Titanic just recently had it’s 25th anniversary, so I had decided to challenge myself to a James Cameron double feature while the majority of Western society had their eyes focused on this year’s Super Bowl (Shoutout to KCK). While I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to enjoy and identify with the characters featured in Titanic, in so far becoming thoroughly immersed in the 3D presentation, it made The Way Of Water – a film Cameron made 25 years after Titanic – all the more disappointing. Note that I was dragged to see The Way of Water during it’s premiere week by a co-worker (because this journalism shit pays less than pennies), where I essentially payed for Babylon, walked into Way Of … and read comics for the duration of the film, listening to the dialogue that sounded like a typical family movie mixed with the same plot of the first Avatar, until I walked out.
My second outing to Way Of … came from me walking into Avatar two minutes after viewing the four hour showing of Titanic (trailers and credits matter) – a film I did not check my clock on or get up to use the restroom once – to sit through James Cameron’s version of National Geographic meets Pocahontas, until I decided to be held hostage no longer and took a much needed intermission. Finally, I returned back to the theatre after reliving myself and getting more food to fuel back up on and walked in an hour after it started and the film was still barely just getting to the rising action ! I had a whole meal and read through all of David F. Walker’s excellent “Shaft” Dynamite run and still had thirty minutes to spare until I caught up to the final hour where the climax finally began, and I have to say – the build was not worth seeing even more Nat Geo scenes and about thirty minutes of ship destruction/sailor survival homage to Titanic when hours earlier, filmed a quarter of a century ago, I saw Jack and Rose do it better.
Cameron should listen to a little more Hip-Hop. 50 and Em obviously did when James Horner who scored Titanic was selected to score the Jake Gyllenhall combat sports joint Southpaw. If Cameron listened to Hip-Hop more often he might stumble across Busta Rhymes’ “Legend of The Fall Offs” and figure out the lyrics in that Big Bang – closer can describe his entire career post – Titanic, which unsurprisingly finds the first Avatar placed chronologically in the lauded director’s filmography. For The Way of Water, audiences were given familial melodrama that could be done better on a low budget telenova, nearly an hour of a wannabe Captain Ahab/ Moby Dick story that looked better on trailers for Free Willy and every sequel that followed it, and tribal/ethnic tension told through the lens of European colonists razing indigenous “so black they’re blue” people in the search for physical immortality while marveling at the size, speed, and spiritual capabilities of the same people these colonists covertly (and overtly) assimilate culturally towards in order to rape and pillage their world; a story that is more entertaining in a college African Diaspora studies lecture than this four hour family flop.
Wan’t to know why Terminator, Judgement Day, and Aliens were so good ? Because James Cameron stayed away from the editing room.
The reason why Titanic and the Avatar‘s that followed are so bloated in runtime is because James Cameron is a terrible editor. Dialogue scenes that were cut in favor of twenty minute scenes of what looks like ad space for timeshares on Pandora is inexcusable. Literally cloning the same villain from the first film and going through the exact same motions that led to the end of the first Avatar to even spawn a sequel in the first place is just lazy writing.
I love Zoe Saldana as a sex symbol. That Afro-Caribbean Goddess is always going to draw me to at least try a movie as boring as Amsterdam, but holy shit, this was too much. This really took fourteen years to make? With technology so cutting-edge that Rayman on a PSX is more visually stunning? By the time I got my third viewing in to finish the film I opted for the 2D version, and honestly the sound and visual quality were much better with the downgrade from the standard premium formats. How is that even possible for a film from one of the guys that brought modern day cinema the “blockbuster”? When films like Titanic and Judgement Day look far superior in premium formats than a film made nearly decades later from the same director, it’s obvious this guy is moving more than backwards. Ever since Cameron opened up “Pandora”‘s Box he’s not only lost his marbles but damaged his legacy to the degree that not even Kyle Reese going back in time could repair it.
Avatar : The Way of Water is a remix of the first Avatar with heavy plagarizations of Cameron’s Titanic and Nat Geo excerpts taken directly from Disney’s archive’s once they acquired 20th Century Studios and bought the rights to Cameron’s air headed franchise by proxy.
The Way of Water is one of the most expensive films ever made … Titanic cost less to make than The Way of Water. National Geographic cost less to film and all the stories that inspired The Way of Water cost less to create probably put together. With costs always going up in a capitalistic economy where the blockbuster was born, it makes no sense for companies to keep funneling money to this dinosaur who no longer knows how to entertain audiences.
The Way of Water is James Cameron’s way of torturing audiences into having bladder issues. At least Spielberg tried and (failed) to be subtle when scripting those epithets in regards to the monkey scene in The Fabelmans. But in a landmass with an anagram spelling “I Am Race”, I don’t believe my fellow Americans are tired of being openly insulted on screen by the old guard of Hollywood, but I truly am.
I didn’t spend one penny on watching The Way of Water because I don’t believe another penny should go to this tired series that seems to be designed just to put audiences to sleep.
Cameron was cool in the 90’s. It is time for the champions of yesteryear like Cameron,Spielberg, Scott (Ridley), and others who come from that class who were not a member of “A Band Apart” to hang it up. Cameron feels like a geezer who’s lost touch with the world around him since he believes that dated technology combined with a dated colonial conquest story is anything close to “cutting edge”. Just like the funeral at the end of the film, Cameron needs to use that as a metaphor for his career because “The Way of Water” in it’s four hours is a death knoll that sounds like a screaming banshee. It’s too late for a swan song. And since Cameron is attempting to extend this series further with a professed nine hour cut sent to the editing room for the yet to be titled “Avatar 3“, I really hope he sees the grave before another group of gullible goofballs take their guppies to another excuse for Cameron to torture audiences with this exercise of his “titanic” sized ego.
C.V.R. The Bard
Score : 1/5