Went and saw Avatar: The Way of Water this past weekend with my brother, mostly because he wouldn't shut up about it and partly because I needed an excuse to sit in a dark room for three hours and not think about work email. Quick verdict: it's a lot of movie. Three hours and twelve minutes, according to the ticket stub, which I only know because I checked my phone twice during the second act and felt guilty both times.
But the thing I actually want to talk about isn't the plot (there isn't much of one, and that's fine, nobody's here for the plot) — it's the projection tech, because this is apparently the first movie a lot of us have seen that switches frame rates mid-scene on purpose.
Cameron shot big chunks of this thing at 48 frames per second instead of the usual 24, and the theater we went to (a regular AMC, nothing fancy, just standard 3D not Dolby) was doing some kind of hybrid presentation where it dips into high frame rate for the underwater sequences and pulls back to normal 24fps for a lot of the dialogue and land scenes. Nobody explains this to you before the movie starts. You just notice it. And what you notice, if you've ever fiddled with the motion smoothing setting on a cheap TV and hated it, is that the HFR parts have that same slightly-off video quality. Everyone always calls it the soap opera effect and that's really the only comparison that lands. Water and hair and particles look incredible in it, genuinely like nothing I've seen before. Human faces in dialogue scenes look like a British sitcom filmed on a camcorder. It's a weird trade.
I don't think this is a flaw exactly, I think it's a genuinely interesting experiment that a studio with infinite money decided to run on a few hundred million people at once, which is a very tech-industry thing to do honestly. Ship the beta to everyone and see what breaks. What breaks, in this case, is that half the audience I was in seemed to not even register the switch was happening and the other half (me) couldn't stop staring at it instead of watching the movie. My brother didn't notice at all until I pointed it out, and then he got mad at me for ruining it, which, fair.
Ticket was $19.50 for standard 3D, which felt like a lot until I remembered the last time I looked at movie prices was probably 2019. The glasses situation has not improved. They still fit over regular glasses like garbage and mine kept sliding down my nose during a pretty crucial 40-minute whale sequence near the end. Somebody at RealD needs to solve the glasses-over-glasses problem, it's been over a decade now and it's still just two pieces of plastic clipped together.
One aside that has nothing to do with any of this: we almost didn't go because of the storm warnings. There's a big winter system supposed to roll through this weekend and mess with holiday travel pretty badly, cancelling flights all over the place before Christmas even gets here, and for a minute we debated just staying home instead of driving to the theater. Glad we didn't, the roads were fine Saturday, it was more of a "brace yourself for Tuesday" kind of forecast. Still, if you've got people flying in for the holidays, I'd be checking flight status obsessively for the next few days rather than trusting anything printed on a boarding pass right now.
Anyway. Is the movie good? I don't know if "good" is really the metric. It's an enormous, gorgeous, slightly bloated tech demo with a story bolted onto it, same as the first one was in 2009, except this time the demo is frame rate switching and water simulation instead of "look how deep 3D can go." I'll probably watch it again just to catch the parts where I was too busy staring at the frame rate to follow what the blue people were arguing about. My brother's already talking about going back this week, which tells you something about who this movie is actually for. Not me particularly. But I liked the water enough to forgive the rest of it.
If you're going, sit further back than you think you need to. The HFR stuff is less jarring from a distance, and your neck will thank you after three hours regardless.