Peter Viney's Blog

Produced and directed by James Cameron
Screenplay James Cameron, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver

December 2022

MAIN CAST:

Sam Worthington – Jake Sully, former human,  now leader of the Forest People
Zoe Saldana- Neytiri, Jake’s mate
Sigourney Weaver- Kiri, adopted daughter of Jake and Neytiri
Stephen Lang- Colonel Miles Quaritich, a clone of the previous one who was killed by Jake
Kate Winslet- pregnant wife of the leader of the Sea People
Cliff Curtis- leader of the Sea People
Jamie Flatters- Neteyam, oldest son of Jake
Britain Dalton – Lo’ak, second son of Jake
Trinity Lo-Bliss – Tuk, Jake’s 8 year old daughter
Jack Champion – Spider Socorro, original son of Colonel Miles, rescued and adopted by Jake and Neytiri after the first Miles was killed.
Brendan Cowell- Captain of the marine hunting vessel

3D.

We had to buy glasses (£1.50 each) because we’d lost the ones left from the heyday of 3D, which was 12 to 15 years ago. Somewhere there’s a box with ten in a cupboard at home. 3D may be coming back – we saw it in iSense 3D (at a swingeing £20 a head) and watched dire 3D trailers for Shazam, Transformers, animated Spider Man and Ant Man Meets Wasp Man. No, nothing there I’ll go to see.

Let’s ignore the avatars from the sky people concept and get to the heavily pointed allegorical roots.

There are tribal people in the forest, the Na’vi or Blueskins. They commune with the nature spirit. They fight with bows and arrows and tomahawks, chant songs and live in pyramidal structures, which we might call wigwams. They were invaded by bearded people, who went back home leaving an outpost which is friendly. The central family are later called ‘half breeds’ a category you may remember from 50s Western movies though it’s desperately non-PC now. It may be rude, but they must have sufficiently humanoid DNA (and genitalia)  to interbreed in spite of being taller, thinner, blue, with muscles in their ears and tails with sensors that can contact the Great Spirit. Maybe being avatared helps. They have adopted Monkey Boy / Spider a left over Sky Person child.

So the ‘Sky people’ are coming back with clones in Blueskin form (so very tall and strong and blue) led by the evil Colonel. He is the clone of the colonel Miles from the first Avatar in 2009, who was killed. I can’t recall his full name, so I’ll call him Colonel Custer. (The original Custer was only an acting-general, and was really a colonel). He wants to kill the renegade Jake who married into the Blueskins. I’ll think of Jake as Sitting Bull. The height differentiation technology owes a debt to Lord of The Rings with the humans as hobbits. When threatened, the Blueskins adopt a New Zealand rugby team stance, bare their teeth and make warlike noises, add the Maori tattoos and there’s a further New Zealand (Lord of The Rings) link.

The Sky people have chunky metallic spaceship / helicopter / metal crab transports technology which will be saleable as toys and models in Lego and other formats to rival Star Wars and Jurassic Park. They come in to attack the forest tribe’s habitat. Perhaps connect to the battle in the snow at the Washita River involving the original genocidal Custer and seen in Little Big Man.

It gets worse, and the Americans / Cowboys Sky People race around in attack helicopters and burn villages and threaten Native Americans Blueskins,  immediately summoning up those Vietnam war movies like The Deer Hunter. The colonel captures Monkey Boy (can they get away with that name?) who has been brought up by Blueskins, much as Mowgli was in The Jungle Book. Kitty (well it’s Kiri, but I heard my granddaughter’s name) has special powers to commune mystically with natural stuff. She misses Spider. The Blueskins fight back well, think Little Big Horn.

So our Blueskin Lakota half-breed family need to go elsewhere to remove the threat from the tribe. Mounting their pterodactyls, they fly off to meet a different sea people tribe of Blueskins, with a fierce chief. Geronimo? These people use some type of ichthyosaurs as transport rather than the pterodactyl-goose cross and we are entering Jurassic Park territory. They also have cooler tattoos.

We’re now also entering High School Movie territory because the Water Blueskin kids bully the Forest Blueskin kids as they do in High School Movies. They squabble. The Forest kid settles it with his fists, just as John Wayne would have.

Our hero Blueskin Lo’ak (Lakota reference?)  is persuaded to cross the reef to the dangerous ocean and then abandoned by the Water kids to a ferocious shark like sea creature, but is saved by a huge intelligent whale type creature who has been outcast from his / her / its pod.

The Water Blueskin son is fiercely accused by the headmaster / school principal his father for setting up the dirty trick and Lo’ak gets him off the hook, saying it was his idea to go outside the reef, so they become friends. You may have seen this in high school movies, but with less water. There’s a lot of water. Think Waterworld.

The movie changes dramatically to Moby Dick as Custer decides that after burning a few sea people villages from his base on the ‘Sea Dragon’, he can flush out Sitting Bull by whale hunting. The hunt is led by an Aussie Captain “bloody hell!” Ahab, and they kill a huge intelligent whale creature so they can extract eighty million whatevers worth of anti-ageing serum from its brain, which is just a phial full, then discard the rest, a couple of aircraft carrier sized lumps of blubber.

This pisses off the sea people who commune with these whales who are ‘more intelligent than we are’ and have brain areas for philosophy and advanced language. So now we’re into a Star Wars battle with the sea creature mounted attacks (Snowspeeders from The Empire Strikes Back without snow). Yet again the colonel kidnaps the family’s kids. It’s one hell of a battle with equipment that will really feed the Lego models spinoffs. Aussie Ahab loses a limb due to the whale, as they do, and disappears under water (dead, but as we don’t see him dead, he might be back).

So then the Star Destroyer / Sea Dragon / Aircraft carrier becomes the scene of the personal hand-to-hand battle between Luke Blueskin and Colonel Vader.

Then the craft begins to sink, and we remember it’s a James Cameron movie as we are plunged deep into Titanic Two with our heroes trapped in water-filled metal corridors, seeking air bubbles, trying to open waterproof doors. This goes on even longer than in Titanic or maybe it just seems that way. Hey! Kate Winslet was in that one too.

There’s a Bambi moment (dying hero). At the very end Colonel General Miles Darth Custer survives, which is necessary as Avatar episodes 3 and 4 and 5 are already in production.

It is sure to be the biggest film of 2022.

Critics range from 5 stars to 1 star.

Yes, it looks fabulous. 3D gets irritating though.

It is three hours twelve minutes long. Way too long. Self-indulgently long. Remember the film editing rule. If the thought ‘That’s too good to cut” enters your head, cut it. You wouldn’t have even had the thought unless it was expendable.

I could cut sixty hugely expensive minutes in a trice. It would be a better movie though the virtual cutting room floor would be deep in beautiful bits of SFX, each minute worth a Euromillions lottery win. .

However, I survived 192 minutes. I didn’t get too bored – there was lots to look at. I think the plot wears its references way way too heavily.

Is this what it’s about? I know I made the same smartass link on Jurassic Park this year (This set references Avatar -One from 2009)