Avatar chauffeur

My dad and my son finally saw Avatar: The Way of Water yesterday, 20 days after they were originally scheduled to see it.

And not without me chauffeuring them to and fro.

The tickets to see the movie on what was once the world's third largest IMAX screen were a Christmas present "from" my 12-year-old son to his grandfather, which really means I bought the tickets and told my son they were from him. So my son got an extra present. 

They were supposed to go on Wednesday, December 28th. But Tuesday, December 27th was when I tested positive for COVID. Neither of my sons ever tested positive, but it was understandable that my 83-year-old father didn't think it was a good idea to carry on with the next day's scheduled activities when we had no idea whether he'd be infected by his own grandson. (And we tried not to think too much about his exposure to me when I was infectious earlier that day, when we all went to see Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile.)

I had wondered if L,L,C might be the only movie in the theater they saw on the trip, which would have been okay since he and his wife seemed to like it. It was in keeping with the tradition of digital animals that blow my dad's mind, which started when he saw Peter Rabbit five years ago (as discussed in this post).

But the IMAX people surprised me. Despite stating flatly on the ticket that it is "non-refundable and can't be transferred to another session," the good people at the Melbourne Museum gladly allowed me to postpone our IMAX visit indefinitely, given my diagnosis with COVID. (My dad said he would have been willing to buy the replacement tickets if they couldn't reschedule for us, but it's uncertain whether this would have actually happened.)

I stopped testing positive on January 1st, and my wife did on about the 3rd or 4th. On the 6th we left on a weekend trip out of town for four nights, and the remainder of that week was spent finishing a building project that my dad had given us as a present, actually for my birthday if memory serves. 

This week is their last week in town, so I had to move now if I was going to reschedule the Avatar screening. I was sure the IMAX people would have thought better of it by now, but they had not. So we managed to book in seats D-18 and D-19 for the Tuesday 3 p.m. showing.

My original plan had been to send them off on the train for the excursion, but I had started to think better of that plan myself. Although my dad is one of the sharpest 83-year-olds you will ever see, he's shown some signs of confusion on this trip -- nothing major, but enough that I wasn't sure I wanted to send him off on a voyage into the downtown, where he'd have to catch the right tram up to the museum after the train ride, then walk correctly to the museum. Especially since my 12-year-old is fairly hopeless at the moment, which I'm told comes with this age.

Plus, speaking of this age, there's the fact that the 12-year-old has started to respond monosyllabically to every question or potential topic of conversation. I could only imagine the awkward 70 minutes on either side of the movie, when my dad tried in vain to engage him and my son reciprocated with nothing. A fate far worse than getting lost in the big city, it seemed to me.

So I drove them in, waited around three hours, and drove them back out.

This actually worked out to have its benefits. It turned out that our back driver's side tire got a flat the day before, and the place where we have a warranty against roadside tire hazards is right in the same neighborhood as the Melbourne Museum. So it actually worked out quite nicely, as the tire was fixed quickly (at no cost to us), and I could even finish off my normal workday, having only taken about 90 minutes to negotiate the logistics of getting them to the movie. I sat and had an iced coffee with the remaining hour of my work.

But getting there was a wee bit tense. Although I thought I left with plenty of time, the traffic started to crawl as we got into the city, and I probably hadn't taken the optimal route to get there -- seeing as how I was trying not to abuse the spare tire, which was not supposed to exceed 80 km per hour (about 50 mph). It was especially frustrating as we got closest to the museum, though I did luck out in finding a parking spot in front. But I had to go in with them and wait with them in the 15-minute line for the candy bar, since that's where I needed to redeem these replacement tickets. (I think they didn't want to just send me a barcode because then I could sell it to someone else, which goes against the spirit of their kindness in allowing the COVID postponement of the viewing.)

Fortunately, I sent them inside the theater just after the trailers began, and was back to my five-minute parking spot before anyone could realize it had been closer to 20.

Fortunately again, it was all worth it.

My son didn't call it his favorite film ever -- for once -- but he did say that as mind-blowing as the visual effects were, he actually might have liked the story more. Given that it focuses on teenagers bristling against the rules of their parents, that doesn't surprise me. (And I do think the story is a big improvement on the original Avatar.)

My dad used the three-word phrase both James Cameron and I were hoping he would use: "totally immersive experience." He was pretty amazed by it all, and asked a lot of questions that revealed my lack of technical expertise in describing the motion capture process. 

Neither reported being overwhelmed, in a bad way, by the 3D, but my son did say he had to take off his glasses for ten seconds here and there just to reset. 

