As usual, I’m late to the party, not having seen this in the theaters. But it became available for streaming this weekend. As with the first, it’s a visually stunning movie. And also as with the first, while I know I was supposed to be captivated by the animals and vegetation, and was to some extent, I was more interested in the machines and overall human technology, and how they work, particularly the interstellar sleeper ships. (I know, I’m a bad person.)
The story is similar to the first, taking place on Pandora, a moon of a gas giant in the Alpha Centauri system. Pandora has resources that humans want. (An anti-gravity mineral in the first movie, an anti-aging serum in this one.) But extracting them means damaging the environment and ecology, which operates as an interactive whole. The native Na’vi, and all life, are literally able to connect and mind meld with other animals and the ecosystem, such that when someone dies, a version of their mind is preserved in the system.
The humans, aside from the scientists, are mostly either oblivious to this or don’t care. Which makes humanity in general the bad guys in this movie. Particularly as this episode raises the stakes. It’s revealed that the Earth is dying, and now the goal is to colonize Pandora.
The story starts up sixteen years after the first movie. After being evicted from Pandora by the natives, the humans have regrouped and returned in force. Ex-Marine Jake Sully, now gone fully native, has a family, and is a resistance leader, providing strategic and tactical insights to the natives.
Recognizing Sully’s importance, the military has a new squad of avatars implanted with the minds of deceased human soldiers. They are led by Colonel Miles Quaritch, the villain from the first movie, now in Na’vi form. Quaritch is assigned to hunt down and eliminate Sully.
When Sully realizes what is happening, and the threat it represents to his family, he takes them from their homeland in the forests to islands in the sea, and requests sanctuary among the Na’Vi there. But Quaritch eventually learns where he is and pursues him. So much of the movie takes place in this new sea environment.
I noted above that one of the resources humans want from Pandora is the anti-aging serum. This serum has to be extracted from the brains of a whale like species we meet in this movie. It turns out that the species is intelligent. Humans know this, but hunt them anyway. The operations to hunt and kill them seem like a high tech version designed to evoke memories of traditional whaling on Earth.
While I overall enjoyed the movie, the storyline is one I can take or leave. It leans too heavily into the blighted humanity sentiment for my tastes. And early on in the movie, it relies a little too much on the reckless teenager trope. Also the middle sections feel too slow. But the second half of the film makes up for it with a lot of cool action sequences.
I found Quaritch and his crew interesting characters in this movie. Resurrected as Na’vi avatars, they quickly fall into their role with little existential angst, with Quaritch himself only repeating the slogan: “Marines don’t die, they only regroup in hell.” I get that Marines are tough, but I don’t know that I buy this reaction. Maybe they’re counting on eventually being restored into new vat grown human bodies at some point?
More broadly, their return reveals that the technology exists to save minds and restore them into vat grown bodies. Which makes me wonder why the anti-aging serum from whale brains is such a vital resource. I suppose James Cameron could simply say that growing bodies is far more expensive than taking a serum. And Quaritch does say multiple times that he’s not the original Quaritch, which might give insight into the prevailing mindset in this society, but also bring us back to the unrealistic acceptance from his crew of their new lives.
All of this makes me think of Pandora’s ecology and the mind uploading involved in its integrated system. When I saw the first movie, this felt a little too perfect, a little too much of a radical environmentalist fantasy, a Gaia hypothesis on steroids. But now, knowing how much of a perfectionist Cameron is, I wonder if it provides clues into where these movies are going.
This is just fan speculation. But it would be cool if the Pandoran ecology turned out not to be a completely natural one, but one that had been heavily engineered at some point in the deep past. And a neat plot twist might be that it turns out to be much more advanced than anything the humans have. The final resolution of the conflict might be humans having to alter themselves to fit into that system. Or taking it back to Earth to revive its own environment.
So overall a good movie. A moderately appealing story but visually excellent and with many interesting concepts. If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend checking it out.
If you have seen it, what do you think, about the movie, or my speculation?
SelfAwarePatterns 
Watched it yesterday for the first time.
I’ve got the same general reaction: cool visuals, vanilla tropes.
Disappointments are:
1) Humans are still evil theme — bullshit.
2) Na’vi marines are immune from Yahweh’s, I mean Eywa’s, permeating life-force?
3) The atmosphere is now just a nuisance — for both species?
4) The climax is barely a third of the High-Stakes of the first film.
5) which leads to the “Cameron’s a money grubbing asshole” moment when this whole thing is just a setup to the next movie.
