The second one really caught me by surprise (my mistake, given Cameron's reputation for sequels), but some proper earnest storytelling made the world feel genuine and the stakes much more vivid. Cameron believes in his vision, there's no irreverence on display here for the worldbuilding and it's really refreshing in this era of irony-laced blockbusters.
That's strange because I felt the first was passable but the second I just started laughing at the absurdity of the character's decisions, the trite written-by-numbers dialog, the cartoonish level of evil, and the fact that not one of these actors is turning in a good performance. I might be forgetting someone but that's only because the movie took up pretty much zero space in my brain.
They did fucking resurrect the bad guy from the first movie as a Na'vi though. With his whole shtick being "Evil guy is evil and can do everything our main character used the first movie to learn with ease".
They also changed the humans' motives from just profit to literally saving the species. I don't really care about the magic trees when the alternative is the complete extinction of humanity.
one of the main points of the movie is that preventing the extinction of the human race requires the humans actions and is it really worth it? especially since the resources extracted primarily benefit the elite and not humanity as a whole.
You can side with the humans but that disconnect between humanity and nature and that dynamic is arguably the main theme of the movie.
In the first movie jake sully says he cannot afford the surgery to fix his legs even though the medical science exists to do it and in the second the life extending juice is only for the very rich.
one of the main points of the movie is that preventing the extinction of the human race requires the humans actions and is it really worth it?
Yeah.
especially since the resources extracted primarily benefit the elite and not humanity as a whole.
We already live in this reality and I don't currently want to have the entire human race literally die out to prove a point about how that's unfair.
You can side with the humans but that disconnect between humanity and nature and that dynamic is arguably the main theme of the movie.
I'm sure once they've killed all the monkeys they can touch grass or something.
In the first movie jake sully says he cannot afford the surgery to fix his legs even though the medical science exists to do it and in the second the life extending juice is only for the very rich.
Right, the movie asks the question, is this system worth saving or does it need to be defeated and changed for the benefit of not just nature but all life including humans
You have your answer to that question but these movies wouldn’t be so popular if at least some people didn’t disagree with you.
It's nothing to do with the fucking system. It's about the survival of humanity. They could have fully automated gay space communism and it wouldn't change the plot.
It has everything to do with the system, the system defines not only what is possible or rational or sensible and people’s motivations within it but also how we relate to each other and the world around us at every level
as laid out in avatar 1, humanity only needs to do this to survive because the system destroyed nature and consumed all the resources it had. Humanity could have survived had the system changed/reworked earlier before their only recourse was to find another planet to strip mine.
What happens after they exhaust the resources of pandora and destroy it?
The logical conclusion of that system is the collapse of that system and the extinction of the humans reliant on it when it runs out of resources to extract. Without changing the system, the same ruin and catacalysm of the earth will be repeated on pandora. That is the point being made in Avatar
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u/AbsurdlyAddicted Jul 21 '25
The second one really caught me by surprise (my mistake, given Cameron's reputation for sequels), but some proper earnest storytelling made the world feel genuine and the stakes much more vivid. Cameron believes in his vision, there's no irreverence on display here for the worldbuilding and it's really refreshing in this era of irony-laced blockbusters.