollywood, so what could he possibly stand to gain from supporting the brainless idiots ruining it now?
A place on the short list to have his memories digitized and blasted into space?
Excellent point, maybe he's trying to buy them off with ballicks about testosterone being poison and guns being evil so they won't come after him while he is in the spotlight with Way of Water. It's very possible that those around him advised him to come out with woke nonsense just to keep the target off his back. Hollywood has become the Soviet Union.
I agree with most of this, except for the take about Rowling. Rowling happily sipped the Kool-Aid and actively retconned her own story and characters multiple times to score brownie points with the Woke mob for years until she inevitably said the "Wrong" thing and the mob turned against her. Hence why she's now anti Woke. But before that she was gladly part of the Far Leftist insanity crowd.
@@DespotofAntrim They were always communist filth, but now they're open about it.
TWICE? you mean once, maybe sort of.
I never liked the Noble Savage myth; your either noble or your a savage, you can’t have it both ways
Good point.
🎩YOU! Sir are a savage
Based. And true.
That depends on what you mean by "savage". If you mean it in the context (mostly modern) of "vicious and dangerous" maybe not. But vicious to all and for what? If you mean it in the context of "living outside a state of civilization" (meaning Western civilization mostly) I don't see why both can't be true.
and you can’t spell you're...
It's not that Cavill is a bad actor. He fits Superman. The problem is they had Snyder make Superman everything he's not. So Cavill didn't get to shine whatsoever in the role. Same problem with The Witcher. Cavill is a big fan of the series but the people behind the production are not.
it shocks me that they’d hire people so incompetent that they would allow their own prejudice of the source material to leak into the show. I understand that writing is a job and you can’t always write for something you like but intentionally hating on the show feels like a way to bury your own career.
What a dumb comment XD
Clearly you didn't watch any movie with Cavill as Superman fully. Worse thing is that Despot liked this comment...
You forgot how the Maori wiped out the indigenous Moriori - though to be fair that part of history has now been officially rewritten so they instead gave them citizenship by the Maori and then their genetics were wiped out by interbreeding with the stronger Maori genes 🤐 which is odd as Maori had no unilateral government or leadership organization or unified body of law pre-colonization🤔 🤔 and there were also many rubbish pits found full of Moriori bones with human teeth impressions.... wow that sounds bad when you say it out loud.... but i guess history is full of bad acts we need to learn from
Fascinating, the noble savage perspective on history is unfortunately still very widespread; more than half of Americans believe that Native Americans lived in peace before the arrival of Europeans.
17:32 I do believe that a good portion of audiences would go for a more realistic and philosophical story about The morality of humans colonizing another world with sentient life on it and how they’d realistically would react to them in the future. But that can’t be the main focus. The audience does in fact mainly want blue people but we also want a story that realistically flows with how humans would actually act. The cardboard cut outs we got in this movie was unappealing and that’s one of the main problem/criticism people have with this but besides that it’s an almost flawless movie just like the review you gave for it
In the first film, the Navi were based on a mix of South American and Native Americans, more so the later. It was basically a combination of "Dances With Wolves" and "Ferngully". In the sequel, the water tribe is easily seen as being purely based on the Maori. Even the tattoos are similar.
Yeah, I'm gonna stay with the 1990's movies. Also, Pocahontas. Fck Disnwy
The part about giving the na'vi some actual problems and drawbacks is actually very interesting.
It would've undermined the purpose of pandora, as pure escapism is perfectly fine and something we honestly need more of, but i definitely see your point.
Would've been interesting to explore in parallel universe spin-off type of way; Na'vi that see the unparalleled benefits that humanity can provide, as opposed to their uncivilized and disgustingly savage world.
The trials and tribulations of a group of Na'vi immersing themselves in Human understanding of technology, science, astronomy etc. while trying not to lose sight of what makes them Na'vi could make for a compelling narrative. Of course that wouldn't sit well with explosion-addicted popcorn-munchers so we got this instead.
Perhaps that's one of the reasons it's such a popular franchise, people can watch these divine beings that live in paradise and forget all their troubles.
My mother is the type that just wants something to go, “ohh so pretty!” Lol she HATES watching movies with me now. She loved Rings of Power! I made her watch “Galadriel is a Psychopath” and she huffed at me the whole time. If you literally have millions/billions of dollars at your disposal, how do you not make something that’s both beautiful and meaningful? Like The Abyss?
Even if the Na’vi want for nothing, I loved Despot’s point about them having NO culture. That would be interesting to explore.
@@DespotofAntrim And that is why I am subscribed to your channel, you tend to hit the nails right on the head.
@@Elessar1888 I'm sorry your mother is a fool.
this movie can be BEST Summarized as.... The best looking house, and when I mean best looking i'm saying its a shtty house too, in a very Very VERY BAD Ghetto Toilet ...... Maybe like a Chicago or Baltimore type neighborhood..
The Avatar movies have shown that James Cameron is a good action/skirmish director, but a terrible war writer.
