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Avatar 3: Fire and Ash - December 2025

IDKFA

I am Become Bilbo Baggins
Avatar is better than Terminator 2, there I said it.

lLva0B4.gif
 

RaduN

Member
Loved Avatar, thought TWoW was mid. I hope this one is going somewhere good, narratively.
2nd one came too far apart from 1st and they had to rework the script, and basically turn it into a reboot of sorts.

It's a good news to see that the rest seem to be on track-ish.

Thia one will basically be the 1st real sequel.
 
I do respect the technological aspect of the Avatar movies and I think the second one was at least slightly better than the first one in terms of the story, though that really not saying much. be that as it may, I still think these are not good movies, especially when it comes to story telling. would I watch this new one? sure, why not. I'm going in expecting the same fanncy spectacle as the first two. am I expecting the same bad story telling as the first two also? absolutely.
 
Excited Wake Up GIF by Originals


First movie was okay, second film bored me to tears and also had some baffling directions. It’ll take a god tier trailer to convince me to sit through another one of these.
Me too. I didn't eve finish it. Lost interest while watching. Just so boring.
 

AJUMP23

Parody of actual AJUMP23
Red Navi for Fire, Grey Navi for ASH, talking volcano monster that we will be told was some great creators. Those artist will be destroyed for some corporate need. Three hour long lecture on the environment


Sleep Yawn GIF
 

AlphaDump

Gold Member
Could not get into Avatar 1 at all, saw it once and shrugged, but 2 absolutely blew my face off. I am all in on this one.
 
Interested to see where this story goes and what other Na'vi tribes exist in this fascinating world.

Got a feeling this is all going to lead to a full scale interplanetary battle between Earth and Pandora.

But most looking foward to Avatar 4 as the Fox exec's who saw the script reacted with a 'holy fuck' when they saw that.
 

BadBurger

Many “Whelps”! Handle It!
Excited Wake Up GIF by Originals


First movie was okay, second film bored me to tears and also had some baffling directions. It’ll take a god tier trailer to convince me to sit through another one of these.

People excuse the scripts, but if anything the scripts should be even under higher scrutiny when they had 13 years to nail it (and all they could come up with was bring back the one good element of the first, the villain, and that was only due to the actor, the character himself was your average asshole corrupt general). Terminator 1 and 2 and Aliens had solid scripts along with the other elements, Avatar’s repeated failure in the former just wore me down. Good god, the first few scenes alone with the Marines in Aliens made them more memorable than the Avatar leads after two entire films. Honestly, there’s barely any difference between the Avatars and 2019 Lion King: all a pretty special effects picture but zero soul.

I've given it two shots. The first time watching my wife fell asleep about 45 minutes in, which her slumbering against me caused me to get drowsy and fall asleep.

The second time I was home alone for a night and figured I'd pick up where I left off. I forgot pretty much half of what happened, and the movie spent a good twenty minutes on some really long meandering scene that was supposed to be character building for the son but it was just ..... I don't know, nothing. Nothing was really happening. So I turned it off to rewatch some old movie like Blade 2 or some shit.

I want to finish it just so that I know the story in case the third is actually engaging throughout. But man. Cameron added a lot of padding to this thing making it hard to fight through.
 

simpatico

Member
I couldn't get through the second one. Like the first well enough. I think we're so awash in VFX that the Avatar stuff just didn't seem special to me last time around. The writing was just hard to get through and I just gave up. I think for a VFX set piece project you could really think of a million better settings.
 
That movie is great

I remember watching that on my birthday when it came out in theaters

I had to drag my brothers but after the movie ended, they both told me they loved the movie
What a day to be alive.

It's like a long Saturday morning cartoon that takes place in space. What better way to capture the imagination of a kid? With a banger like this one of course.
 
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deathsaber

Member
Love these movies- such a double edged sword- though- quintessential MOVIE THEATER films- must be seen on the biggest 3d screen (hopefully IMAX) you have in town, and it is mind blowing cinematic movie magic bliss.

Watch at home though on your tv, and it loses like 90% of the impact and it's just a good effects film.

IMAX 3D theaters should contractually be required to screen both Avatar films once a month or something just so they are readily available to be watched in the only way they really SHOULD be watched.
 

Fbh

Member
I'm in for the visual spectacle, but I can't say I'm too interested in the story.
Hopefully they at least break away from the formula of the last 2 ones. I hope there's more to this than just Jake and friends getting to a new tribe, being treated with mistrust because they are outsiders, but then slowly gaining the trust of the tribe and becoming one of them, and then going to fight the same bad guy for the third time.
 
Love these movies- such a double edged sword- though- quintessential MOVIE THEATER films- must be seen on the biggest 3d screen (hopefully IMAX) you have in town, and it is mind blowing cinematic movie magic bliss.

Watch at home though on your tv, and it loses like 90% of the impact and it's just a good effects film.

IMAX 3D theaters should contractually be required to screen both Avatar films once a month or something just so they are readily available to be watched in the only way they really SHOULD be watched.

