Thirteen years in the making, James Cameron’s insipid, overlong followup to his sci-fi record-breaker is a very expensive beached whale
renching us with a disappointment that can hardly be admitted out loud, James Cameron’s soggy new digitised film has beached like a massive, pointless whale. The story, which might fill a 30-minute cartoon, is stretched as if by some AI program into a three-hour movie of epic tweeness.was a pioneering 3D sci-fi spectacular which Cameron delivered in 2009. Now, after 13 years of unimaginably expensive pixel-crunching, the aquatic followup has arrived, with a third and a fourth on the way.
The effects now, technically impressive as they are, amount to high frame-rate motion smoothness which is soulless and inert, creating not so much an uncanny valley but an uncanny Mariana Trench down in the depths. Cameron’s undersea world is like a trillion-dollar screensaver. Where is the oceanic passion and jeopardy of great Cameron movies such as Titanic or The Abyss?
The situation is that ex-human Jake Sully is committed to the Na’vi body he assumed when insinuating himself among the blue-bodied, pointy-eared tribe as part of the “avatar” strategy in the first film, before falling in love with dynamic warrior Neytiri and siding with her people against the humans who would exploit the Na’vi’s mineral resources.
But just when they thought they were happy, the “sky people” of planet Earth reappear and there is an admittedly ingenious twist concerning the gung-ho marine colonel Miles Quaritch, memorably played by Stephen Lang. Sully’s family have to leave their rainforest habitat and hide away among the far-off Metkayina, an amphibious reef people led by Ronal and Tonowari . There they must learn the mystical Metkayina art of existing for long periods underwater.
And what do we find aside from the high-tech visual superstructure? The floatingly bland plot is like a children’s story without the humour; a YA story without the emotional wound; an action thriller without the hard edge of real excitement.Take a front seat at the cinema with our weekly email filled with all the latest news and all the movie action that mattersNewsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties.
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