Avatar: Fire and Ash made $1.4 billion at the box office but is still seen, by some, as a disappointment -- now Disney is taking a hard look at further sequels.
We’re three movies into this franchise. You can look at the first film as a ridiculously expensive pilot, testing out the characters and environment and seeing if the whole thing had legs. As it turns out, it did. There’s even a bunch of hyper-fans who are seeing the movie 100 times and fantasizing about living on Pandora. Neat-o. Cameron gets to make this a franchise.
But what’s it going to be about?
Michael Bay turned Transformers into incomprehensible VFX noise with zero interest in overarching themes, but I don’t expect much more from him or a series based on toy robots. Cameron is a solid filmmaker and idea guy, so he can definity do better than this.
It wasn’t until the success of the first film that he started planning the sequels. That’s when I presume he started settling into the main ideas of the project. Anyone who saw the director’s cut of the The Abyss should find this familiar: humanity bad, but can be saved with good guidance from not-humans.
That’s where I see the Avatar films heading. Humans are a pile of shit, but they can turn themselves around if they just STFU and listen to the Na’vi on how to not be shit. That works for me.
But WTF is going on with these new films? The hero’s journey of the first film was Jake realizing that humanity had life all twisted and that the Na’vi had things more figured out, so he was going to live within that culture. As the sequels kick off, Jake and Neytiri have built a family, but it’s entirely based on the dynamics of a US military family: stern dad doing drills, kids calling each other ‘bro’ constantly. There’s nothing non-human there; it’s terrible. I don’t understand how the Neytiri character put up with it. That relationship would NOT have worked out.
But getting into this last film, we get introduced to a traveling tribe of traders, so commerce via a trading economy is a thing now. And there’s raiding parties attacking the traders for no explained reason. To steal stuff? To just kill people? Never explained.
The Na’vi are being cooked up less like a utoptian society and more just-like-us-but-blue.
So what’s this all about? Spider.
Cameron and the producers saw those superfans who wanted to live on Pandora and created Spider as their self-insert surrogate. He’s the product of the worst of humanity, but he gets to live on the planet. He gets adopted into a native family.
spoiler
He gets to breathe the air, grow a psychic ponytail penis and commune with the planet.
The entire throughline of the franchise is about indulging Spider and, thereby, indulging the franchise’s superfans and their escapist fantasies.
And if that’s the case, we can forcast the suitability of the Avatar franchise by monitoring the activity of those superfans. Are they digging in or are they moving on?
We’re three movies into this franchise. You can look at the first film as a ridiculously expensive pilot, testing out the characters and environment and seeing if the whole thing had legs. As it turns out, it did. There’s even a bunch of hyper-fans who are seeing the movie 100 times and fantasizing about living on Pandora. Neat-o. Cameron gets to make this a franchise.
But what’s it going to be about?
Michael Bay turned Transformers into incomprehensible VFX noise with zero interest in overarching themes, but I don’t expect much more from him or a series based on toy robots. Cameron is a solid filmmaker and idea guy, so he can definity do better than this.
It wasn’t until the success of the first film that he started planning the sequels. That’s when I presume he started settling into the main ideas of the project. Anyone who saw the director’s cut of the The Abyss should find this familiar: humanity bad, but can be saved with good guidance from not-humans.
That’s where I see the Avatar films heading. Humans are a pile of shit, but they can turn themselves around if they just STFU and listen to the Na’vi on how to not be shit. That works for me.
But WTF is going on with these new films? The hero’s journey of the first film was Jake realizing that humanity had life all twisted and that the Na’vi had things more figured out, so he was going to live within that culture. As the sequels kick off, Jake and Neytiri have built a family, but it’s entirely based on the dynamics of a US military family: stern dad doing drills, kids calling each other ‘bro’ constantly. There’s nothing non-human there; it’s terrible. I don’t understand how the Neytiri character put up with it. That relationship would NOT have worked out.
But getting into this last film, we get introduced to a traveling tribe of traders, so commerce via a trading economy is a thing now. And there’s raiding parties attacking the traders for no explained reason. To steal stuff? To just kill people? Never explained.
The Na’vi are being cooked up less like a utoptian society and more just-like-us-but-blue.
So what’s this all about? Spider.
Cameron and the producers saw those superfans who wanted to live on Pandora and created Spider as their self-insert surrogate. He’s the product of the worst of humanity, but he gets to live on the planet. He gets adopted into a native family.
spoiler
He gets to breathe the air, grow a psychic ponytail penis and commune with the planet.
The entire throughline of the franchise is about indulging Spider and, thereby, indulging the franchise’s superfans and their escapist fantasies.
And if that’s the case, we can forcast the suitability of the Avatar franchise by monitoring the activity of those superfans. Are they digging in or are they moving on?