I can't really say that memories came flooding back as I watched the first Avatar again, but I can say that seeing it confirmed the vague sense I had about it. It had an unexceptional script; the plot was fueled by tropes, and the dialogue (especially the constant voice-overs) clanged. But it looked amazing. That was even watching it at home, not in 3D (as originally released), and even 13 years later (with all the subsequent advances in visual effects).
Avatar: The Way of Water is all of that, again. Exactly.
The plot of James Cameron's new sequel is a regurgitation of exactly the same plot points of the original movie. The protagonist's story is carved up among multiple characters this time around, but everything is so much the same that it borders on ritualistic. That, plus the dialogue is just as tin-eared, with voice-over just as ham-fisted. If you didn't have to watch the first Avatar just to reconnect with a few basics about the setting, then you'd probably do well to skip it entirely and just watch The Way of Water, because it's the same movie.
From a technical standpoint, it's also exactly the same movie -- though in this case, I mean this as enthusiastic praise. As I said, the visuals of the first Avatar still seemed to hold up to me on a recent viewing, even several ways removed from "the author's intended experience." Watching it today, I thought, "yeah, I can see why this blew everyone's freaking minds in 2009." (Myself included.)
My mind is blown all over again seeing what The Way of Water pulls off. CG characters look so real that you simply cannot question their reality. There is no uncanny valley. And the "degree of difficulty" in what is depicted is orders of magnitude above what the first Avatar showed. Real human actors are more fully integrated into more critical action. CG characters interact in complex ways with complex lighting, water... everything that an animator would absolutely avoid if they were trying to make things easier on themselves. It is, quite frankly, hard to imagine how the visuals could ever be improved upon. (Maybe some day when people start making literally 3D movies? Holograms you can be inside?)
Well okay, there is one thing you could do to improve the visuals of Avatar: The Way of Water, but it has nothing to do with the impressive work of the animators. James Cameron has opted to revisit the experimentation with "High Frame Rate" that some directors were playing with a few years ago. Audiences rejected it at the time, noting that the HFR made everything look cheap and fake. Cameron believed he'd cracked the code now, though, combining a new process for adjusting the visuals in post-production with a decision to only use HFR in some shots of the movie (sticking with a conventional 24 frames per second for more intimate, dialogue driven scenes).
James Cameron did not crack the code here. If anything, he made it worse. That is, unless he was trying to give the world a "tutorial" on why everyone should turn off motion smoothing on their TVs by serving up a 3-hour-long side-by-side comparison of what movies look like with and without it.
Honestly, my experience with the HFR footage here is so horrible, it makes me question whether what I'm seeing is the same thing everyone else is seeing. Like "what if the color I call red is what everybody else sees as blue?" kind of existential uncertainty. Because it is inconceivable to me that a director as obsessed with perfection as James Cameron is would want any audience member to see his movie the way I did.
The stated goal of HFR is to render the world with hyper-realism, to remove the "jutter" of 24 frames per second and make you feel like you're looking through a window rather than at a screen. And when the camera is locked off, not moving at all, HFR does do exactly that. Every character (CG or not, when it comes to Avatar), every blade of grass, looks perfect and sharp. Any single freeze frame is a beautiful photograph suitable for framing on your wall.
But the moment that camera starts to move at all, things move too fast for the eye to keep up with. They literally seem to be moving too fast -- characters moving, almost "drifting," with unnatural speed. To my eye, backgrounds actually get less clear; moving by at seemingly a different speed than the foreground, everything turns to a blurry mess and I can't track what's going on. The big action scenes that are supposedly the showcase for using HFR? They border on incomprehensible to me, save in the blissfully relaxing shots where the camera isn't moving. And I'm not even having the experience that a handful of people report: having extreme motion sickness triggered by HFR. (Though I have tried VR goggles before, and found they can give me that sensation.)
Let that all serve as further testament to how amazing the visual effects work is in Avatar: The Way of Water. Because I hated-hated-hated the back and forth of conventional footage and HFR. I never stopped being aware of it, and that utterly destroyed any chances that the movie would engage me with its recycled plot. And still, I praise the movie as the most triumphant, accomplished visual effects work ever. It looks amazing. (Though if there is such a thing as a screening that has the 3D but not the intermittent HFR, that's the version of the movie I would recommend.)
I always wrap up my reviews by giving out a grade. But how can I possibly put one grade on this experience? The story took a lackluster element of the first Avatar and simply repeated it. (To be fair, not really doing it any worse. Just taking the uninspired and being uninspired again.) The technical achievement reached unimaginable new heights. And one galaxy-brained creative decision about the frame rate threatened to wreck the entire thing.
I'd give it a B, I guess? Yes, the visuals were THAT jaw-dropping, that with everything else pulling against the experience, Avatar: The Way of Water still just barely sneaks onto my Top 10 list of 2022, soon to be posted. (At least, until I see just one more worthy movie to kick it out to #11.)
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