Avatar 2 - The Way of Water Dec 2022

[Festoon]

2 hours ago, the_debaser said:

I just spent about 2hrs watching this and walked out of the cinema so don’t know how it ends. And to be honest I don’t care. It is unbelievably boring, and quite possibly the worst thing I’ve seen all year.  

 

Avoid. 0/5. 

 

Noah Baumbach has a new film out so that'll be worse.

[Hamus]

10 hours ago, Paulando said:

I like Kermode but honestly, he just comes across as an annoying twat. That voice ffs.

 

If you didn't know who he was, and heard him spouting in the pub, you'd move tables or leave the place entirely.

 

Look and feel is of an unhappy old man. Which is weird because he must have a decent lift.

[Festoon]

2 minutes ago, Hamus said:

 

If you didn't know who he was, and heard him spouting in the pub, you'd move tables or leave the place entirely.

 

Look and feel is of an unhappy old man. Which is weird because he must have a decent lift.

 

He used be ok, but the siren call of internet and social media has appealed to his worst instincts for a showy rant. For da views.

[PaB]

Saw it today in imax hfr.

 

pros

Visually stunning

HFR is great. But then I am a fan of it 

Last 45 mins is good

 

cons.

its at least an hour too long

the story isn’t as good as the first (there’s a reason that plot line has been used so often)

Very few human characters make this essentially a Pixar film. 
 

2.75/5

[Sumire]

I just got back from watching this in IMAX 3D. I have to say it does look and sound truly phenomenal, the best I have seen in terms of visuals. It is worth watching for the 3D alone.

 

It was too long for me though, I just do not think I can do these long films anymore as I get so uncomfortable. I do think they could have cut some time from it and it would have been a lot better especially for family viewing.

[Loik V credern]

First thing I ever saw of Kermode was this 

 

 

I don't think he's putting the same effort into rants any more. I don't listen to the Mayo and Kermode show any more, just the occasional review on YouTube when i remember. I prefer reviews with multiple viewpoints as you get disagreements sometimes, even Siskel and Ebert had that, with Kermode just talking to an indifferent Mayo who might watch films but is never passionate or eloquent about anything then it's missing a lot I get elsewhere. On the podcast Kermode did with Jack it's better I think but it's not new releases where he's raw. 

[Paulando]

48 minutes ago, Loik V credern said:

First thing I ever saw of Kermode was this 

 

 

This is how you do a rant. Used to love his Transformers ones too.

[majic]

Well regardless of some of the critics take on it I really enjoyed it. It looked amazing, the most cohesive cgi world yet, feels a step ahead in that respect. 

 

The story wasnt amazing, and it could definitely do with 30mins chopped out of it, but it's definitely worth seeing. I will say though I saw it in 3d and it worked, it never felt imposing. However watching it on a small TV at home would be a very different experience for this film. 

[Triple A]

Yeah I really enjoyed it too and it’s an experience that will stay with me a long time, more so than the first movie.  It’s an all-time cinema experience.  It does demand all the theatre tech to get the most out of it though.

[Gambit]

16 hours ago, Paulando said:

I don’t think he’s ever really had a sense of humour? Aliens has some good laughs though.

 

The majority of which I'm pretty sure were adlibbed by Bill Paxton.

[Stig]

I've made the decision to not bother going to see this after convincing myself I would. Too many reports of it being boring plot wise and I'm unwilling to make a 5 hour round trip (which includes travel, adverts and the film) to see a film where its main feature is CGI only. Honestly, it's not enough for me to go watch a near 3.5hr film if the main plot isn't even interesting. I didn't like the first all that much and if people are saying this is worse, I'll save my money and time. 

[Stig]

On 17/12/2022 at 09:57, Triple A said:

It’s as though he’s become somewhat of a shock jock, trolling for views, since leaving the beeb 

 

I think it's more that he's been let off his leash without the restrictions of the BBC rules. If you've ever seen him on Twitter and other stuff, he's been like this for a long time.

 

He doesn't rant that much anyway, I think maybe 3 this year on the new show, plus I still enjoy listening because he offers a different perspective to Empire.

[makkuwata]

The Empire perspective.

 

[Bazjam]

3 hours ago, Stigweard said:

I've made the decision to not bother going to see this after convincing myself I would. Too many reports of it being boring plot wise and I'm unwilling to make a 5 hour round trip (which includes travel, adverts and the film) to see a film where its main feature is CGI only. Honestly, it's not enough for me to go watch a near 3.5hr film if the main plot isn't even interesting. I didn't like the first all that much and if people are saying this is worse, I'll save my money and time. 

I really wish I’d done this.

[Bazjam]

17 hours ago, PaB said:

Saw it today in imax hfr.

 

pros

Visually stunning

HFR is great. But then I am a fan of it 

Last 45 mins is good

 

cons.

its at least an hour too long

the story isn’t as good as the first (there’s a reason that plot line has been used so often)

Very few human characters make this essentially a Pixar film. 
 

2.75/5

This is a very good point. You really do feel like you’re watching a completely cgi film. Lots has been made of the advancement of underwater camera technology for this, but when everything just looks computer generated it’s kinda hard to see the difference.

[macosx]

What a snoozefest. Some amazing visuals but lacked the inventiveness of the first and just felt like a game trailer. Walked out.

Love and own all Cameron’s films but this 

Spoiler

needed some serious editing as it just became a graphics showcase midway through. When a whale starts talking telepathically in papyrus font it’s game over man.

 

[Alex W.]