If only European IMAX had Avatar instead of Twisters this summer. Nobody watched Twisters in Europe.
Avatar 2 in an air conditioned IMAX during July's heatwave... It's free money.
 

RJMacready73

Simps for Amouranth
I couldn't get through the second one. Like the first well enough. I think we're so awash in VFX that the Avatar stuff just didn't seem special to me last time around. The writing was just hard to get through and I just gave up. I think for a VFX set piece project you could really think of a million better settings.
I dunno, seeing the world of Pandora in HFR IMAX 3D just kinda destroys every other vfx scene in every movie out there, there is simply no comparison in terms of realism and sheer artistry on display
 

jason10mm

Gold Member
I'm in for the visual spectacle, but I can't say I'm too interested in the story.
Hopefully they at least break away from the formula of the last 2 ones. I hope there's more to this than just Jake and friends getting to a new tribe, being treated with mistrust because they are outsiders, but then slowly gaining the trust of the tribe and becoming one of them, and then going to fight the same bad guy for the third time.
I'm with you there. We need Cameron's version of the Borg or The Flood or some other outside threat to get this ball moving.
 
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simpatico

Member
I dunno, seeing the world of Pandora in HFR IMAX 3D just kinda destroys every other vfx scene in every movie out there, there is simply no comparison in terms of realism and sheer artistry on display
Yeah, but you need to be into jungles as an aesthetic. Jurassic Park and shallow Native American tropes. The technical prowess is great, but I'm just not interested in the content all the way down to its premise. I think people are ascribing positive qualities to the story because of how great technical prowess is. James Cameron really said: "What if we take an early 2000s GPU manufacturer's promotional render and make it a huge motion picture trilogy". The good parts of the Avatar movies can be much more efficiently enjoyed via sizzle reel. Make it a nice tight 15 minute short and show it before every IMAX film as a treat. Even then I'm only enjoying the technical aspects and wishing they used them on something more beautiful and interesting. Majestic waterfalls and "ooh look bioluminescent" only works like once per movie.

When the Avatar project started, VFX were very far from what they are now. Photorealism is accepted as commonplace now when it comes to special effects, so Avatar now has to lean more heavily into its actual aesthetic content. It's subjective like anything, but for me it just comes off generic and cheesy.
 

Days like these...

Have a Blessed Day
I watched the first one on a borrowed Blu Ray and imo the fx aren't worth sitting through such trite story teling, bad acting and unlikeable characters.
 

RJMacready73

Simps for Amouranth
Yeah, but you need to be into jungles as an aesthetic. Jurassic Park and shallow Native American tropes. The technical prowess is great, but I'm just not interested in the content all the way down to its premise. I think people are ascribing positive qualities to the story because of how great technical prowess is. James Cameron really said: "What if we take an early 2000s GPU manufacturer's promotional render and make it a huge motion picture trilogy". The good parts of the Avatar movies can be much more efficiently enjoyed via sizzle reel. Make it a nice tight 15 minute short and show it before every IMAX film as a treat. Even then I'm only enjoying the technical aspects and wishing they used them on something more beautiful and interesting. Majestic waterfalls and "ooh look bioluminescent" only works like once per movie.

When the Avatar project started, VFX were very far from what they are now. Photorealism is accepted as commonplace now when it comes to special effects, so Avatar now has to lean more heavily into its actual aesthetic content. It's subjective like anything, but for me it just comes off generic and cheesy.
But it's so much more than just the insane visuals effects, it's the small details that Cameron injects into all his movies, it's the sets he builds, the worlds he creates feel alive, he's a stubborn perfectionist with an attitude and that translates to the screen, sure we get the WOW floaty waterfalls shite and cool Alien creatures but he's also a tech guy so he fills the screen with technology that's actually been thought through properly to ensure that not only is it asthetically pleasing to the eye it could also work
 

Doom85

Member
But it's so much more than just the insane visuals effects, it's the small details that Cameron injects into all his movies, it's the sets he builds, the worlds he creates feel alive, he's a stubborn perfectionist with an attitude and that translates to the screen, sure we get the WOW floaty waterfalls shite and cool Alien creatures but he's also a tech guy so he fills the screen with technology that's actually been thought through properly to ensure that not only is it asthetically pleasing to the eye it could also work

That’s cool and all, but at the end of the day, I need to give a damn about the characters and to a slightly lesser extent the story (on occasion a solid story can carry weak characters, but I find solid characters can more easily carry a weak story), and I would laugh if someone said whoever wrote the first two movie’s scripts was a “perfectionist”. Cameron nailed character writing in Aliens for example, and even if that film had first came out today, it wouldn’t matter if the effects were nothing noteworthy by this point because the characters and suspense were just that damn good.

Special effects and worldbuilding can only do much. Beast Wars was a cartoon whose CGI aged poorly rather rapidly, and the worldbuilding is mostly basic (just two separate Transformers factions at war for MacGuffins stuck in the ancient past on Earth), but I could watch 8-9 episodes alone, the rough runtime equivalent of an Avatar film, and feel way more connected to the Maximals and Predacons than pretty much anyone in the Avatar film.

