Just got back from it. I seem to have the heart of a TV fan and not a movie fan, because I actually really appreciate consistency in locations and other aspects of production design; there's something grounding about spending so much time in the reef, and revisiting the forest, seeing the humans using the same water-craft. I get taken out of the story when there's a lot of change for change's sake, like the Star Wars prequels, the MCU, the Dark Knight (which was then reversed by DKR incorporating much more stuff from Batman Begins back into the world). There's also the fact that this one could concentrate more on narrative momentum since we weren't getting a whole new biome with new rules to learn. I guess the drawback to remaining in the same settings largely was that it didn't reach the same level of bitchin'-ness as the previous film. I only shit myself with my mouth wide open during the closing action scene with the ships being chewed up by the magnetic tornado. No, I am never going to stop bringing up that James Cameron quote.
The dialog was more naturalistic and didn't have the leadenness of other Cameron scripts (I don't remember to what degree that was the case for Way of Water, though). It probably could've used a little more humor, I think my only laugh was Kiri doing the "Aliens" line. Overall, I think centering the movie on the family's grief over Neteyam's death and how it affected all of them, from Jake trying to repress the whole thing, Lo'ak being suffocated by his feelings of culpability, and Neytiri sublimating all of her bigotry and rage about her family's human heritage into blaming Spider for existing.
The Ash people were a good addition to show that things aren't all peace and love on Pandora, and that the "insanity" of human avarice and warmongering isn't exclusive to them (which is what brings Neytiri back around). I think that perspective shift will be important in what I assume is the endgame of the series, a return to Earth to try and bring humanity back into symbiosis with their own homeworld.
I think Cameron is on to something with using high frame rates only sometimes to avoid the "soap-opera effect" and as a dramatic device, but I don't think the balance was as good as it was in Way of Water. There were many more cases where I noticed the frame rate step back down to (I assume) 24 FPS, but I'd gotten used to the smoother motion and it seemed to "step" visually. I'm not sure how many different speeds were used in the film, but experientially, my guess is that it went as fast as 96 FPS, which set the psychological benchmark for "too smooth," and made 48 FPS feel cinematic, and 24 feel slide-showy. I support more experimentation with variable frame rates as a dramatic device, but I think that is going to require a lot of growing pains until the "vocabulary" is worked out.
I hadn't been to the theater in a while, I forgot how good Dolby screens look. I'd gotten used to them when I was seeing movies in the cinema more regularly and stopped appreciating how big the difference is. It also doesn't help that the pre-roll with the side-by-side comparisons don't make the normal screen look crappy enough to be an authentic demonstration. I saw a demo in a professional color correction suite when Dolby Cinema was first being rolled out in 2017 or so, and the guy there showed us demo footage on his conventional mastering monitor first just so we could know what it looked like (pretty good!), then the HDR monitor, which was visibly better, and then he turned the conventional monitor back on and it was shocking how gray and flat it looked when it was side-by-side with the HDR screen; it looked almost like uncorrected log footage, even though it'd seemed bright and colorful a few minutes earlier before we'd seen the alternative.
I think they already have, technically. I remember before Way of Water came out, there was an interview where Cameron or others were talking about the filming plan, and how they'd had to shoot 2, 3, and part of 4 as close together as they could, then there was a time-jump partway through 4, so they could pick up production of the last 70% of the movie or whatever it was later on after 2 and 3 had been finished.
The dialog was more naturalistic and didn't have the leadenness of other Cameron scripts (I don't remember to what degree that was the case for Way of Water, though). It probably could've used a little more humor, I think my only laugh was Kiri doing the "Aliens" line. Overall, I think centering the movie on the family's grief over Neteyam's death and how it affected all of them, from Jake trying to repress the whole thing, Lo'ak being suffocated by his feelings of culpability, and Neytiri sublimating all of her bigotry and rage about her family's human heritage into blaming Spider for existing.
The Ash people were a good addition to show that things aren't all peace and love on Pandora, and that the "insanity" of human avarice and warmongering isn't exclusive to them (which is what brings Neytiri back around). I think that perspective shift will be important in what I assume is the endgame of the series, a return to Earth to try and bring humanity back into symbiosis with their own homeworld.
I think Cameron is on to something with using high frame rates only sometimes to avoid the "soap-opera effect" and as a dramatic device, but I don't think the balance was as good as it was in Way of Water. There were many more cases where I noticed the frame rate step back down to (I assume) 24 FPS, but I'd gotten used to the smoother motion and it seemed to "step" visually. I'm not sure how many different speeds were used in the film, but experientially, my guess is that it went as fast as 96 FPS, which set the psychological benchmark for "too smooth," and made 48 FPS feel cinematic, and 24 feel slide-showy. I support more experimentation with variable frame rates as a dramatic device, but I think that is going to require a lot of growing pains until the "vocabulary" is worked out.
I hadn't been to the theater in a while, I forgot how good Dolby screens look. I'd gotten used to them when I was seeing movies in the cinema more regularly and stopped appreciating how big the difference is. It also doesn't help that the pre-roll with the side-by-side comparisons don't make the normal screen look crappy enough to be an authentic demonstration. I saw a demo in a professional color correction suite when Dolby Cinema was first being rolled out in 2017 or so, and the guy there showed us demo footage on his conventional mastering monitor first just so we could know what it looked like (pretty good!), then the HDR monitor, which was visibly better, and then he turned the conventional monitor back on and it was shocking how gray and flat it looked when it was side-by-side with the HDR screen; it looked almost like uncorrected log footage, even though it'd seemed bright and colorful a few minutes earlier before we'd seen the alternative.
I think they already have, technically. I remember before Way of Water came out, there was an interview where Cameron or others were talking about the filming plan, and how they'd had to shoot 2, 3, and part of 4 as close together as they could, then there was a time-jump partway through 4, so they could pick up production of the last 70% of the movie or whatever it was later on after 2 and 3 had been finished.