Anyone with a sense for war in charge when corporal Jake rallied the Navi would laugh at his stupidity. An army of 47000 Navi the largest army in the history of Pandora is incredibly easy to defeat largely by doing nothing.
The Navi have no logistics or stockpiles they are hunter gatherers Jake’s army would eat the forest clean of food and pollute the water before they got halfway to Hellsgate.
Yo, this became an modern world history course! Pretty nicely done. All that's missing is a quiz and an essay assignment at the end.
Maybe they had a specific molecule they were looking for. And whalebrainium had it. Let's call it walnut brainium. Or white rabitium. Or Adrenochromium
I considered that possibility but why would you examine a whale bring of all things?
I was kind of hoping to see a few of the RDA characters desert or appear sympathetic to the Na'vi cause but not entirely switch sides.
Less Spider, more RDA traitors, I like it.
Just found your channel this last week. Honestly I was expecting more of the parody material in the vein of Galadriel demon-beast, but this was a seriously good review. Keep it up king, you've got my sub.
Thanks king. I try to have a good balance of content, the next video will be a much needed assault on Hollywood.
The myth of the "noble savage" was always a triumph of ludicrous Luddite romanticism over facts, reason, and logic.
Luddite romanticism, that's beautiful, I may have to steal it.
@@DespotofAntrim Thank you! And no need to steal it; I give it to you😁.
It was always a very racist point of view as well, seeing native peoples as almost child-like in their innocent and uncorrupted state.
It was created by people who had nothing to do with the colonies. Much like those who most love mass migration are those completely insulated from the consequences of it that the working class are being crushed by
I think another important thing people may not be considering about this movie is expectations. I watched Avatar 2 with my mom, and my expectations were in the dirt. I expected it to be horrible garbage, but was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I knew the writing wasn't going to be great, but i was able to enjoy the other elements. And seeing how much my mom loved it as well and knowing she wants to watch it again also helps me enjoy it.
Long story short, Avatar 2 captured what so many movies have been missing this year. Fun. It's just dumb fun. Not so stupid it's mind numbing, but it won't change your life.
Also, I enjoyed seeing two strong male characters going at it. They hate each others guts, want to kill each other, and fight tooth and nail for victory. I enjoyed seeing Jake be a strong and responsible father figure and general. In my opinion, he improved massively in this movie from the first.
Jake was definitely an improvement, and the movie beats the hell out of the vast majority of dross Hollywood has released over the past year; it frustrated me though because the movie could have been a masterpiece.
@Despot of Antrim Completely agree. You also made a lot of good points in your video. I'm aspiring to do my own writing, so I like hearing the opinions if different RUclips critics.
Also I love your version of ROP season 2.
I'm trying to force myself to see this film in the theater before it's too late. I have a feeling 90% of it's majesty will be non-existent on my meager 65" TV.
Try to see it in HFR 3D or IMAX 3D
As majestic as it looks, I don't remember any aspect of the movie that could only work, or be compelling, with 3D. And I'm a huge Cameron and theater stan.
"Too late" please, we all know Cameron will re-release this film every few years to maximize profit like he's done with the first film.
While Avatar 2 (and the first one) isn't woke, I still think, it presents a potentially dangerous message. Especially because it has so little nuance. As you described in the your video, the Na'vi are absolutely flawless beings, while humans are presented as mostly evil. Back in 2009 this might have been not as dangerous, but in nowadays world we have several groups of climate change fanatics who are becoming more radical every year. Since the Avatar movies are also aimed at very young people, I think they will fuel this Gen-Z radicalization even more. Because what those movies are showing is exactly how those fanatics are viewing humanity (especially white western culture).
Greetings from Germany :=)
Since Na'vi are a fiction, what this conflict represents is a struggle between green environmentalism and rampant consumerism. Na'vi do kill, hunt and apparently even had a massive war in the past. But they try to live in balance with nature, while for industrialist humans nature doesn't even exist.
But you are right as well, people tend to take everything literally and on-the-face, so this sort of message is dangerous, but only because of how thoughtless the masses are.
Movies like this are more dangerous because that are actually decent as films. For propaganda to be effective it has to engage the audience, and much of the slop they put out fails, and thus fails as propaganda. Films like this are far more successful in influencing minds.
Besides the basic sci-fi war elements, this series, is essentially ThunderCats fused with Smurfs with humanity, taking the place of Mumm-Ra and Gargamel.
Think about it
1.) Villains that is two dimensionally evil with goals that are constantly shifting and unclear while also being needlessly destructive.
2.) A race of two dimensionally good & also primitive people that have a seemingly supernatural powers and connection to nature itself, also whose design is something out of children’s folklore.
3.) there’s also the fact that despite constant interactions and fighting, the bad guys, can’t seem to remember where the good guys base is or least approximate it.
I see this regurgitated criticism being constantly brought up by the media illiterate, its kinda sad.
@@Bionickpunk the only ones that are media illiterate are the writers not the viewers, because the movie series itself has been nothing but visual noise with writing that’s barely existent to the point of naming something unobtainium etc.
