Chapo Trap House - 694 - Tulkun King (1/2/23)

Episode Date: January 3, 2023

It’s finally time to return to Pandora: we review Avatar: The Way of Water. James Cameron expands and improves on his otherworldly saga of colonization and resistance in about every conceivable way, including revolutionary whale violence, CRAB MECHS, and competing visions of eternal life, one blessed & one damned. Saddle up your Skimwing and join us once again in this consciousness-raising blockbuster fantasy world of blue guys. Tickets for the Hell on Earth launch show/party @ Littlefield in NYC 1/20/23 here: https://littlefieldnyc.com/event/?wfea_eb_id=479703214227

I Hello everybody, we are back. It is Monday, January 2nd 2023. Hope everyone had a happy new year but celebrations aside, it is time for us to kick off the new year the right way. That's right. It is finally time for us to talk about what really matters. Probably the most important thing that has happened last year or has happened this century and will continue to happen as time advances forward. That is right. It is finally time for us to do avatar the way of water. So I'd just like to begin by saying, listener, is there any of you out there who doubted big box office gym? Is there anyone left on the planet earth who has any doubt about big box office gym?

Box office gym cannot be doubted. The haters have been conclusively silent and that avatar, both avatar one avatar the way of water and the next bunch of avatar movies that he's currently working on are not to be doubted. They are to be embraced as the paradigm shift in humanity that they represent. There's some bitch ass hater that I was talking to after avatar way of waters opening weekend where he was saying, oh, they missed expectations. So it's going to be a bomb. There has been zero drop off week to week in avatar. I mean, the first weekend to the second, obviously, because the first was a half a billion dollars, but no drop off from second to third weekend unprecedented. This does not happen folks in the modern blockbuster era. Only big gym can

hold huge numbers of people coming to see a movie back over and over again. The vast majority of blockbusters that exist now in the IP era make their nut in one or two huge open first weekend and then like the first 10 days, basically. And then they basically have to take their money and run because everyone has done their fucking jury duty of dropping in and seeing this fucking thing. Everybody who feels like they have to because that's it obligation only fucking Jimbo puts a movie out there. People got to see it. They got to keep coming like the fucking field of dreams. They have to come and they have to keep coming because it makes them feel something that they cannot feel literally cannot feel anywhere else. Listener, rest assured, we would be talking about this

movie and taking it seriously and evangelizing it if it was a megaton bond or if it is in this reality. Just a little BO for you. This is the updated three day weekend estimate from avatar, The Way of Water, is $66.8 million. Updated four day weekend estimate $86.3 million. Estimated total domestic gross through Monday stands at $444.2 million. So look, the haters have been silenced. Well, avatar has no cultural resonance because I don't see any memes about it. Of course, you don't because it's in a theater for longer than a day. You can't put together a Jake Sully fan cam because if you do it, it has to be recorded off your phone in a movie or taken from a cam rip with Russian subtitles or something. Right. This is not like a movie by

the Russo brothers or someone like that where frame by frame, everything is engineered and sent to a sweatshop filled with slaves to determine the memeability of every individual line of dialogue and frame. This is a movie about love, but also a movie about the dictatorship of the third world proletariat killing to their white surprise, the Colonel Quadraches of the world. Well, it's a blue surprise now. All right. Well, much to his blue surprise. The movies that they talk about, like, oh, it had there's so many memes from glass onion. Glass onion is all memes. The movie is a pre digested slurry of already conceived memes. Every line of dialogue is a tweet. Of course, it's, of course, it's disseminating that way. That's what it's meant to be. It's

meant to reassure you that all of your opinions are correct. All your precious opinions are right. And so, of course, you can go and repeat them. Hey, look, these guys agree with me avatar. When I saw it anyway, it left me feeling this ache, this lack, this absence. That's not a thing you can name. That's something that you can turn into a chirpy little gif. Right. When Ryan Johnson sits down to write one of his blockbuster hits or couchbuster because they're all on Netflix, he, you know, he goes to one of those websites, you know, one of the one of those Indian websites that's like the 35 best tweets that summarized December. And he finds all the tweets, all of them, all the tweets by late night writers, all the tweets by the Andrea Corkboards, the world,

all the things that used to be on Buzzfeed. Every, you know, 120,000 like banger shit that's like, I wish you could get a grade from your therapist. He takes all that in, takes all that in and he writes a script based off that knowledge. He's basically, his mind is a neutral bullet, processing, processing the memes of the elder millennials. So yeah, his movies, by the time you get them, it is, you know, you're, you're digesting something, you're digesting a bird pellet. Of course. Yeah, it's already been processed. Yeah. By the time you shit it out, it's like, oh, what a surprise. You know, there, there's a thing that Bennett Goodrich or whatever the fuck with Daniel Craig's character in those movies is called, said that matches this exact news

