Mainly because Average Joes are reporting that they’re suffering vague headaches and otherwise (as I noted in my initial reaction) feeling exhausted from the weight and length and gut-slammy nature of Avatar 2. Which is partly attributable to its 192-minute length, and partly due to the heavily-saturated visual spectacle.
It’s too familiar, too cliched, too long and, the underwater stuff aside, not as much of an eye-popper as the original Avatar because it’s basically a flamboyant rehash and because so much has happened big-spectacle-wise over the last 13 years.
Avatar 2 is visually masterful and dazzling from start to finish, yes, but, as the Critical Drinker notes, “visual spectacle is nothing new in movies today, and the more you see it in this film, the less impact it ends up having,..it’s like being fed the world’s largest chocolate cake morning, noon and night for an entire year…eventually you get kinda sick of it.”
Plus pic “suffers from a bloated and self-indulgent screenplay that drags on for at least an hour longer than it needs to…the middle family section is 90 minutes of sheer fucking inertia.”
Boiled down, the too-much-chocolate-cake aspect, I think, is what seems to be giving people headaches. (And which may have killed that poor guy in India.) Chocolate cake overload. Avatar 2 may or may not reach the worldwide $2 billion gross that director-writer-producer James Cameron has said it needs to earn to be considered a success, but like I said a day or two ago, three Avatars on Pandora will be more than enough. Please.
The only thing that could prolong the interest factor would be if a huge Navi army travels to our planet to confront the powers-that-be and…I don’t know, demand that they leave Pandora alone. Perhaps a wild-ass battle of some kind, or perhaps some kind of a Davy Crockett goes to Congress denouement…I don’t know. Okay, confronting humans on their own turf isn’t such a good idea. The Navi can’t breathe our air, for one thing.
Three is enough, over and out.