Spider being a stoner is now cannon in my head
27:20 Lol, as much as this review is excellent, the sheer conviction with which you stated your position on Kiri's conception was fucking hilarious. You sir have just earned a sub for that.
Tbf, the colonizers crap alone is enough to be annoying at this point.
I'll play that game. In 150 years, everybody may have cameras in their eyes recording everything they see, and saving it all on some future-tech cloud. Therefore, while it wouldn't necessarily be saving the memories themselves, it would be saving all the images which created the memories, which would fairly easily allow the mind to fill in the blanks and work with it. Hell, you can trigger memories through sight and smell and taste anyhow. It would pretty much be the same, only in a more focused and tech-based way.
Very good point, a cloud based AI could certainly take on the task of recreating someone's personality based on their data, however it would inevitably be incomplete (inner thoughts / missing data / trauma), good point though.
@@DespotofAntrim However, *Regardless* of how much Memory (Data) is captured & put into a new body, it wouldn't be YOU. Just a COPY. The show 'Black Mirror' a show on its bad days 10x smarter than either 'Avatar' film, also dealt with supposedly transferring consciousness to a new environment (Most Notably in the episode, 'San Junipero'). However, as with nearly all fiction and with most discussion in the real world, the true problem is sidestepped, if not outright ignored.
The Problem is this- As I said, creating a COPY of you, may one day be possible. I doubt it, but let's be generous. That's all that's been done. The Copy may have your memories, it may look like you, act like you, etc... but if you are living right beside that copy, how does this benefit YOU? If you die and the copy goes on, how does that help YOU? Most stories just have the original conveniently die to avoid showing this. If you watch Black Mirror- San Junipero closely they confirm this by saying that the main character's bodies have to be killed. Why do they acknowledge the problem, but obscure it at the same time? I don't know, though it is more than a tad creepy.
Any technology that could actually transfer your consciousness would kill your body by THAT PROCESS ALONE. As the body cannot live without the Spirit. Of course materialists do not acknowledge the existence of 'Spirit', which creates a serious problem for them. I guess that since they believe consciousness is only a by-product of the Brain, the only way they could see to extend life would be to preserve that specific brain by any means necessary.
Surprisingly, one popular Sci-Fi series, 'Sword Art Online' DOES acknowledge a non-material aspect to our existence, by means of what they refer to as, 'Fluctlights'. They are sort of a Materialist's version or compromise to acknowledging Spirit, but still, far better than most, especially slick-looking garbage like Avatar.
@@torikazuki8701 Me, me, me, me, can you ever not think about yourself?
Let me start by saying that you are COMPLETELY RIGHT in your observations. Mind transfer is impossible and copying data is no way to capture souls. Nevertheless, even that data is potentially useful. Perhaps not immediately useful, but imagine if it were used to prolong one's legacy, if not life. Imagine if you could advise your progeny even beyond death, would you not?
It may not be alive, it may not be YOU or even a person, but if it holds accurate representations of one's memories, thoughts and feelings at the time of scanning, ca it not be used by posterity to get in touch with their roots, us?
To know us not through the often-sanitized interpretations of the history books, but by our own recorded memory?
What do you think?
@@Oera-B If it were openly acknowledged to be merely a Person-Flavored Software Database of everything that person knew, I'd have no problem with that in *principle*.
Aside from the additional issue of that data being manipulated, as any data can be, my only other real issue would be- Does this database have anything valuable to SAY?
Most of us can talk, some of us know things, but how often do we have real understanding and true wisdom to impart?
I thought that it was a bit on the nose that a Japanese woman was the pilot on one of the space whale-hunting ships.
My assessment of the narrative in this movie is that it is decent enough but built on a mountain of contrivances. I wish that the movie had more realistic motivations in the humans and more realistic flaws in the Navi but I do like the idea of humans colonizing an alien world and having to fight the natives for it and the movie is gorgeous and doesn't throw the contrivances in your face so much that it becomes annoying.
Also if the humans can grow Navi with mixed human DNA why can't they take the whale DNA and grow something with the immortal juice producing gland? One could already grow a younger body and upload themselves into it and if they make an immoral human this could solve the problem without the need to hunt whales.
That's an excellent point... perhaps social interaction is required between whales for the brainofwhalium to develop?
@@DespotofAntrim They've already established themselves as having pretty advanced genetic technology. I don't see why they cant do a lil' sploicin' and grow the glands in other creatures.
@@MachineMan-mj4gj yes like humans.
They can’t breathe on Pandora? But they’re leaving earth because they can’t breathe on it either. How does that make sense?
"Only Top Gun Maverick was good."
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, tho.
Saw it last week, great movie.
“Bridgehead”. Like what’s happening at the US southern boarder
This is a really fair review. It gives the movie credit where it's due, points out things that are enjoyable, and yet also points out issues and things that could be made better from a logical standpoint rather than an emotional one.
I like all your videos, but this one is especially excellent. Great work!
