I thought it was decent and obviously visually excellent but I have 4 issues (stared as two but grew as i was thinking about it more):
- I thought the villains were overly cartoonish. I don’t remember if it was that bad in the first time of the movie but I found my self annoyed pretty much every time the soldiers were on screen. Not only were their depictions cheesy (every time that one soldier popped the bubble gum I was legitimately angry) but I feel like their story didn’t serve it’s purpose. Cameron’s goal of these movies is to use his talents to take on issues of conservation an climate change for a popular culture direction which is all well and good but is this movie effective in that? The antagonist isn’t the systematic environmental destruction. It could have been. The humans are tearing down the forests of Pandora and and harvesting the whales which in its own could be the source of the conflict with Jake as the protagonist. Instead they bring back the villain from the first movie and makes the drive myopically centered on his revenge against Jake (then worst of all let’s him live to return in the sequel when the other who were just part of expeditions for medicine get shot burned and drowned). This issue with climate change and the stripping of natural resources isn’t one guy on a vendetta over decade, it’s about capitalistic systems of complicity and collective preferences for profit and comfort. Sure there there’s your oil execs that support expansive drilling and reduced regulation and there’s politicians and members of the military that facilitate it but the issue isn’t that those individuals get reincarnated and are focused on killing the people who killed them, it’s the fact that new people see the wealth the last guy accumulated and want to get the same. If they were going to focus on the military chasing after Jake to kill would have preferred if they’d put more focus on the new general and the whale profiteer seeking out Jake not because they don’t like him but they see him as a legitimate strategic threat to their operations as the leader of the resistance operation. You can have the same movie with out the silliness of fake Navi caricatures. You are also able to make it so the antagonist isn’t just a straight up asshole and has a glimmer of humanity overshadowed by self centeredness. After all, the allegory is supposed to be the planet is the protagonist and those destroying it are the antagonist but in real life it isn’t mustache twirling villains happy to kill everything it’s real people in positions of power (and even ordinary people with little power but who perpetuate the systems) who are just willing to look the other way when it comes to consequences. Perhaps I’m looking at it wrong and it will become clear when the whole series is done. I’m inclined to map this movie closer to the present day: the military is representing of the American and other western aggressors wars in the Middle East for oil. When you do that though it kind of makes Jake Sully a stand in for Bin Laden or other leader who the military is putting on display and retaliating against for terrorism. I suppose instead the concept is that the first movie is 16/17th century starts of western colonization; this one is more 17/18th beginnings of native genocide and plantation systems; three might introduce “enlightenment” from the invaders at the same time destructive practices continue along with slavery; four would then be full industrialization on stolen land; and five brings us to the modern day. Perhaps that will be the case and more clearly so by the end but with the movies so far apart and hard to even remember it just didn’t track for me in this one.
- The premise that the humans are just flat out committing genocide is bonkers to me. It’s often a question I have about future earth scenarios where humans are invaders. I get that it’s allegory (see essay above) but it doesn’t make sense to me that after centuries of regret for a deep history of disruption of native cultures and the planet’s ecosystem the powers that be would just be cool with doing it on another planet. The fact that this movie exists among many which are part of a progression toward moral and ethical improve the when it comes to human and natural rights. The implication that somehow that has regressed on the Earth of Avatar or never happened in the first place (essentially in Avatar cannon was there never an Avatar equivalent, there was but people in charge actively ignored it, or there was but people forgot it). I suppose it’s the same as the necessity of some zombie media to not have zombies to make sense.
- The timeline was confusing. After the one year time jump to the villain’s arrival the passage of time for the bad guys and the good guys doesn’t seem to line up. On the whole it felt like Spider was with his “dad” for the same time that the Sullys were with the ocean tribe but when they cut between the two it felt like time was passing at disconnected and inconsistent rates. There’s been a couple things recently if felt this editing issue but it particularly stuck out to me in this.
- Love Jermaine Clement, he was terribly cast in this. Because the actors I’m most familiar with are Navi it make it really easy to ignore the fact that you recognize them (I’m not entirely sure if I would have realized Sigorney Weaver was playing her own daughter if I hadn’t heard about it before seeing the movie) but Jermaine was the only non-cgi actor I recognized so he stuck out like a sore thumb. To make matters worse they inexplicably had him doing an American accent. The captain of his ship wasn’t American (I think it was Australian) so why didn’t Jermaine just use his Kiwi accent?! It made recognizing him even more distracting because during the first few scenes he was in I was trying to figure out if it was him out I was crazy.
The logic is a bit messy. Like how did they spend three weeks teaching Walt to be Calvin and yet he doesn’t even skim Calvin’s thesis despite reading Sophie’s and Sophie doesn’t think it could be important that her “boyfriend” knows her parents were dead. Also, how is she rich if she grew up next to a toxic dump site. Are Calvin’s parents rich and if so how did they meet. Or, did she get some sort of settlement from her parents wrongful death from pollution either could be interesting but they just let her be rich for the sake of getting her to Mars. I am glad that in the future we discover that crippling anxiety can be cured immediately by dancing. Also, why is it called Moonshot? There had to have been a more clever title.
I thought it was cute and I liked the introduction of Zach Braff’s character and would have liked to see more of him and Cole. I think they did too much trying to balance complicated romance narrative and Walt’s personal growth/Charlie and the Chocolate factory storyline. I feel like they could have just simplified some things and cut 20 minutes off the movie and it would have been better. What I think might have happened given Greg Berlanti’s involvement it could have been conceived as a series—and episode on Earth, a few on their way to Mars, and a couple more once when they arrived—allowing the world and relationships to be explored and explained with out having to quickly explain away things to have time for the love story. I’m disappointed because I feel like the performances were generally good and the concept was interesting but it needed some better script edit or restructuring.
