There's nothing to be ashamed of and embarrassed about in admitting and apologizing publicly to mistakes we make. And with regard to Avatar 2, what I mean to say is that I am not apologizing for my personal opinion of Avatar: The Way of Water but my mistake in formulating an opinion in the face of not having obtained all the information I should have collected before passing a negative judgment on an otherwise great second part of Titanic director and Canadian movie-maker James Cameron’s Avatar paracosm.
So, what was I thinking when I wrote my review titled “I am not Avatar 2’s audience” (https://hilath.blogspot.com/2023/03/i-am-not-avatar-2s-audience.html)?
I have thought deeply about it and came to the conclusion that it was a serious lapse of judgement and not because of the kind of unpleasant desire some people have in getting involved in negative activities such as "review bombing".
My mistake in publishing the review was because I did it without understanding the whole film, mainly a result of my being sometimes unable to clearly catch spoken English. Friends ask me whether sometimes I can’t grasp spoken English because of the accent spoken in the particular movie I happen to be watching. Some ask me whether it’s a problem with the differences existing in American accent with that of British accent. But I don’t think that that’s the problem either. For example, “Notting Hill” starring Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts has a variety of accents and I had no problems with understanding each single line in the movie which made me go to watch it 4 times in the cinema while I was studying in Malaysia.
But the truth is that I do have a problem understanding dialogue in some films. I think one of the reasons I did poorly in Cambridge Proficiency in English (CPE) exam, getting the same ‘C’ pass in 2 consecutive years, could be the result of scoring poor marks in the “listening” segment of the exam.
Needless to say, I started becoming more choosy when it came to deciding which movie I wanted to watch at Schwack Cinema. I settled for focusing on going to watch action-adventure films rather than plot, narrative, and dialogue-driven “talky” movies. I reached this decision based on the consideration that there was no point to watching films at the cinema if I can’t grasp every bit of dialogue and end up disappointed because I didn’t understand the whole movie. So, in the end, I ended up going only to 3D films, because there was no other way to watch 3D films, and action films like Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 which could be enjoyed brainlessly just for the cinematic action sequences.
However, I did go to Barbie (https://hilath.blogspot.com/2023/08/movie-review-barbie-exposes-reality.html) and Oppenheimer (https://hilath.blogspot.com/2023/07/movie-review-oppenheimer-is-killer-score.html) after deciding that I don’t mind even if I didn’t catch all the dialogue to get a good grasp of the story’s narrative.
In the case of Avatar: The Way of Water, may be because I couldn't grasp all the dialogue, I had a false belief and a faulty assumption that Cameron was lax in answering all the questions arising in the movie, even with the employment of so many screen-writers to collaborate with him for more than a decade.
But upon watching the English subtitled version later at home when the Blu-ray was released, I realized that Cameron answered all questions and doubts that may arise in the viewer, and that he had left unanswered only one single unexplained event: how Grace’s avatar body had given birth to a daughter. This is somewhat similar to the concept of virgin births occurring in the Universe - a common theme in George Lucas' Star Wars mythology and the Christianity religion, too.
All other questions were answered in Avatar: The Way of Water, such as why the villain Miles Quaritch had a 15-year-old son, Spider, left on the moon Pandora, and why Quaritch now has an avatar body even when his human body was killed in Avatar part 1.
Before Avatar 2, several months back, I happened to chance upon a Schwack official and asked him why English subtitles were not projected on the screen when screening English films. He offhandedly replied that it was “because they are English films”. My thinking in asking him that question was based on feedback from some of my friends that, like me, they also needed subtitles in order to understand English movies fully. These friends actually later watched English subtitled ones at home of the movies that they were interested in understanding fully.
I didn’t voice this opinion to the Schwack official and instead asked him why English subtitles were projected in the case of Indian Hindi language films and he replied that there were viewers who cannot understand Hindi but were interested in watching them and therefore they needed a way to understand.
So, in essence, his point was that English movie watching audiences are assumed to understand all the dialogue that appears in English which couldn’t be further from the truth if we take the case of me and my friends who, even though we have a good grasp of written English, have trouble to some extent in understanding spoken English.
There is, of course, that persistent issue that subtitled films distracted viewers from enjoying the visuals because they will be tempted to focus on reading the subtitles. While this is true, there is the fact that so many good movies come from non-English countries, films sometimes that even Hollywood can’t match.
For example, take the case of the Cannes award winning Iranian film Taste of Cherry. It’s such a chilling realism film that its makers decided to include a concluding shot of the movie crew dismantling the equipment used in the shoot. This reminded me of my late grandma trying to convince me that Mithun Chakraborty's mother’s character in his 1982 Bollywood film Disco Dancer doesn’t really die after touching an electrocuted guitar that was meant to kill him but was only pretending to be murdered. I was only 7 years of age then but this should be enough of an indication that realistic cinema can be all too real for people who are not that well exposed to cinema.
Perhaps, because of such factors, serious film buffs nowadays encourage their friends to get used to subtitle reading because otherwise they are missing out on great cinematic works by only sticking to Hollywood films.
So, I was thinking that, if Schwack projected English subtitles for Hindi films, that would be a great distraction for Hindi movie fans who would already understand Hindi. Therefore, I felt that if Schwack projected English subtitles on Hindi films, it should also project English subtitles, however disruptive such action is perceived to be, on to English films, in order to prevent its audience from dwindling because people like me are losing our sense of priority at watching films in the cinema.
Hence, why I have decided to reverse all my claims in the Avatar 2 negative review I posted earlier is because after watching the English subtitled Blu-ray version at home, I finally understood the whole story, and came to the conclusion that it was much better than the first part, because Cameron expands the cosmos of Pandora, and part 1 was just that - an introduction to the world of the moon Pandora.
However, there are some viewers who still don’t understand the nature of the Avatar universe. Some friends told me that they enjoyed the first part’s visuals but not the story. And I got the same feedback from friends who said that Avatar: The Way of Water was a great 3D visual experience that can be enjoyed by ignoring its story!
This dissing of the Avatar universe's narrative should not be surprising because, like Lucas’ Star Wars, Cameron is also now exploring the nature of the Universe as a single interconnected system of disconnected parts, functioning singularly in the form of a pansychic consciousness that is all encompassing of everything in existence.
For those who cannot make sense of what we mean by an interconnected pansychically pervading conscious Universe, you may need to look up the meaning of the word “panpsychism” because that is a subject too expansive for the scope of this review. So, if you are one like some of my friends who found only the 3D visuals appealing and found nothing of interest in the story, you might need to carry out some research into Cameron’s exploration of the singularity nature of our Universe.
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