If they have to make the humans one-note bad guys to make the Na'Vi interesting by comparison, I think some mistakes have been made in the writing room.
One thing about that whole memory upload to new, artificial grown body. Wouldn't that be a better way to prolong your life than some rare brain juice?
Not really because uploading your memories to a clone would just create a copy of yourself, but you would still die, you would not be able to transfer your consciousness to the clone.
Brilliant stuff as always, but sadly Susan is diddling you, because I'm subscribed and have notifications on and I only just saw this! 🤬🤬
Wow! Excellent in-depth profound review or better examination of Cameron's Avatar 2. I especially like your constructive criticism. You make some really good creative suggestions. Great!
And congratulations for your first 10k subscribers!
Oh, and please allow me one little technical complaint: have mercy with headphones users and (try to) level all audio volume with your voice volume - the first third gave me a few jumpscares :)
Thanks for the feedback, I will improve my audio mixing for future videos. Glad you enjoyed the video!
Absolutely love your content Despot but you blew my ears out with the reaction clips you put in. Keep up the good work man!
Sorry man. I was still inexperienced with audio mixing when I made this. Thanks for watching!
I still was rooting for the humans. I got was cheering when i saw the humans landing on Pandora. NGL, i probably would have signed up for the RDA
Mechs 💪
When are the Na’vi going to run into the brutal, Na’vi sacrificing each other to the sun in a misunderstood ritual of devotion.
Mel Gibson should direct the next movie.
@@DespotofAntrim imagine Jake Sully’s fear when he finds massive pyramids with Na’vi blood stained stairs. Or, even a Na’vi “blood eagle” (I’m Norwegian, we all had our ‘noble indigenous/savage’ phase.) but, they’re “so in touch with nature” (rips out heart) or, a statue of a multi armed warrior woman, tongue out and fangs bared. Either way, the Na’vi seem to be lacking certain aspects of culture. You should do a serious dive into it. I enjoy the content by the way.
ruclips.net/video/RGQ1x5r-LCQ/видео.html
For your consideration, just a piece of tangible culture, that is not only an instrument but also a psychological warfare tool, that gives an insight into the society and thoughts of the beyond of a culture. Or, how come none of the Na’vi tribes build their bow & arrows differently? On earth, almost every culture has developed archery, but have varied it up, like a sort of technological and cultural convergent evolution, or homologous structures of thought. I believe, that the Na’vi are left culturally inept and shallow for a reason. But, I’m very into sociology, so that’s why I’m bouncing these ideas at you, and Avatar always seemed shallow, and needed that sort of true world building that Cameron is seemingly shying from.
There was a math done about uploading memories of a dog. Apparently there is not enough storage in the world just to do that, for a single creature. So we shouldn't be afraid of AI just yet, and definitely there is no way to copy a single human brain on to the hard drive like device.
They could have gone with stop humans from activating an air terraforming reactor.
I really enjoyed your review, which you obviously put a great deal of thought, and effort into!
It is encouraging that a strong male father figure was included.
The physical appearance of bad guy Col. Quaritch was an interesting choice.
Instead of a stereotypical big, bald, ugly, empty-headed, loud drill sergeant type, turn back the clock to when he was a teenager, and he would have been boy band material. In some mannerisms and facial expressions, he can even come across as androgynous.
When you refer to the ugliest urban space ever, it is not unlike the background for the ski and snowboard jump events at the Olympics in chn last year.
Your balanced approach to modern Western civilization is as appreciated as your balanced approach to the true history of native (primitive - sorry) people. (I agree that native Irish should count as native, and same for other Europeans although there's also a lengthy history of population displacement, so trying to figure out who was native to which area first could become tricky. Eg Celts used to live in Bavaria before being pushed northwest by Germanics.)
Your assessment of the Navi, and their lack of culture, is a definite weak point in the world building. When you were talking about what recreational, sporting, competitive, musical, etc activities they could have had, I felt I would love to create a culture for them!
I doubt James Cameron would have had the guts to single out specific countries that are responsible for ongoing current colonization, recent colonization, genocide (or attempted) or whale hunting. Western civilization is such an easy target because, as you pointed out, the sins in question ended decades ago, and the Western elite refuses to fight back. In fact, they encourage Western self-loathing.
Thank you again for an excellent video!
He didn't need to single any nation out, but realistically, the whalers would have been a very international gang of mercenaries, total and utter scum of the earth led by corporate types, like the buffalo hunters of the wild west.
@@DespotofAntrim yes, you are right!
Just glad that you used a clip of Oleksandr Usyk boxing some brains in, got my sub for that.
"Brainofwhalium" gosh that made me piss myself laughing, man. Good job on this review too, I'm excited to see new content from ya!
Gald you enjoyed this review. This video is definitely one of my less popular ones.
