It's not cringe woke at all, at least not any more than the original. Highly entertaining with mind blowing CGI and action sequences. Story is simple, but with more new characters, overall maybe slightly stronger than the first one. I know people have little stomach for Hollywood lately but this is the film to see if you want to send a message. The movie contains strong father figures and great family dynamics and themes.
I noticed a fairly in-your-face adrenochrome reference. Also the phrase, DARKNESS TO LIGHT appears verbatim. I know it's a generic phrase but I found that interesting.
Highly recommend IMAX 3d if possible.
Spoiler: I'm not going to see it.
I don't want to be too snarky, and I genuinely appreciate your take on what is supposed to be a big, blockbuster movie, but:
The first movie was awful, Dances With Wolves with aliens, but even worse than that sounds. Cameron wanted to shoe-horn Sigourney Weaver (and JP from grandma’s boy for some reason) into the movie needlessly, so he ruined what should’ve been the premise of Sam Worthington/ Jake being the prototype avatar. Instead, Cameron made Sigourney and JP into avatars also, which required a convoluted, mystical explanation for why Jake’s avatar was uniquely accepted into the blue Indian tribe. That’s just part of the problems.
Dune author Frank Herbert released a book in 1979 called The Jesus Incident . Here’s an excerpt of Wikipedia’s plot section: “The surface of the planet Pandora is 80% seas, and the sea is dominated by a type of kelp which appears to be sentient.” Cameron stole from Herbert the planet’s name, and worse he stole the concept of sentient plants incorporated into a planetary communications network. (edit: here’s another quote from the wiki plot: “As the book progresses, the reader discovers that the kelp, the hylighters, and other creatures of the planet appear to be linked into a large entity with a shared consciousness, Avata.”)
Cameron preaches that humans are bad and he doesn’t explain why they value “unobtainium” over some of the nodes of the sentient plant network. Btw, “unobtainium” was a joke cliche among the engineers and material scientists at a company where I once worked, long before Avatar came out. Anyway, in the Avatar universe, if unobtainium is what facilitates all the interstellar travel that is depicted, then it’s worth cutting down some telecom trees to obtain it.
Avatar 1 was unoriginal, preachy, and stupid. I don’t know about #2 but clearly I’m skeptical.
I had the same thought - it's long been a clever joke that references something that either doesn't exist, or is too expensive to use in a particular application. But when I saw it referenced in connection with this movie, I could only think: "What, so they just stole that joke, and and now trying to pretend it's supposed to be something serious? That's... really lame."
Yup, most things in that movie were stolen, even from old corny jokes
So color me unsurprised if this overcooked, poop-stuffed turkey doesn't make back the 2 billion dollars😳 that the douchebag director reportedly says it needs to collect to even break even, and become a(nother) financial disaster for Pedo-disney that will make their recent fag-family cartoon movie bomb look like a winner in comparison.
You're right, I can't think of a single Avatar-film meme, just memes related to the cartoon "Avatar: The Last Airbender". The first film didn't really have much of a lasting pop culture impact.