cycle. But that, you know, okay, he is a processor, a processor of culture. James Cameron creates culture, but more than that, he creates longing. He creates a generation of people that include you, me and all the listeners who will kill ourselves to be friends with Tolkien. Yes. I mean, look, the movie, honestly, should have been called The Way of the Whale, but we need, we need to build to the Tolkien. I will just say James Cameron is one of the, one of the last men standing. He is a visionary. He is using the power of cinema to create an immersive emotional experience that taken in whole amounts to an attempt to save humanity, to say something important and to inaugurate a shift in consciousness in human society on a

global level. And he is doing that with these movies. Benoit Blanc just goes, oh, Mr. Musk, we all bear witness to your corn cobbins, sir. And we all, we all clap like seals for that. But moreover, my eyes must be destroyed, sir. James Cameron is Napoleon of our time. And if you say, you can point out correctly, oh, the Napoleon of our time makes movies. Yes, that's not an indictment of James Cameron. That's an indictment of our times that that's the only place that you can actually assert that sort of will to power is in make believe because all the avenues of real subject making have been algorithmized into, into paralysis. We can't do that stuff anymore, but we can try with all of our fucking might to make people relate to

this world differently. And that's right. What does that make? Ryan Johnson, the Adolf Hitler of our time. I don't like, I don't, I don't like saying it anymore. You like hearing it, but it's true. Adolf Hitler, it's just because all our output is entertainment. And that is the kind of movie that Adolf Hitler would make where the white man is always right. Ben Walplonk. I wonder what that name means. Shit, you're right. I say he's worse than Adolf Hitler. But, um, right. Just a little bit, like, into the assessment of the movie itself, you know, we get, we gave the BO rundown and, you know, I did my part because to prepare for this, I saw this in theater, 3D IMAX. Well, first I saw the Dolby IMAX and the Dolby Atmos around

sound system, which was awesome. So, so twice in the IMAX 3D, the movie theater experience, I'm doing my part. But, you know, as research for the film, very similar to the first Avatar episode we did, I did see the second movie on just a little bit of mushrooms. Just enough to make it, just to add a little, little something extra, you know, not to trip hard, because of course, you know, I take my, I take my role as a film critic seriously. I wanted to, you know, be locked into the movie and not, like, disassociate from reality, but excellent experience. And then, okay, let's talk about the movie itself. My general impression of the movie, my review of the movie, is that it surpasses the first one in every regard. And this, and you know, you know my

feelings on the first one of these movies. I thought that this was a sequel that builds and expands on the first one, but is in every respect superior to the first one. And that is no knock on the first movie. Yeah, I mean, I think, I don't know, I think it was always going to be better than the first movie because the first movie had the unfortunate, the job of trying to explain this and explain this type of movie to the audience. It was, you know, there hasn't really been, well, there certainly had never been a blockbuster where the audience walks out cheering for the Taliban in 2009, so to speak. But there also had not been a blockbuster like this in Star Wars, where, you know, you're introduced to a whole new world, a whole new lore, a whole new language.

You know, there was Lord of the Rings, there's other shit, but those were either, you know, pre-existing media properties or nowhere near in scale or ambition as Avatar was. It had, the original Avatar is pretty long, but it has to spend so much time explaining what it is, while still being a great movie, obviously. But like the Red Phillips, the first third is very much, it's about Jake Sully, the human being, and then introducing the concept of like the Avatar body and then like, you know, what is Pandora? And there's a lot of, like, whereas the second one, the plot just starts right away. Yeah, it just starts and there's no more, they don't have to introduce you to this concept anymore. They're like, oh, there's Jake, there's blue Jake Sully.

Also, don't even remind people, just like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, remember Grace, or I'm not gonna fucking hold your hand, bitch, you saw this movie, don't lie. Well, there is not to get too ahead of ourselves, but that is something I love about this movie and love about the character of Jake Sully, that they were able to do more so with the second movie. And it's something that we see very early on in the first 10 minutes. I made a note of it, when Jake Sully talks about how, when they go out and they see some, you know, beautiful wonder of the world of James Cameron. This is our date night, you know, just a little bit away from our kids. The point of that being, though, that Jake Sully is just

sort of a dumb dumb. Yes. Nothing really that special about him as a character, besides maybe his bravery or his compassion. The point of Jake Sully, which, you know, hopefully you got this message in the first avatar, and they definitely hammered home the second one, it's not that Jake Sully is this unattainable, special Kyle Riesk as character that you can never hope to be, it's that any, any of us dumb dumb can be Jake Sully, if we exhibit the right compassion, togetherness, and love of the world around us. And I mean, this is very much where the, how we kind of like, summed up the first avatar in our, in our last avatar episode, but it was the thing that hung me up the first time I saw an avatar, and I thought the weakness

