What You See

 Water, we are told, is the beginning and the end. Maybe you thought it was dust, but you may not have been paying attention to director James Cameron. Mister Cameron recently unleashed his sequel to his futuristic fable Avatar on the moviegoing public. More than three hours of wet lushness. It zipped on past one billion dollars inu worldwide box office receipts just a couple weeks after it opened. A great big, wet blockbuster. Thirteen years after the original story of big tall blue space kitties fighting for their homeworld. 

The frist two entries in what has now been announced to be a five film cycle. Chances are that there won't be a thirteen year lapse between each installment, but this is a business, after all. The idea that there are still so many threads left hanging from the first two installments is secondary to the number of millions left to be made from the ticket buying public. 

I could go on and on here about my issues about the most recent story of Pandora and it's computer generated denizens. It was a very pretty movie that ultimately had more than three hours' worth of plot holes and contrivances. Which makes sense, given the real estate it's trying to cover. It was very pretty to watch. There are all kinds of technical advances on display. It is to Cameron's credit and all the people he gathered to help him achieve this vision that most of the time you don't worry about how they did things. The trouble comes when you try to make sense out of why they did them. 

Storytelling sometimes takes a back seat to special effects. In the half hour or so of coming attractions before The Way Of Water was projected before us, my wife and I witnessed a slew of comupter-generated images that were designed to astound and amaze us. Giant robot apes, magical worlds beyond our understanding, and a mustachioed plumber out to save his own magical world. The giant robot ape was part of a saga that began way back when a major motion picture studio decided to take a chance on a movie about transforming toys. The mystical worlds were part of an ongoing construction of a universe inspired by comic books. The plumber comes to us originally from a forty-two year old video game. New ideas? Not really. Just new machinery to get them onto the screen. 

These are the potential blockbusters coming to a theater near you in a few months. Will there be a character in any of these stories to care about? Does that matter? Should it? 

Before my wife and I went out into the wind and the rain to brave the trip to the multiplex with a screen bigger than the one in our living room, we had been contenting outselves with stories told on that somewhat somaller screen. The lure of the cinema has been diminished by the sheer number of stories being told with all those newfangled contraptions being used to make movies about giant space kittens and robot gorillas. 

I would be more impressed if there was a story that made sense no matter what part of the universe it was set in.