Don’t think it’s a diety, I’m pretty sure that the idea here is that Pandora is/has a planetary brain of some sort, and yes, the flora and fauna can be controlled by it.
That, at least, makes sense. Since when are the super-rich known for their long-term thinking? If an immortality serum is available, they’ll buy it and to hell with the consequences.
I couldn’t understand why Cameron used Edie Falco, a great actress, for three throw away scenes. I think it would have been a much more entertaining movie to show her as the quasi-villain, who is less GI Joe than the colonel, but still decides she has to use force against the Na’vi, getting more and more evil as she goes. Maybe they will do more with her in the next movie, but it just seemed like a waste of great talent on three scenes that basically any actor would have been fine for.
My guess is going forward Quaritch becomes less evil, eventually allies with the Navi, and she becomes the big bad somehow.
Well both things can be true. There is a named deity, Eywa, that the na’vi worship, and that represents some kind of “spirit of the earth”.
Secondly, there’s no doubt that Eywa can control the behaviour of the fauna, as that’s what happened at the end of the first movie. The question is whether they are still under some kind of direct control in the second movie.
I think most likely the writers just plum forgot about the major plot beats of the first movie and/or thought no-one would care. Because the new behaviours don’t make a great deal of sense and aren’t the same as in the first movie.
I also wanted to know what happened to Nurse Jackie after her appearance earlier in the film.
I’m about an hour or so in and I have questions.
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Avatars can have kids with Na’vi? Uh, I guess I figured their Avatar bodies were…incomplete. Like, I didn’t think of them as the kind of thing(are their Avatar bodies “things”?) that would be sexually compatible with Na’vi.
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Wait, they can store people as backups? This is like Altered Carbon, where people can kind of live forever because they are stored on backup hard-drives. They brought back the villain from the first one because they…backed him up? What does that entail? Is death ever permanent, then?
In the first movie it’s explained that the avatars are grown from both human and Na’vi genetics. Which apparently is what makes it possible for a human to ‘remote pilot’ their custom grown avatar. I think this handwaving just makes it possible for the movie makers to have the human’s avatars have similar faces to their pilots. So, yes, apparently the avatars and Na’vi can interbreed, but for some reason the half-breed avatars have human-standard four fingers+thumb, and OG Na’vi have 3 fingers, something not brought up at all in the first film but a minor plot point in this one.
Almost none of this is explained. We don’t know if tech exists to do this for everyone, or if it was a one-off using extreme mil tech/budget for just a few people.
See, this is what is weird. Altered Carbon(I am specifically talking about the show) got into this idea in a great way. A guy is murdered, but he is murdered with a several hour gap since his last upload, so he hires a detective to figure out who killed him and what the heck happened in the hours-long gap since his previous backup-copy was made.
My wife and I only watched about 60% of the movie last night, but we were laughing at how comically evil they made the antagonist again, just like he was in the first one…where he died.
Anyway, it’s certainly well made, but the effects are actually not blowing us away like we expected them to. I don’t care about effects that much and, while James Cameron would scoff at me for saying this, the effects are certainly good enough. I think some of the landscapes are just so clearly animated, not real.
Finished it today with my wife.
Yeah, that was certainly a movie. A pretty good movie, but nothing all that special or amazing. I thought the first one was quite a bit better. I can’t believe it really did just turn into Stephen Lang vs. Sam Worthington again.
The humans are back to get the unobtanium, I assume. So why is Stephen Lang getting revenge on Sam Worthington so important? Like, I get that the villain wants revenge, but why would the rest of the humans allow him to go so far?
Anyway, neat enough movie. I’ll check out the third one on streaming or Blu-ray.
When the “sky people” returned they started stomping all over the landscape again. Worthington’s character organized an apparently effective resistance. The lady general ordered Lang’s character to break the resistance so Pandora could be colonized, because “Earth is dying, Pandora is the future”. Lang took that as killing the leader of the resistance, Sully, and off we go.
Unobtainium is not mentioned.
I wonder what’s up with Cameron constantly trying to drown people, in at least two movies? Those scenes were tough to watch, and a bit silly as the characters could hold their breath exactly as long as the plot required.
Is…that not what they are there for? I guess it was to move humans there this time?
They traveled the stars seeking handwavium 
This time it was colonization, but it’s not clear to me that in the first movie that wasn’t also the case. Last time we had an updated Carter Burke ruthlessly seeking some mineral and having jarheads to throw at the problem. This time the military itself is in charge, fuck the stockholders.
The whale story was neat enough, but I still think he should have full-blown smashed that ship/boat to kill the Australian(?) bad guy instead of cutting his arm off.
Was Jemaine Clement also supposed to be Australian? I mean, what a stretch for him as an actor.
