Tag: Avatar — Way Of Water

Wait, What? The ‘Woke’ Criticisms Of ‘Avatar – Way Of Water’ Have Gotten Even Worse

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I fucking hate MAGA Nazis. I really do. But cultural Leftists really get on my fucking nerves sometimes. I see the growing chorus of “woke” hate for Avtar — Way of Water and I find myself becoming more and more enraged. Apparently in the post “Get Out” world a movie like “Way of Water” is unacceptable and this is why we can’t have nice things. Something about this really annoys me — I haven’t seen “Get Out,” but I didn’t even think about that element of alleged “cultural appropriation.”

It’s because of such “woke” hate of a movie that is actually reasonably entertaining that most of the movies that are probably going to get Oscars this year either suck or are so obscure and “woke friendly” — at the expense of the story — that no one has actually seen them.

Excuse me. I’m cranky.

I’m cranky because I see the dumb, woke criticisms of the latest Avatar movie and I worry about how the novel I’m writing, which has a lot of organic representation — will be picked apart because I’m a “CIS white male” writing it. The thing I’ve noticed about cultural Leftists is they simply refuse to admit that maybe….they need to tone it down a little bit in name of saving democracy, if nothing else?

While I don’t fucking hate Leftists as much as I fucking hate MAGA Nazis, Leftists — especially cultural Leftists — really grind my gears because of how self-defeating they can be. But getting into the weeds about “what is a woman” they pretty much hand a loaded rhetorical handgun to MAGA Nazis whenever the issue — which shouldn’t be a big deal, but is — comes up.

The whole situation is intractable and difficult to do anything about. America is increasingly becoming two nations, one Red, one Blue and as much I hate to say it “both sides” really do have a fucking problem with very nasty extremists.

Scriptnotes: How I Would ‘Fix’ Avatar — Way Of Water

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Ok, I’m working on my first novel and, as such, I’m completely consumed with storytelling — to the point that it’s almost impossible for me to sit through a movie that I feel fails to match my personal high expectations for what makes a great yarn. (Why waste my time?)

I saw the most recent Avatar movie and I could definitely see that there was a little bit of pandering to the MAGA Nazi set in it — but not enough to drive the box office to $2 billion like James Cameron needs. When I was working at a movie theatre, the one movie that drove the most crowds was the Sniper movie because it fit the MAGA Nazi midset so perfectly that they came to see it in the theatre in droves.

Here’s what I would have done:

First, if the movie must, for the sake of James Cameron’s ego, be three hours, I would slice the “woke” Gaia-on-another-planet part of it down to a spare 1.5 hours. All the rest of the screen time would be filed with fleshing out the motives and aspirations of the “star people.” Don’t make them smug Blue caricatures of MAGA Nazi, but fleshed out people who think they’re the good guys for various reasons.

And, more importantly, I would really have do a lot more with the relationship between Spider and the bad guy. There was a lot of traditional heteronormative heart that could have been built around those two characters. Maybe it was there in the 7 hour cut of the movie, maybe it wasn’t. But it definitely seems as though Cameron could not figure out what to do with Spider.

There was a pretty deep, profound epistemological thing going on between Spider and Bad Guy and…it wasn’t really addressed at all. I know maybe that would have made the movie a little TOO different…but it would have made the proxy MAGA Nazi badguy at least a little bit less one dimensional and would have gotten MAGA Nazi asses in seats.

Anyway, I only even bring this up because the structure of the movie definitely might have allowed Cameron to have appeased both Red and Blue with two parallel storylines that intertwined at the end.