I'm not going to spend much time on the obvious. The film is a monumental achievement in CGI technology and the stunning, vibrant, almost plausible alien world is incredibly inviting. More than worth the watch for those 2 aspects alone.
However the film is a sequel. Which usually spells 2 things: 1) The novelty value is gone and the film has to scramble to compensate for said loss - Something Avatar :TWoW doesn't fully achieve - and 2) Either a film remains a standalone production or it immediately gets turned into a franchise with a whole bunch of sequels. They rarely stop at number 2. Which means only the first film has a good satisfying ending. All subsequent iterations end on setups for yet another sequel. Which is the case here too.
As far as action the action goes it's a lot less 'impact full' and 'grand' then in the first film. Instead of large scale combat we get Jake sully and co duking it out with the crew of a commercial whaling ship.
Furher major and minor gripes with the film: The whole middle hour is highly predictable teen drama, there's way too much focus on the child characters in general, they talk like 21st century human hypebeasts, Sigourney Weaver - a 75 year old woman - voices a teen and it pulled me out of the film every single time she spoke and the character of spider made me cringe a lot.
Also the language consistency is a mess. In the first film some of the Na'vi had learned to speak broken English and conversed with Jake and others in such manner. In the Sequel the film makes a point of showing us Jake now speaks fluent Na'vi and thus obviously converses with his tribe in their own language instead of sticking to English. So whenever there's no human characters around English is supposed to represent Na'vi. Yet Neytiri and another Na'vi still speak with a heavy accent whereas Jake speaks fluently making it appear as if he's the native speaker and everybody else is adapting.
Now on to my titular main issue with the film. After finishing up I realized something nobody else seemed to have noticed. The film kind of moved beyond it's own core concept: namely that of the avatars. The first film was about humans piloting a genetically engineered human/Na'vi hybrid. In the second film, save for a few brief scenes involving the left behind scientist crew from the first film (i.e. Norm and co), there are no more true avatars. All the human/Na'vi hybrids are now full hybrids that have their human mind melded with the avatar body, same as how Jake ended up.
And before you say who cares? This writer's decision actually influences the story in a highly noticeable way. There's no real central and critical human characters around anymore (save for spider). In the first film around half the screen time was dedicated to the human story lines and we had some better and lesser known actors to elevate the film: Sigourney Weaver, Michelle rodriguez, Stephen Lang and obviously Sam worthington himself. They brought the human element to the film, recognizable characters to associate with and share their human emotions.
In this film it's about 90% blue people with some human extras thrown in as canon fodder. It turns the second film a little too much into a CGI-fest for me and also raises some weird notions about it's message. Is the film trying to make me hate my own species? Am I supposed to root when blue space aliens kill a lot of people? With there being less nuance and subtlety then the first film (which was about as subtle as a megaphone and pamphlet wielding militant) you'd almost start to think James Cameron really really hates people.
So an unbalanced film with lots of diminishing returns. It's about a 6 in general entertainment value but it gets a bonus for it's technical achievements. 7/10.
However the film is a sequel. Which usually spells 2 things: 1) The novelty value is gone and the film has to scramble to compensate for said loss - Something Avatar :TWoW doesn't fully achieve - and 2) Either a film remains a standalone production or it immediately gets turned into a franchise with a whole bunch of sequels. They rarely stop at number 2. Which means only the first film has a good satisfying ending. All subsequent iterations end on setups for yet another sequel. Which is the case here too.
As far as action the action goes it's a lot less 'impact full' and 'grand' then in the first film. Instead of large scale combat we get Jake sully and co duking it out with the crew of a commercial whaling ship.
Furher major and minor gripes with the film: The whole middle hour is highly predictable teen drama, there's way too much focus on the child characters in general, they talk like 21st century human hypebeasts, Sigourney Weaver - a 75 year old woman - voices a teen and it pulled me out of the film every single time she spoke and the character of spider made me cringe a lot.
Also the language consistency is a mess. In the first film some of the Na'vi had learned to speak broken English and conversed with Jake and others in such manner. In the Sequel the film makes a point of showing us Jake now speaks fluent Na'vi and thus obviously converses with his tribe in their own language instead of sticking to English. So whenever there's no human characters around English is supposed to represent Na'vi. Yet Neytiri and another Na'vi still speak with a heavy accent whereas Jake speaks fluently making it appear as if he's the native speaker and everybody else is adapting.
Now on to my titular main issue with the film. After finishing up I realized something nobody else seemed to have noticed. The film kind of moved beyond it's own core concept: namely that of the avatars. The first film was about humans piloting a genetically engineered human/Na'vi hybrid. In the second film, save for a few brief scenes involving the left behind scientist crew from the first film (i.e. Norm and co), there are no more true avatars. All the human/Na'vi hybrids are now full hybrids that have their human mind melded with the avatar body, same as how Jake ended up.
And before you say who cares? This writer's decision actually influences the story in a highly noticeable way. There's no real central and critical human characters around anymore (save for spider). In the first film around half the screen time was dedicated to the human story lines and we had some better and lesser known actors to elevate the film: Sigourney Weaver, Michelle rodriguez, Stephen Lang and obviously Sam worthington himself. They brought the human element to the film, recognizable characters to associate with and share their human emotions.
In this film it's about 90% blue people with some human extras thrown in as canon fodder. It turns the second film a little too much into a CGI-fest for me and also raises some weird notions about it's message. Is the film trying to make me hate my own species? Am I supposed to root when blue space aliens kill a lot of people? With there being less nuance and subtlety then the first film (which was about as subtle as a megaphone and pamphlet wielding militant) you'd almost start to think James Cameron really really hates people.
So an unbalanced film with lots of diminishing returns. It's about a 6 in general entertainment value but it gets a bonus for it's technical achievements. 7/10.
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