Honestly, I would pay you to remake avatar if i was James Cameron! You telling me that Spider KIss wouldn't be one of the best and funniest movie plot twists ever? Get us the product! hahah
At one point, when the clone commander was trying to ride his first dragon thing,he fell down. Right after we see Jake riding his new fish thing and I said to my gf : ohh no I got flashback of a deja vu of the commander hitting the water in front of them, then kinda loosing his memories and being rescued by bringing him back to the village. Then you know what would happen next and would be looking forward to the great reveal of who he really is when the memories are coming back. You could if you want as well change his reaction or goal after living,learning,fighting and maybe fall in love with them, being torn between his new life and old human self. The reveal could be triggered by crossing the clone soldier that would be happy to find him.
You, sir, I have made an epic video! You've hit all the pros and cons of the movie. I've not seen either avatar, and I don't plan to, but it sounds like you did this one justice.
The whale thing is so stupid. Arguably, some of the most intelligent aquatic mammals on Earth are dolphins and orcas. Both are well known for their needless cruelty, to members of their own species and to other animals. Rather than giving up killing, they have become Masters at it thanks to their intellect.
There's a reason Orcas are called "Killer Whales." They butcher sharks just for the liver and waste the rest of the body (Oddly enough, something Spider bemoaned the evil humans doing to the space whale), slap seals into the air as hard as they can for fun and murder baby humpback whales because they like hearing its parents being sad.
...They are some really Fucked up animals sometimes XD
I think you're actually very kind to this movie. Surprisingly so. The dramatic beats were flat, the characters were annoying with sleep-inducing dialogue, the story makes little sense, and many character decisions are rock stupid. And this all has the effect of making the action scenes into over-indulgent tripe, because as we all know, a cool action that doesn't make sense or emotionally resonate is basically just a kid slamming his action figures together. As for it not being political propaganda...okay Despot, I know we're all so used to this that we're basically numb to it, but the incessant bashing over the head about how mankind is the destroyer of the environment and we "civilized people" need to learn how to live in harmony with barbaric nature is 100% political propaganda. It's just the propaganda of 15-20 years ago, not the propaganda more fashionable in "modern audiences."
This was easily my weakest video of 2023, and deservedly failed. It's mostly correct but I was far too kind to this mess of a movie.
Thanks for the review, I mostly agree with what you said, though I like that you at least gave a reasonable explanation for Quartich and Sigourney having children lol. I didn't dislike the exile whale, I actually liked that he finally makes the only intelligent decision and starts stacking bodies, but everything else involving the whales was pants on head ridiculous. Supposedly in the third, there will be Navi that side with the humans (finally), but given Cameron has lost all creativity, they're probably going to be Captain Planet villains on par with the humans, or have been tricked by the evil humans and corrupted by YT space magic. It won't be remotely plausible and will be more noble savage fantasy tripe meant to demonize the people that have improved our planet beyond a question of a doubt.
Also thanks for pointing out the BLATANT anti white message in this. About halfway through I noticed that not a single bad guy was brown, and that didn't change at all throughout the run time. About as subtle as a hammer to the head, all as more anti white rhetoric. Maybe in the future the white man takes their nations back?
Also what's that anime game where you're braining people with a fire extinguisher?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yandere_Simulator
@@DespotofAntrim LOL I didn't even recognize it. Yeah I'm good, thanks.
Improved beyond a question of a doubt? How can you be so sure? Doubt can certainly be cast into it. Are you sure you're not the one indulging on a myth?
@@DespotofAntrim This goes for you, too.
ow yeah, with a continent of plastic in pacific ocean, plastic particles everywhere, destruction of all sorts of lungs of the planet (forest, plankton), rampant consumption of an oceanic fauna, global warming - our planet has been so improved by consumerism driven industrialists!
if Avatar was anti-white, then this review is pro-cancer.
Yeah - it wasn't trash. But that still is not very good especially if you consider how long it took to come up with the story and the cost to make it.
Bloodhound Gang? Still killing it with the OST. Congrats on 10k!
I had blocked Woman King out of my mind. I blame you for my current suffering. Great video though.
What I probably hate most about These movies is how weak the humans are, they make them out to be these ruthless animals, but can barely put up a fight and have shit equipment and fighting tactics
One interesting thing i found to be immediately glossed over is that the humans (Mantids) accept the sudden influx of a squad of navi supersoldier immediately, In opposite contrast to the way Jake was an outcast that had to earn it among the actual navi, as well as spider as you say being shown to not be accepted yet either by whatsherfasce holding him hostage. Possible its just glossed over along with the entirety of the human side of things, but thought it was interesting when i noticed it, General empowered woman even shakes his hand etc (though with her exo suit instead) Might have even been interesting to see soldier Mcbluedude et al having to come to terms with being treated differently and might even foster some conflicting thoughts in themselves, can even be a bonding thing with spider who is similarly an outcast species among another now, not to mention maybe spider would be pissed his evil grr dad got to be a Navi, something which he so desperately wants to be
Cassie: “At least we’re making a difference dad!”
She conveniently forgets her dad is the reason the Avengers were able to undo the Blip
Personally I just interpreted Spiders acting as him being social inept and using old human media or something/stalking navi to learn how to talk to people.