On 16/12/2022 at 11:28, K said:

Although that said, the Miami Vice film did something similar by shooting everything on relatively primitive HD digital cameras, which gave everything a kind of uncanny hyper-real atmosphere, which I thought worked really well, even though the vibe of the film and the action sequences was pure ridiculous escapist fantasy.

Boring technical details: for Miami Vice and Most Wanted, what they were doing was shooting at 24 fps with a 360-degree “shutter angle”, i.e. the fraction of the time the film is exposed during each 1/24 of a second. (Out of a possible 360 degrees. 360 is only possible on digital: with film the shutter has to close when you advance to the next frame, but otherwise the principles are identical.) That means everything happening in front of the camera appears on one frame or another, averaged together in motion blur. At the opposite end with a very narrow shutter angle you get just what is happening at the exact moment the shutter is open. The image strobes in and out 24 times per second, these perfect 1/2400th of a second snippets with no blur. That’s what the opening of Saving Private Ryan looked like.

 

And it’s always been interesting to me that full-shutter-angle 24fps looks so much like 48 or 60fps or higher video. I think it implies that the “film look” doesn’t come from the actual frame rate but from the strobing.

[Paulando]

Thought this was fucking great. Didn’t once get distracted by how good the CGI was, because everything was just so solid and real, and I was totally absorbed in the alien world.

 

It’s long, but it flew by for me. Enjoyed it a lot more than the first film too, I think because the na’vi are way less annoying. That’s probably down to Sully’s family and the child actors playing them, who were exceptional I thought. That they did all of the underwater stuff for real made all that stuff even more astonishing.

 

I was split with the HFR. On one hand it made the 3D far more comfortable in fast-moving scenes, but the HFR shots with human actors had that hyper-real Gemini Man look. There was also little consistency with what was HFR and what wasn’t, and some shot-reverse-shot scenes had them mixed in! The underwater stuff was hugely improved with HFR though, felt like you were there with them. Wish it was just one or the other though, or there was a more obvious split (like the IMAX/non-IMAX scenes in the Nolan Batman films).

 

Solid 4/5 for me. Wonderful cinema experience.

[IcEBuRN]

On 17/12/2022 at 16:43, the_debaser said:

I just spent about 2hrs watching this and walked out of the cinema so don’t know how it ends. And to be honest I don’t care. It is unbelievably boring, and quite possibly the worst thing I’ve seen all year.  

 

Avoid. 0/5. 

I don't really know you. But the fact you walked out of a film that you paid for makes you an idiot, thus your opinion invalid.

 

I just got back from a 3d showing of it. It was a mediocre film, with ground-breaking CGI, pretty much as you'd expect. The 3D in the last segment/finale was awesome, and makes me wish it hadn't died a death so badly.

 

I look forward to checking out a nice 4k HDR/HFR release.

[makkuwata]

Hey now, I walked out of The Island when Scarlett Johansson saw an ad of herself selling a real product. The idiot stays through pain like that. 

[SonOfSoAngry]

Yeah, the one thing in this life you don’t get back is time; if anything people should walk out of films more often.

 

I walked out of the first Harry Potter when Emma Watson showed up with a plummy “Hullo, has anyone seen a toad?”

[Paulando]

41 minutes ago, SonOfSoAngry said:

Yeah, the one thing in this life you don’t get back is time; if anything people should walk out of films more often.

Yeah, totally agree with this. I’ve walked out of a couple and/or turned them off because they were rubbish. Couldn’t get through Jurassic World Dominion, for example.

 

But I would question anyone who takes time out of their day and pays to see a sequel when they claimed ‘the first film was wank’, and anticipated that this ‘will be even worse’.

[NoVisAnima]

It was too long and story set up was all over the place but when it settled down back into living in the world it worked better. The hyperreal nature of the HFR worked so well on the Na'vi for me and I kept struggling to remember they were CGI.

[Waggo]

33 minutes ago, NoVisAnima said:

 The hyperreal nature of the HFR worked so well on the Na'vi for me and I kept struggling to remember they were CGI.

 

Being blue and 7 foot tall didn't give it away?

[JPL]

1 hour ago, NoVisAnima said:

when it settled down back into living in the world it worked better

I went to see it over the weekend and this worse the worst part for me. I understand what he was trying to do by building the characters, but it dragged so badly in the middle after the decent setup and excellent third act.

[Paulando]

That second act was a nice breather. I sat there and happily enjoyed the spectacle and incredible vistas. That was it for me: experiencing something created entirely from someone’s imagination. It was a real place with living, breathing inhabitants while I was watching it. Loved that bit.

[IcEBuRN]

Nope, I don't get it. I see what you guys are saying, but if you've invested the time and money to get to the cinema, you've sat through two thirds of the film, why not complete it at that point? You're really not gaining anything by leaving that far through, and I'm sorry, but  there must be a warped sense of quality going on here, because while I didn't think the film was amazing, there's absolutely, objectively, no way it's so bad it's worth walking out on like that.

[Uncle Mike]

What if it's crap and you realise it's not going to change? You've not invested anything really, and staying put is just gambler's fallacy of chasing a loss.

[macosx]

I walked out yesterday 2 hrs in and went home and played CoD with my mates and read the wiki on what I’d missed in the gulag

Spoiler

Whilst watching I was awaiting when one of the forgettable Sully kids was getting chased by a big fish ; ‘there’s always a bigger fish’ and on cue it appeared. Then some humans randomly turn up to hunt the whales you’ve just made mind friends with. Just trash.

 

[Jammy]

I was tempted to take the boy to see this, but with a 3.5hr runtime and a slow middle act it would be a recipe for an unenjoyable experience for both of us. I would like to see it as intended though, as much for the spectacle as anything.