I love that this White Noise adaptation held over the frequent instances where characters offer a summary conclusion in their monologues by saying shit like “This is what happens to desperate people.” “This is not a reasonable fear.” “Why not tell me it is round? This is crucial to our understanding.”
This is probably as good of an adaptation you could hope for, but it is only making me think fondly about the novel, when I’m not admiring Don Cheadle at least.
Edit: actually idk what to think about this. entertaining but I don’t like the things it does different like the ending.
James Cameron really does love making boats sink and people drown. It’s his favorite thing.
I guess this movie has a… framerate thing? Is it 60 fps or whatever? Normally I can’t tell this sort of thing but for like 30 minutes until I got used to it I really almost felt like someone was holding down the fast forward button or something. Weirdly slick, slippery movement, very unnatural and uncomfortable.
My Way of Water review: it’s a three hour long videogame cutscene. It is fun for the heavily American coded soldiers to be the bad guys and cheer when they get exploded and drowned to death by the dozens.
Still no one can direct an action scene like Cameron. The whole last act, with multiple boats and aircraft and sea animals and simultaneous action in, under, and over the water, would have been an absolute wreck if handled by most Hollywood guys. Here it was clean as a whistle, everything legible, the practical weight and momentum of things clearly communicated and visceral. A craftsman at the height of his powers. Too bad about all the dumb ass shit.
yeah the big fight in the final act remains one of the best things I saw all last year, for sure, but every time I think about how good it was to see a whale spike a torpedo off its head like a soccer ball, I cannot stop myself from ruminating on the rest of that movie and getting more and more annoyed by it all
if your dad doesn’t respect you, there’s one neat trick you can use to instantly get his full respect and love unconditionally forever, no questions, no ambiguity. Unfortunately to execute this trick you will need to drown your dad
I laughed pretty much the entire time but got misty eyed when Raab himself had a cameo at the end because it looks like he is doing okay. Also, the return of Party Boy. It was also sweet seeing Chris Pontius bring his baby on set.
At the end of the movie, after continually screwing up and endangering his family because he is a Loner who Can’t Follow Rules and Tells It Like It Is, the protagonist character (Jake Sully’s middle son) instigates a situation that leads to a giant battle. Like, the character breaks a rule that leads specifically to a battle happening because it puts him in a dangerous location he’s not allowed to be. In the course of this, his older brother DIES!!! And then shortly after that, his father and mother are trapped in a sinking ship and almost die too!!! But he drags his dad out of the wreck and saves him, and then tearfully his dad says, “I see you,” which is the phrase from the first movie that the characters use when they want to say that they fully accept and love one another. It’s never adequately addressed that this kid took actions which resulted in the death of his brother and the horrible traumatization of his entire family
But, to be fair, the thing he was doing which he was not supposed to be doing was saving the world’s only whale criminal who is a criminal because he is the world’s only whale who kills people, who, when the battle does start, saves everyone because he once again decides to kill people. So who can say if middle son was wrong or not.
True if this movie has any moral stance at all, it is that whales should absolutely kill people, and that pathetic whale pacifists are the bane of whalekind
apparently it has a variable framerate, they made sure avatar 2 had nvidia gsync support so there’s no screen tearing or slowdown when somebody does their special move during scenes with lots of characters on screen