An actual down-to-earth honest review, and master-class commentary with relevant real-world tie-ins. Absolutely love your assessment bro!
Huh you know I was expecting a long, somewhat angry rant similar to Rings of Power where while you do break things down sensibly still rip into the movie with a level of anger yet also clever jokes, but here your focus more on the logical problems with the movie without too many wisecracks yet I wasn't bored listening to this at all.
Nice work.
Thanks, this movie deserves a fair review, I have listened to many reviews and only one was good. Hating this movie is undeniably fashionable, both for left wingers (because of the presence of a traditional father hero) and for edgy RUclips critics (because it's not cool to like Avatar), but it is nowhere near the level of shite spewed out by Hollywood over the past year.
43:03 I disagree with this take of Jar Jar... George's original idea was to do a slow burn Yoda Sith...a funny, clumsy character as a facade, later on the story he was supposed to show his true colors...like Yoda. This plotline is well documented and you have to pay attention of what George was doing on film, then the fans backlash came, and Lil' George didn't dare to go all the way with his original idea. Set up with no payoff.
1:01:39 Also their anime and manga kick the crap out of the shit we have here in the west regarding animation and comics. Seriously, give me Demon Slayer, One Piece and Yu Yu Hakusho over any of the garbage coming out of Hollywood these days.
For anyone interested, the memory upload device was a key thematic concept explored in Michael Crichton's Timeline. He definitely went down the path of the problematic - as manifested by the story's quaritch-like villain. Cameron instead took the glossy approach to the scifi concept, where it's just assumed every kink gets worked out with sufficient time (and guinea pig sacrifices).
well let us assume 'Skynet' had plenty of test subjects to perfect it's 'tech' on.
I don't even remember that one, although I know I read it. I have been a big fan of Crichton since I was a kid, he does a great job of writing actual _science fiction_ that isn't just space fantasy. I will have to read that again. Although I remember being less impressed with his later books, and I wondered if his health wasn't already suffering at that point. Wasn't that where the guy like goes back to medieval Europe, kind of like Stargate but it's a time machine? Shit yes, the last time I read that I was in like 6th grade reading on the bus ride home every day. Like 25 years ago, time flies. I'm going to go order that right now.
The whale plot is stupid. The last thing Earth needs is schlubs living forever, it needs a nice new planet, then a good cleansing with neutron weapons. We had resources in the first movie. Why not make the whales, and their gigantic brainz, the nodes of planetwide wi-fi for the spirit of Pandora? They're distributed, mobile hardware. That way they're a critical strategic target for the military, potentially to capture, suborn, exploit, and control. This could lead to interesting plots with spies, subterfuge, treachery, betrayal and so on. Maybe have some Na'vi traitors get sciency with the humans too. Anyway, more like leaning in to Harry Harrison's Deathworld, with the psionic connected planet fighting the humans. More interesting than Brain Goo Long Life (TM), which is kind of .. trivial.
One of the most interesting reviews on this movie I've found so far. Didn't want to click on it at first, because I'm pretty much done with Avatar 2, but I'm glad I watched it. This channel has become one of my favorites very fast.
Greetings from Germany :=)
So the Navi is if a "Mary Sue" was an entire race instead of a single character.
Your channel is a repository of sanity in a (media) world gone mad. I've name dropped your name in the efap superchats. Consider giving them (mauler) a dm on Twitter. Your content is right up their alley, and they have a huge audience that would gobble up your wonderful content.
Thanks Julien I appreciate that. I will submit my channel to the big chats for consideration in the future, for now I still need to grow and improve.
I didn't really mind the concept of uploading your memories. After all, the first movie had already shown a halfway technology with commanding avatars, and a biological one with Eywah transfering Jake's mind into another body.
Thanks for this well made video, there were a lot of points I didn't think about that much.
I enjoyed watching the sequel, but felt like I was let down, not because of the noble savage trope, but mostly because of the tired trope of the military father having a troubled relationship with his hotheaded son, as well as a lack of consistency with the first movie. Jake literally culturally converted to the Navi culture, but seems to have forgotten all of it. He trusts only a conventional human diagnosis for his daughter's epilleptic episode when he knows firsthand that Eywah is real and tangible. He also seems to be the only one deciding how to raise his kids and does it in a very classical American way. Neitiri used to actually be more of her own person but completely fell in the background, doesn't question her husband's way of raising her kids (when she was very protective of her culture), and constantly gets treated as an unruly kid by Jake when they joined the other tribe. I don't mind her getting a traditional role, it's just not typical for her.