If you focus too much on the details and not enough on what should be the heart of a tale, you will usually fail IMHO. This is what to some extent Lucas had issue with when it came to making the prequels (to be fair, he did start to slowly figure out his mistakes with each following film IMHO). In fact, while I never got to see this documentary myself, I once heard about it and how it focused on Drew Struzan who drew a ton of classic movie posters including the Star Wars films. Apparently he once visited Lucas’ home and were discussing the SW posters as they looked at them, and why they thought the posters were so memorable for many people. Struzan talked about how we wanted the imagery to evoke a sense of adventure, grandness, romance, etc., but Lucas disagreed, and started talking about stuff like, “see, Luke is positioned here, and Han is here, and Leia is here, it helps get the viewer’s attention exactly where it needs to be.” Lucas was so focused on the technical aspects but seemed to not understand the heart of the work that Struzan had focused on and what made the imagery so unforgettable.
 

jason10mm

Gold Member
Lucas was so focused on the technical aspects but seemed to not understand the heart of the work that Struzan had focused on and what made the imagery so unforgettable.
Yeah, I think in Avatar it was the side characters that really drew me in, the grumpy Na'vi, the pilot chick, or the other scientists, rather than Jake Sully, Netiri, or the main bad guy (though his performance was good). In Avatar 2 its worse because Cameron is unwilling to depict the Nav'i in any kind of negative light, though that's kinda explainable in that they are really just puppets for the Gaia mother plant thing and don't seem to have free will in the way humans do. Camerons more memorable characters in other films are more conflicted, more prone to mistakes, or just more charismatic actors. That anyone can get a performance through the Na'vi CGI is a testament to the actor and the effects team. But Cameron knows character, I think he gets distracted by the details though, and especially with Avatar he is thinking 2-3 films down the line and neglects stuff in the film he's actually putting out.
 

RJMacready73

Simps for Amouranth
That’s cool and all, but at the end of the day, I need to give a damn about the characters and to a slightly lesser extent the story (on occasion a solid story can carry weak characters, but I find solid characters can more easily carry a weak story), and I would laugh if someone said whoever wrote the first two movie’s scripts was a “perfectionist”. Cameron nailed character writing in Aliens for example, and even if that film had first came out today, it wouldn’t matter if the effects were nothing noteworthy by this point because the characters and suspense were just that damn good.

Special effects and worldbuilding can only do much. Beast Wars was a cartoon whose CGI aged poorly rather rapidly, and the worldbuilding is mostly basic (just two separate Transformers factions at war for MacGuffins stuck in the ancient past on Earth), but I could watch 8-9 episodes alone, the rough runtime equivalent of an Avatar film, and feel way more connected to the Maximals and Predacons than pretty much anyone in the Avatar film.

If you focus too much on the details and not enough on what should be the heart of a tale, you will usually fail IMHO. This is what to some extent Lucas had issue with when it came to making the prequels (to be fair, he did start to slowly figure out his mistakes with each following film IMHO). In fact, while I never got to see this documentary myself, I once heard about it and how it focused on Drew Struzan who drew a ton of classic movie posters including the Star Wars films. Apparently he once visited Lucas’ home and were discussing the SW posters as they looked at them, and why they thought the posters were so memorable for many people. Struzan talked about how we wanted the imagery to evoke a sense of adventure, grandness, romance, etc., but Lucas disagreed, and started talking about stuff like, “see, Luke is positioned here, and Han is here, and Leia is here, it helps get the viewer’s attention exactly where it needs to be.” Lucas was so focused on the technical aspects but seemed to not understand the heart of the work that Struzan had focused on and what made the imagery so unforgettable.
I hear ya, without a solid story and characters you care about it doesn't matter how much flashy shit you throw up you'll soon lose interest, case in point the Bayverse Transformers, incredible effects tied to a fucking abomination of a story makes the entire thing an arduous slog to watch but with Avatar, I actually like the story as simplistic as it is and the characters are all serviceable so I can look past those weaknesses and embrace the movie as one 3hr theme park ride that'll I'll do maybe once or twice and that's it.
 

sankt-Antonio

:^)--?-<
So is the illegal avatar immigrant going for the Mr. Planet powers set or what? He learned how to swim in the second movie and now hes about to know to to make fire.
 

Trilobit

Member
I've given it two shots. The first time watching my wife fell asleep about 45 minutes in, which her slumbering against me caused me to get drowsy and fall asleep.

The second time I was home alone for a night and figured I'd pick up where I left off. I forgot pretty much half of what happened, and the movie spent a good twenty minutes on some really long meandering scene that was supposed to be character building for the son but it was just ..... I don't know, nothing. Nothing was really happening. So I turned it off to rewatch some old movie like Blade 2 or some shit.

I want to finish it just so that I know the story in case the third is actually engaging throughout. But man. Cameron added a lot of padding to this thing making it hard to fight through.

I would never watch the movies without 3D as the stories are so basic, but when you get immersed into the world thanks to the 3D in a movie theater you just go with the vibes. Especially in the second movie where they dive under water.
 
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