Director: James Cameron
Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez
Have I Seen it Before: I think if you were alive in 2009 you were required to see it. The box office numbers would certainly seem to back that up.
I first saw the film in IMAX 3D, which is probably the way to see it. I certainly enjoyed Avatar: The Way of the Water (2022) in that environment. What I wouldn’t recommend, however, is seeing the film in IMAX 3D… from the first row of the theater. I don’t like to include nausea in my filmgoing experience, unless Ari Aster is involved.
I feel obligated to say that this film is one of the few films my cat has ever taken an interest in**. It is entirely possible that I’ve only seen it the second time when I watched it with her, back when she was a tiny kitten.
Did I Like It: The film works better out of 3D in the long run. That’s a little bit because I don’t have to grumble about the rash of 3D conversions that riddled movie releases for the better part of a decade, but also a testament to Cameron’s fundamental skills behind the camera. He might have had ambitions to bring a new level of spectacle to the movie-going experience***, but he still understood that the movie would be playing on my crappy TV for the most of the rest of history.
I might complain—and was indeed, more than a little bit surprised—that the film leaned on VO narration so much, and the less said about “unobtanium,” the better, but when the shit really starts to hit the huge helicopter blades on Pandora, the film picks up with a pace that can’t be denied. If I’m more than content to judge the entirety of a film based on the strengths of its third act—and I am—it’s entirely possible that the film earned all of those eyes on it way back when.
*Even then…
**For obvious reasons.
***Essentially boiled down to “3D without people fling objects straight at the camera.”