Regarding your point on bad sides of different cultures to stray away from the noble savage trope, this reminded me of the webnovel The Deathworlders, in which the author took the time to give an actual culture (good and bad) to the alien species. For example, the Gao (space racoons) are fiercely loyal, but they also are quite aggressive and lethal duels are not uncommon. They wear their battle scars proudly, decide of some leader positions through violence, and their current highest leader is, through necessity, a ruthless dictator who has a right of life and death over his subjects and castrates or skins alive the worst criminals. The Tengewek, an actual tribalistic people of space gorillas, follows a culture of balance and giving/taking, but live in a dangerous hunter-gatherer world where a caste of naturally superhuman members and de facto leaders follow an initiation rite where the initiate is hinted at being beat to near-death before becoming a new man. The strongest of them all, in the goal of uniting all tribes after near extinction, conducted ethnic cleansing where diplomacy couldn't work.
On mind uploading as depicted in Avatar, there are reasonable arguments to be made that the data can be stored and put into a new body.
The new body one is easiest. We're only shown mind uploading to newly cloned bodies. If the brains were printed, cell by cell, from an imprint and then implanted, the process seems plausible and doesn't contradict anything shown in the movie.
On storage, this mostly boils down to the observation that much of the brain's mass isn't used for information processing, and most of what is used for processing doesn't govern higher brain functions that we care about preserving. >90% of cells are present in densely packed, almost crystalline structures near the center and base of the brain. The precise structure doesn't vary much from person to person, and so can be made on the spot rather than preserved. A substantial amount of the brain's volume is dedicated to logistical cells; blood vessels that distribute resources and "house cleaning" cells, like glial cells, that clean up dead cells. These, obviously, don't need to be preserved. And all the cells have cell nuclei that don't contribute to processing, so they don't need to be preserved. The dendrites themselves don't need to act as actual channels for neurotransmitters in a scan and so can be made smaller as a result. Taking an image but editing these listed things would lead to an image, not some abstract format, but an image of the mind that's several orders of magnitude smaller than the full brain. How such a scan could be done is, of course, a mystery. But storage on its own on a small card as depicted in the movie is not wholly unrealistic.
Very interesting. Thank you for that fantastic comment.
Agree on Mr. Despot's assertion that Jake Sully is portraying a strong family man but let's remember that Jake is not a Homosapien....he is a tall blue skinny dude who needs to eat a cheeseburger.
I had to screenshot The Intersectionalizer. It's magnificent.
Thank you, it's one of my finer pieces.
I love the balanced approach of your review.
I appreciate that. I have only seen one fair review of this movie on RUclips, Cameron made a massive effort with this and it has earned a fair assessment.
Thank you for mentioning oppression of white people. That's absolutely true. The Western world knows about Holocaust, but doesn't seem to care about Slavic people, who were oppressed due to their alleged ethnic inferiority. Slavs were granted the right to live (unlike Jews or Romani people) but they were only good enough to serve the "master race", according to that ideology. I'm Polish and I guarantee you, there's no Pole without a relative that was either killed, imprisoned, tortured, or forced to do slave labour during the occupation. I literally cried hearing some of the stories, especially those concerning torturing and murdering little children. So thank you once again, it's really important to me that the Western world hears about this, even a tiny little bit.
The writing is terrible and the antagonist is so lazy. Plus Cameron doesn't like me because I have testosterone and he flips fans off that waited for him likely for multiple hours
I could see him not signing their merch, busy man and all that, but flipping the fans off was a disgrace, asshole.
Lol that Turok 2 reference to the Mantids!
I was stuck on that level for 20 years (shitty game design).
To be fair, Cameron probably didn't think that the immorality whale brain juice was too much of a stretch because he partakes in the human version of such extraction rituals if you believe the tin hatters, which each year I seem to be leaning towards more and more...
Yeh!
Dude I found your channel after your appearence on The Drinkers channel, Open Bar stream. So glad I did. Your videos are awesome and your attention to acurate historical detail is spot on. Well done and thanks for the content.
Finally watched Avatar 2 today. Been dieing to watch this review. You didn't disappoint. Hilarious 😂
Thanks man, I actually thought this was my weakest review of this year so I'm glad it's getting some love.
27:05 dude, I love the way you just say things so bluntly and comedically. Your deliveries always get a good chuckle out of me.
I loved the way you described the realistic whaling. Certainly that how it would look like.
Instead of that we get a bunch of ideological crap soaking wet with cgi
My guess is that the weapons are stocking an outpost defending one of their mines. When Spider rescues Quaritch that was so, gah. Makes it feel like the final battle meant nothing as Quaritch is just going to keep popping back like a recurring cartoon series villain.
Cameron just wrecked the new Little Mermaid
That thing is DOA, I pray that it bombs.
That's a low bar
I got more enjoyment from this than I did from the two films, it made me think rather than the key gangling the films gave, don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the films.
I will now start a campaign to have you on Friday Night Tights. This was wonderful.
Thanks. Glad you enjoyed it!
Don’t forget in the first film, the line given during the briefing “they’re very hard to kill” has detailed that the Na’vi had tendons and bones are reinforced. Quote: "They’re like animals. They’re very quick. Their bones are reinforced with naturally occurring carbon fiber. They are very hard to kill."