I watched this recently and had a few thoughts. First, this one is fairly technical but I think it exemplifies the whole movie, because it happens right at the beginning and set the stage for the rest of what I saw. When the sky people arrive in their new colonizing fleet, they arrive in massive starships. As they slow down from their relativistic journey their massive fusion drives are angled away from the ship structure making giant glowing Vs in space. A striking visual image, and of course even more striking when these same engines are, for some reason, used in atmosphere to lower a skyscraper full of space bulldozers to the surface, causing a cartoonish amount of damage to the terrain around the landing zone. Very evocative, but also very stupid. Nobody would design a spaceship where 90% of the ship’s structure is exposed to the intense heat and ionizing radiation of the drive plume. You put that shit in the back because that’s where all the shielding already is. And why would you use an engine built to move a ship across interstellar space into a planetary atmosphere, when this is already a universe with giant orbital shuttles? As Benoit Blanc said, “No! It’s just dumb!”
Jake Sully has five children. Oldest, who carries the burden of every “oldest child” stereotype; Fuckup, who is more interesting than Oldest and constantly fucks up his life; Hostage, a girl doomed to exist for no other reason; Tarzan, an adopted human boy who runs around in a loincloth for no reason; and Kiri, an adopted Na’vi who gets to keep her actual name because there’s no short pithy way to say “Literally Pandoran Jesus”
The Sea Na’vi, who are obviously physically different from the Forest Na’vi because heaven forbid we include anything like a race analog without making the races literally different, are friends with the Tulkun, a species of hyperintelligent whales. This is cool to look at, but what does this friendship mean? What we see on screen is, what, they sort of hang out and gossip? This is somehow important enough that the Tulkun, who are strict pacifists, are fine hanging out with Na’vi who are happy to kill for basically any reason?
Pakayan, the rogue Tulkun, is the only good character in this movie. “He’s just misunderstood!” insists Fuckup, but he is not misunderstood. Pakayan has come to understand the radical philosophy of murder, which his people have rightly exiled him for. The first thing we ever see him do is murder the shit out of an alien shark. If he is nice to you, it’s because he doesn’t think you deserve death. Everyone else is fair game.
Neytiri, Jake’s wife, might be the least utilized character in this movie. At least Hostage makes an effort to learn the ways of the Sea Na’vi and drives the plot a couple times. Neytiri refuses to do anything the Sea People way. She doesn’t take a water mount. She doesn’t learn how to use their weapons. This never comes up as a problem despite the fact it obviously should have. At the climax, she’s the only one that hops on a flying mount. Dang, maybe more air support could have come in handy? Maybe she could have taught the Sea Na’vi some Forest Na’vi tricks? No? Well, at least she spends most of her screen time shooting arrows directly into pilots and screaming hysterically whenever something bad happens.
Was there a deleted scene where Colonel Asshole tried to get his ‘son’ Tarzan to trade his nasty wet loincloth in for a pair of pants? Will he get in trouble for wasting probably close to a billion dollars worth of whaling equipment and personnel to go after a guy they had just scared off after one (1) slightly successful counterinsurgency mission? What exactly is the use case for that hilariously oversized mind-reading machine when they don’t have a Tarzan to put in it? Does it just sit in the middle of their facility collecting dust?
Many of my other points have been mentioned already, not limited to the anti-aging whale juice that shouldn’t really matter in a world where you can grow clones and copy people’s consciousness around.
Long story short, this is a $500 million movie for which they spent over half a decade just hammering out the screenplay. The result is pathetic. It’s the Hollywood equivalent to a Tibetan sand mandala: beautiful to look at but ultimately disposable.
And disappoinging coming from the man who created two great sequels previously. He took a look at Alien and successfully figured out what would make a second one not only worthwhile, but highly memorable and impactful.
He made The Terminator, which is a great movie, but what is incredible as they were able to figure out how to make a sequel that surpasses it by quite a bit. And relatively quickly this time.
Avatar 2 does not figure out how to take Avatar, which is a pretty good movie, and escalate the series by making a vastly superior sequel. Nope. I told my wife yesterday, “Uh, Avatar 2 was OK, but I actually remember quite a bit about the first one…and the second one is only OK and kind of forgettable.”
Actually, the ships in Avatar were based on Project Valkyrie, which posited placing the engines and crew areas at opposite ends of long carbon tethers so heavy shielding would be less necessary. It was also apparently the only film depiction of a spaceship having radiators, without which the whole damn thing would melt from the waste heat.
Yup, that was pretty stupid.
While it may be true that the design of the ships in Avatar is based on this design it’s pretty self-evident that they’re nowhere near 10 kilometers long (the wiki states 1.6km). The energetic engine exhaust is shown being multiple times larger than the ships themselves, so I doubt any of the advantages of distance and shielding shown in the original Project Valkyrie design are at play here.
I will give them props for depicting engine radiators, which would be absolutely vital for any interstellar ship. Basically, it’s a realistic design for a starship being depicted in a very unrealistic manner.
I watched Avatar 2 again on my PC this weekend and when you’re looking at it critically for a second time there are loads of animation/CGI effects that don’t hold water (pun intended). For instance, many times a wave will pass along a beach or under their houses and not wet anything it touches. A canoe will rise and fall as a wave moves underneath it but it doesn’t get wet, splashes don’t get things wet. Little things like this really expose the thing for what it is - a glorified cartoon. That, and the super childish story/script. Drinking game - take a swig every time a character growls or snarls at another. Oh, another thing, the shark that chases the boy is almost exactly the same as a scene in Avatar 1 where a tiger chases the hero. Plagiarising his own movie almost!