Avatar: The Way of Water is streaming on Disney+ and MAX so I thought I’d watch the first one, which I’ve managed to avoid until now, and then the next one.
Recognizing that the main appeal of both is the visual experience on the fanciest movie theatre screen you can find, and streaming at home is by far an inferior product from the jump, I found both to be incredibly stupid.
The main plot for both hinges on a group of people inexplicably going from “you are a foreign devil who will bring nothing but death and destruction to our people and you are not welcome here because you will destroy us” to “please make yourself at home while we teach you all of our ways” with almost no explanation for the mind numbingly stupid change of heart. And shockingly, this results in the death and destruction of the group of people that they were aware would happen from the instant the outsider showed up. I get that immersing yourself in the local ways through beautiful visuals is the entire point and appeal of the movies, but as a narrative, it is story-breaking stupid for the group to accept the outsider and the movies just brush past it as quickly as they possibly can and hope you don’t think about it.
Also, the technologically advanced race that has mastered intergalactic travel really, really needs to invent a material for their vehicle windows that a wooden arrow can’t easily puncture.
There are dozens of other things I could bitch about, as I’m sure has been done repeatedly on the internet for over a decade from the first one, but I was inspired to bitch now when an attack helicopter thing was taken down by an arrow through the window in the climactic battle of the second movie, sixteen years after the technologically advanced intergalactic traveling society was aware that was a problem from their first battle.
Edit: the film also includes the main bad guy sitting on a boat looking at the person he’s been trying to kill the entire movie through the scope of a gun and saying “hold your fire, he’s coming here” for some fucking reason as they go to the middle of the boat and wait to be ambushed instead of, at the very least, waiting at the edge of the boat and shooting the person in the water before they get on the boat.