Theyre much bigger too, I like to imagine with carbon fiber like tendons and bones, they will deliver much higher caliber strikes and motions than human technology even though it takes place in the far future. Having arrows the size of a man being shot at with significant speed and newtons, at high speeds of both vehicle and the archer on a much bigger moon vs Earth so I’m assuming gravity will also be higher would mean I’d like to imagine standard bullet proof glass that withstand handgun fire (2k newtons) won’t handle it. Space sci-fi can ignore laws like this and usually be fine if the movie is fun enough.
I have mixed feelings on this film but overall was nice. Predictable as all hell but still fine, i personally didn’t like them recycling two major characters/actors in the new movie but it makes sense.
So Jake betraying Humaity and siding with the Navi scrwed the Navi in the long run with Humanitis revenge ...almost makes me want to watch Avatar 2
Personally I thought it was atrocious. Not even “bad but fun.” I could not get behind a single decision made by any character because they were all forced and idiotic.
- Why would Jake abandon his tribe that he’s seemingly spent decades with and has married into?
- Does the war just end when Jake leaves or is he just letting the tribe deal with it without him?
- Id the war is not off, then why would his wife allow her people to just continue to die without her help?
- Why was Colonel Q brought back just to spend the movie hunting Jake.
- If the war is off, and Jake is in hiding, why would the military awaken colonel Q just to hunt him when he’s gone and now they can focus on the whole “terraforming.”
- If the war is not off, and they think sully is just in hiding but commanding the war still, why only give him a civilian corporate whale hunting boat as his backup? Why not give him a real ship with real soldiers?
- Why does Jake seemingly not understand that they want to conquer the whole planet and will eventually reach the sea people anyways?
- Why can’t they just clone the whales for the goo instead of hunt them?
- Why is the adopted daughter just the fucking Messiah of mother pandora for no reason.
- Why in the hell would Spider save colonel Q knowing he just tried to murder his entire adoptive family?
- Why THE FUCK did they not swim under the fire on the water? That’s how water works, it’s just at the top of the water that’s on fire not the bottom. WHY?
So many dumb decisions and choices that are never explained and ultimately leave me angry at the narrative. No amount of pretty picture can make up for how utterly shit the story is and how beyond dumb the characters become.
I agree, I regard this as perhaps my worst video, I went way too soft on this movie, I think I just really wanted to like something at the time. The movie is shit and I have never had anything even approaching a desire to rewatch it, if I did, I'm sure I would hate it.
@@DespotofAntrim I think people just managed to ignore the story because it is pretty. But frankly the graphics stop being interesting after every single frame being this immaculate over designed/over crafted shot.
the ships burning the landing sites isnt even intentional, just a helpful side effect of how goddamn powerful realistic spacecraft have to be in order to get to planets in other systems
1:55 😂😅 Actually it is. Being the mouth of the regime - is the main idea behind Avatar franchise.
1st film was about racism, colonialism and bad whities;
2nd about Greta Thunberg stuff and bad whities;
Plus there were Cameron's statements about patriarchy, masculinity and white. One of those was that testosterone is a poison and no man should have it. Others also lay in this line of thinking.
1:02:31 😑 I look at how US stealing resources from Iraq & Syria; via military bases and economic warfare trying to subjugate Middle East, Far East and even most of Europe.
I look at France in Africa & french child labour program for uranium mining.
Not only did the sequel negate most of the important plot points of the first, including the importance of Avatars, but had the villains making incomprehensibly stupid decisions from beginning to end.
"Sir, the natives are retreating into jungle, we have them on the ropes"
"Ignore them. Focus all our efforts on the human traitor running the other way"
27:49 Nice video but here the railroad would make more sense than a road which would be a river of mud in this rainforest unless paved, which would be much more expensive than rails.
Good review. I did not expect there'd be an actual hour+ of fresh, insightful commentary but, happily, I was wrong. I will disagree with the final statement though; I'm pretty sure that #2 is already generally considered to be a mediocre sequel. If for no other reasons than 1. there's no way it could ever have the same visual impact that the groundbreaking first film hand, and 2. it essentially doubles down on so many of the faults of the 1st film. There are other reasons, as you point out, but those alone are sufficient.
What's relevant, though, is that we are all fine with that. Avatar 2's simplistic yet overwhelming positives so outweigh the negatives that we are prepared to forgive the movie for its trespasses on the too often cartoonishly bad plot choices and heavy handed, misguided moral positioning. In short it's entertaining as heck and so impressive that the word itself feel utterly inadequate. End of story.
Frankly I put off seeing it because I didn't want to end up having spent the entire runtime wondering over how 3 1/2 hours can feel like an eternity. But never did the film feel too long, and especially given the 2nd act that is a real surprise. Could Cameron have made a bunch of cuts and the film not suffer? Undoubtedly so. But I honestly don't think it would have markedly improved the movie either. Even the god awful Save The Whales plot is handled adroitly enough that we are sufficiently entertained despite also wanting to claw our faces off due to the cringe.
Thanks, Desport, for pointing many things that I either missed or that never would have occurred to me. Watching this video after having freshly seen the film definitely added to the experience. Well done.