There was an added risk with Avatar: The Way of Water that I haven't mentioned until now: Neither of them had actually seen the original. So I brought them up to speed over dinner a few nights earlier, though I'm not sure how much they retained, nor how much they needed to retain -- the film's first ten minutes do a pretty good job catching you up on the events of the first. 

I did feel a bit bad getting them tickets to the movie, knowing that they hadn't seen the first -- the least I could have done was set them up with a screening of Avatar, which is of course streaming on Disney+. However, if that hadn't worked for them, either because the story left something to be desired or because my TV wasn't an impressive enough way to watch it, it would have curdled some of their enthusiasm about the sequel. Besides, I know that most people aren't as worried as I am about whether they've seen the first movie before they sit down for the sequel. This was their big chance to see this impressive visual experience on as large a screen as possible, in 3D, so we had to take it. 

And just as I thought would probably happen -- because it happened, or more properly didn't happen, to me -- neither of them had to go to the bathroom during the movie. This even though I bought my son a popcorn, a bag of mixed lollies and a large Sprite (reminding me that they would have had to stand in this line even if we hadn't had to fetch the tickets). My dad settled for a more modest bottle of lemon lime and bitters, but this also did not travel its way through his bladder before the end of the movie.

The movie is having some trouble settling in its right spot in my year-end rankings, having started out higher than it currently is before dropping behind about seven movies that it used to be ahead of. I'm not immune to the backlash there has been to every James Cameron movie in the last 30 years. 

But "seeing it again" a month later, through the fresh eyes of my son and my father, has reminded me that the commodity Cameron brings to the screen every time -- most succinctly described as "movie magic" -- is worthy of a pretty prominent place on this list. That realization couples especially well with seeing a different movie last night whose technical challenges blew me away. This time of year, we always have to remember that while being moved, emotionally, may remain the ideal cinematic experience for most of us, the less sentimental -- but sometimes equally powerful -- emotion of awe must always be reckoned with.

I had almost forgotten that 3D was a thing

There are probably plenty of funny entry points to discussing my Wednesday night viewing of Avatar: The Way of Water. Here is a couple I will note but ultimately reject:

1) Of the two other people who were supposed to go with me, one couldn't go and one couldn't get there until the movie was nearly 15 minutes old. It's not funny except that one of them is a millennial and the other is a slightly older millennial, and this is very millennial behavior.

2) There was a 1:45 a.m. showing of this 192-minute movie, meaning it would get out around 5 a.m. I've heard of that sort of thing on opening nights of new Star Wars movies that can't start until after midnight, but not when there are showings at a very reasonable 6 p.m., like the one I went to.

But here's the one I did go with:

I couldn't remember the last time I had worn 3D glasses to a movie. 

Yeah we've had the pandemic and all that, but it was way before that. In fact, I doubt I'd have any way of figuring it out for sure. I was going to 3D movies fairly often (at least three to four times a year, anyway), and had no reason to believe that activity was about ready to subside. It's like that extremely melancholy concept that states "The last time you went outside to play with your friends, nobody knew it was the last time." I did nothing to mark the anticipated demise of 3D because I didn't know it was coming.

But then I wondered, is it possible that 3D has continued to be available, only I just haven't been going?

Now granted, I do see most movies in the theater for free with my critics card, which excludes novelties like 3D, IMAX or other oversized screens. (There's a thing here called X-Treme screen and another thing called VMAX, and I believe both are excluded from free passes.) 

But if so, then I'm not seeing it advertised on the posters anymore. There used to be something like "See it in 3D!" on the poster and you would actually consider doing that, depending on the movie.

And I think the glasses have had another technological upgrade, as they did this sort of thing where they synched themselves up, plus gave me a momentary panic about going blind. The first 3D trailer (I believe it was for the next Guardians of the Galaxy movie) led directly to something that was decidedly not 3D, and at least the guy next to me and I thought we might have lost vision in our right eye. It was disconcerting to say the least, having a black square of emptiness in that eye.

But I'm glad 3D was back for Avatar, because yes, the thing looked absolutely crazy once again. 

I don't know how I would really look at them side by side to tell you what was so different. I guess I'll just say it was more. More immersive, more grandiose, more imaginative -- just more. 

Now this is not to say I am giving it my top rating or anything. It's still an Avatar movie, and I firmly believe an Avatar movie has sort of a ceiling on it. But I definitely liked it better than the first. You can read my whole review here.

