Monday, December 19, 2022
Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)
As far as I’m concerned, an Avatar movie does not need to be 3+ hours long. This one treats the audience to the best VFX yet seen in a major motion picture. It’s 90 minutes of anti-war VFX, 90 minutes of anti-whaling VFX, and a few minutes in the part of a screenplay called “resolution” to tie up loose ends.
I don’t see the point of these big dumb Hollywood blockbusters. If this were 30 minutes shorter and had more than a dozen non-VFX shots, I might recommend it.
I would have cared more if there were more gore. I would have cared more if the film were shorter. I would have cared more if it weren’t a fucking family movie. Maybe I’m not the audience for this, but I still sat in a theater to watch it, grabbing the second-to-last empty seat for a Sunday matinee.
Sequels are generally made to make money. They make money because people watch them. When those people are disappointed, they are less likely to watch the sequel to the sequel. Hence, the tail of a linear series is short until the reboot, and the tail of a franchise can be long. Studio execs know where they’re doing. Audiences, apparently, do not.