Hey, I’d love to be as insightful as Slavoj Zizek
. He guessed right from the trailer! That’s a joke, I hasten to add, all kidding aside, the “going native” storyline isn’t anything new:
Lawrence of Arabia, Apocalypse Now, Dances With Wolves, The Last Samurai, Run of the Arrow. And it is interesting how
Avatar came out the same year as
District 9, which told a similar story with a more grungy and gross approach. In terms of other similar stories with fantasy elements, I’d think more of something like that Ursula Le Guin story or the aforementioned
Ferngully. For me though, a bigger touchstone might be Miyazaki films like
Princess Mononoke or
Nausicaä. But Cameron, to me, kind of comes across as hypocritical in that regard. Like I
love T2, but it’s a movie which enjoys telling you that mankind has a self-destructive nature and that violence is bad, while showing you how awesome action scenes are. For me, the
Avatar movies are similar, films that salivate over elaborate action set pieces and fetishized depictions of sci-fi military gear, then telling us that capitalism is destructive while being the highest-grossing films of all-time. My politics are sympathetic with what Cameron is trying to say, but I find the way he’s saying it very shallow. He has none of Miyazaki’s animism or humanism to me.
Plus, I just find the characters and the world much less interesting. Compared to other fantasy worlds-Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Miyazaki, even some stuff in Marvel-there’s so little color (other than blue), so little of the Malick-lite beauty in the cinematography of something like
Dances With Wolves of the awe-inspiring grandeur or someone like Kurosawa, David Lean, or John Ford in terms of imagination in the cinematography. So much of
Avatar feels relentlessly calculated-a romance, politics, some action and anime swipes to placate an audience of teenage boys (and I speak as someone who never outgrew many of those impulses, hard as I’ve tried). Plus, the 3+ hour runtimes really wear me down. The simplistic storylines just feel stretched. There are things to enjoy, and I certainly reserve judgment for
Fire and Ash until it finally goes up on streaming. But I’m much more interested in these film as technical achievements than anything else.
Beloved Aunt wrote: Tue Jun 23, 2026 4:50 pm
hanshotfirst1138 wrote: Tue Jun 23, 2026 12:50 pm
Yeah, for movies that cost $400 million, they certainly could have much more interesting cinematography.
No doubt this post won't pass muster for Mr. Sausage's lofty standards, but: that's just the thing though, I'd have to reckon $400 million is just about the perfect cut-off point for a budget, after which a film is pretty much guaranteed to not have anything particularily innovative or esoteric or what-have-you about its cinematography or its anything else's. I'm hard pressed to think of any film that cost
that much that isn't just processed, glossy, mechanically-audience-gratifying-and-milking-and-bilking burnished glinty ugly schlock like (the first film of, I haven't seen the sequels) this franchise. Can you, hanshotfirst1138, or anyone else name any?
I think that your point is 100% valid. The more expensive a film is, the safer the studio probably wants to play. I can think of rare movies which cost $200 million + that still feel like interesting products of the auteurs who made them-
Pacific Rim, for example-but they’re few and far between just by the nature of what Hollywood is and does. Blockbusters aren’t a place to take artistic risks, generally speaking, and I think that working within those confines, I still freely admit that in terms of commanding spectacle, Cameron is a master at what he does. I still want to see
Fire and Ash when it hits streaming, and will. But I am expecting the same basic narrative with a visual upgrade. I’m not fishing for a fight or anything, just trying to offer up some thoughts.