As for the length? Honestly, it felt like about 2:30. That's a huge compliment. In fact, so little did I need to go to the bathroom, I didn't actually go upon leaving the theater, I didn't actually go after sharing a pitcher of beer with my one friend who did make the screening, and I only finally relieved myself at the train station -- but not the departing side, the arriving side. I was able to hold it on on the whole ride home before deciding not to wait the extra five minutes for the bike ride back to my house. 

And it does look like at least the next Guardians of the Galaxy movie is coming out in 3D, so maybe I'll be donning the glasses again at some point in the not-too-distant future.

The unconscionable length of Avatar 2 is galling

I'm going to Avatar: The Way of Water on Wednesday in order to have a review up before the weekend, and because a friend suggested we go see it, and I suggested $35 seats at the IMAX cinema at the museum because might as well.

I had no idea, though, that I might need to clear my schedule for the whole day.

This movie is an absurd 192 minutes long. That's only two minutes shorter than Titanic.

Insert joke here about Titanic definitely not needing to be that length, but I will shoot that joke down if you try to. I value every single moment of Titanic, and there are many others out there who agree with me.

Avatar is a completely different story.

If James Cameron's idea were to fit every last bit of Pandora and Na'avi and Unobtanium that's floating around in his head into one movie, I get the three hours and 12 minutes. But Cameron has potentially three more Avatar movies still rolling around up there, though he's acknowledged it will only be one if The Way of Water flops.

Which, I've got to be honest, I think it will. 

As strange as it may seem to say this, Cameron has actually been a filmmaker of some restraint throughout his career. He hasn't pushed every success he's had to its breaking point. Only once before has he directed a sequel to one of his own movies, and it was actually arguably his best movie in Terminator 2. He made a dynamite sequel to someone else's movie in Aliens, but then disembarked the franchise at that point. He never pushed for a sequel to The Abyss, to True Lies, or, it may be obvious to say, to Titanic. 

The length of Avatar: The Way of Water in itself may not be out of character for Cameron, but its length, combined with its visit to a world we stopped caring about as soon as we left the theater in 2009, is. In the past, Cameron has always known what we've wanted and given it to us. Now, he thinks we want four more Avatar movies when there is no conceivable way that we do.

Maybe we'd want four more movies if this one were a reasonable length, meaning Cameron was planning to tell discrete, distinct stories, almost like episodes of a long-running TV series. A 100-minute Avatar movie? Sign me up.

But The Way of Water is 17 minutes longer than the longest 2022 movie I had been aware of to this point, that being The Batman. And that's part of a series that has proven time and again that we are willing to back to the well for more material.

Making any sequels to Avatar always felt like a gamble. So what if Jake Sully awakened in fully realized Na'avi mode at the end of that movie, ready for more Na'avi adventures. Just because he wanted them didn't mean we did.

The really silly thing about this is that this has the potential to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Cameron took the unusual proactive approach of acknowledging that the world might have moved on from Avatar and that he may only be able to justify one more movie financially. At three hours and 12 minutes, he's made it a virtual certainty that the movie won't garner the sort of repeat viewings that made Titanic and Avatar (a modest 162 minutes) such gargantuan hits. Without making bank from people going a second and third and fourth time, is there even a path to viewing this movie as a hit?

But maybe it's a picture that becomes clearer the more we look at it. Maybe Cameron already knows he's not making Avatar 4 and Avatar 5 and has front-loaded the story he wanted to end up with into the second and third movies, the latter of which must already be a fait accompli. How else to justify three and a quarter hours with characters we never even liked that much to begin with?

The other issue with the future Avatar movies is that too little time will elapse between them for each to represent a big technological jump forward from the previous one, the sort of technological jump we implicitly crave as viewers. Clearly we are thrilled by the possibilities of how the technology has advanced, in ways we might not have even imagined, in the 13 years since Avatar. When there's only two years elapsing between releases, and they are being made simultaneously with presumably similar technology, that part completely drops out of the equation.

And yet I have ponied up $35 to see it on the largest screen possible on Wednesday.

I don't want to root against Avatar: The Way of Water. I think cinema is a better place when there are wunderkinds willing to push the technology to its breaking point to give us breathtaking escapism. 

But I've already decided that if I have to leave in the middle of The Way of Water to go to the bathroom, so be it. I wouldn't have done that during Avengers: Infinity War, which was 12 minutes shorter, but I'm going to assume that the sea of Avatar blue will not miss me for five minutes at some point in the middle of this behemoth.