The whole Kiri+Eywa spiritual connection, barely revealed, will obviously be THE key in the 3rd movie. That will be the ultimate reveal / power-play. The whole organic aspect of the planet will rise up and repel the invaders. Or, subsume them so that humans get included in the spiritual “All-Life” awareness that Pandora represents.
But regardless, I watched with rapt attention. An entirely CGI movie where I doubt there needed to be any life action filming done, whatsoever. Even the scenes with obviously human actors could have been entirely CG’d.
Maybe there wasn’t a “real set” built at all. Just great assemblies of green-screen tumble mats, trampolines and ladders. And suspension arenas where wire-rigs performed the anti-grav of water. Real water? Why risk the trouble, the hassle of wetness, the threat of drowning?
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On 4), yeah, I felt that too. The problem is that this is just the first of three sequels, so the stakes in the finale couldn’t be that high. It really all amounts to a battle in the overall war. I imagine they’ll increase as we get closer to the final movie. I hope the sequels don’t turn out to just be a big multi-episode version of the first movie.
It does seem clear they’re setting Kiri up to be a big deal. Of course, we’re two writers familiar with story structure, so that might be more obvious to us than most people.
For CG, are they still dependent on motion capture from actors? Even if they are, as you point out, that’s a lot cheaper and safer than filming in dangerous and exotic locations. On the sets, I’d guess that for the human sequences, a lot of the foreground stuff was real, but the background was probably all CG.
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And where is AI? Cameron’s just gonna ignore the Artificial Elephant in the room? I’d bet the human created AI that would be present at this time would /really/ want to mind-meld with this Eywa entity.
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Cameron could probably make Ty Franck’s move, asserting that there’s plenty of AI in the technology used by characters in the movie, just none with a personality. But even this move doesn’t explain why a lot of the dangerous work isn’t being done by intelligent machines.
If my speculation is right, Eywa herself is an AI, or at least evolved from one.
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Hello Mike,
I watched it a while back and I think forgot everything about it as I left the theatres, which is what I do with most movies anyway.
I just know I enjoyed it.
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Hi Mak,
That’s probably my experience with most movies and shows. One thing I didn’t mention in the post is it took a bit for me to remember the situation from the first movie. I remembered the overall gist, but had lost a lot of the details, like what had happened to individual characters, like Sigourney Weaver’s character, Grace.
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All I can say about the Avatar movies is that they really capture Geordie’s attention. He also got into the fight scenes in Lord of the Rings. I was too busy watching him watch the movie to pay attention to the movie. 🙂
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That seems like a pretty big compliment for James Cameron, that he’s able to capture and hold Geordie’s attention. I could never get my dogs into anything going on on TV, but that was mostly in the pre-HD days. My own Jordi was too old to care by the time I finally went HD. I always wondered what they could actually perceive on the TV screen.
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Apparently Geordie loves those newfangled 3D cartoons (I can’t stand them. I like the old school hand drawn ones from my youth). One time I was at a friend’s house and her young son was watching some new version of The Lion King, and when I looked over at Geordie, he was just as transfixed as the kid was. He even growled when some bad character came out. (Of course, bad characters make themselves pretty apparent in kid’s shows.) I had never seen him so into anything. It may have been the novelty of seeing that type of show, since he’s never seen us watch anything but realistic-looking stuff. Also, my friend had a projector rather than a regular television, so it was pretty big.
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I think you’re far from alone in not liking 3D cartoons. One of the anime franchises, in their latest series, went 3D. That series gets very low ratings compared to the traditional ones. One thing I’ve noticed is that some shows do 3D animation for ships, machinery, and buildings, but go traditional with the characters, which seems to get more acceptance. Which implies that this may be an uncanny valley thing.
Anyway, interesting that captures Geordie’s attention.
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That makes sense to do some of the background stuff in a computerized 3D way and do the characters old school.
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A bunch of friends told me to skip it, so I did. But if it’s available on streaming, maybe I’ll check it out. If your theory about Pandora’s ecology being not quite natural pans out, that would be an interesting twist. It kind of bugged me in the first movie that mindmelding was so easy between species.
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I actually thought of your recent post when watching it. The view of humanity’s future in these movies is pretty bleak. I’m sure much of that is Cameron trying to call attention to attitudes about climate issues, but I think he pushes it too far.
On my theory, yeah, it occurred to me after I posted it that I’m looking at it through a very different lens than Cameron. What delights a sci-fi nerd is probably different from what will delight general movie audiences.
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