of the movie was like Sam Worthington and Jake Sully being just kind of a zero as a character. But the fact that he is, as you said, Felix, nothing special. He's not even, he's not even the guy. It's his twin brother that's supposed to be sent to Pandora. He's just some guy just like everyone of, everyone else who finds himself, you know, basically by accident, reborn into a new body on this new planet. And then the end of avatar is about, he's nothing special, but what he, but what he has is that he made a moral stand against everything that he ever believed in and was a part of. And in order to do that, he had to, like his human, his human body had to die to be reborn into freedom, into an, into this angelic like life form,

and to be free and like, you know, live on this, on this new planet. He had to die. He had to make a stand. And the last scene, last shot of the first avatar is his eyes opening. And like, the idea is that Jake Sully is you. You're nothing special either, but you're part of, but you, like Jake Sully in the first movie, are part of this world-destroying system that is, like, you know, that is ending human life and ending all life on this planet in the pursuit of profit. I remember one of the, one of the knocks on avatar, the first one is, oh, sure. The, the, the white interloper, he's the one who's able to ride the Toruk. He's the guy who can ride the big guy. Oh, one, none, none of the native Navi could do it. No, all the Navi, of course, they wanted

to, they wanted to save their, their village. They wanted to save their society, but only Jake Sully knew what they were in for. Only Jake Sully knew the stakes because they couldn't, they were of course unhappy with these humans showing up, but they could not imagine what we were capable of. Only Jake Sully knew what we were capable of because he had seen what we did to fucking earth. And so he's the one who could go and do the insane dangerous thing of riding the goddamn Toruk. So like, and, and, and this, this, and this is where the avatar, the way of water begins. You know, some years have passed since their, their victory against the sky people at the end of the first one, where they kicked him out, sent him home. But we all know this is

just, this is a brief period of peace because, you know, like the humans are coming back. And I feel like you, you allude to their, you know, we see Jake Sully now as a family. And, you know, honestly, a huge strength of this movie and something that I wasn't anticipating is that it is mostly about Jake and Natiri's children. They are, they're basically the main characters of this movie. So a good part of this movie is focused on teenagers, which is usually, for me, the kiss of death for any movie. Awful. However, in this movie, I found all of them. I found them like, you know, authentic, credible, and, and not grating in the slightest. And distinct characters. Like, I don't even remember the names of either of the brothers.

And you can say, oh, that's because they're stereotypes. It's like, well, yes. But all characters, when you have this kind of a palette of storytelling are going to be archetypal, like the, the responsible, you know, air and then sort of the a little alienated second son. There is a reason that is like an eternal fucking structure. But the thing is they're embodied authentically. You believe there are kids, even though they're blue and CGI. Right. Just like, just like the, just like the literal CGI itself, just like how it has a weight and a gravity to it that other CGI does not. Yes. You know, okay. Cameron, the thing that makes him special, the thing that makes him a true auteur is not that he, you know, decides to

transcend or, or, or, or contradict the art form. It's that he takes the art form and does it better than anyone else in the world. And with this, he took the YA format and did a better job than anyone else. Well, you know, I'm like, I'm like, the knocks on the movie about like, oh, like, these are the first movie to like, oh, these are just these are tropes. It's like, oh, wow, you've, you identified a trope. Congratulations. But like, of course, they're fucking tropes. Tropes work. That's why the story has resonance. And I, you know, and a note on the special effects, the special effects, which I honestly, I can't even call them special effects anymore. This is just like, this is just reality. Make the, make the first movie, which looked incredible, basically

like a proof of concept for what he does in this movie. And you see like that incredibly rare thing, Avatar, came out highest grossing movie of all time. The fact that Jimbo had still had the ability in cloud to not have just like a second one out as soon as possible, that he took 13 years to fucking do this. And you see it on screen every second of the movie. He took his time to fucking do this. And like, that is why it looks so extraordinary. And, you know, and like, a little prelude to the movie, we see, you know, Jake and Nathiri and they're, they're living their lives in the forest. They have a family now. They have, they have two sons. They have a daughter of their own and they have an adopted daughter who is the sort of

parthenogenic, Christ-like, virgin birth that was, that was, that was, that was, that was, was Grace's Sigourney Weaver. Sigourney Weaver is Avatar. She died trying to transfer consciousness at the end of the first one into her avatar, like Jake did, but she was two weeks, she ended up, her spirit went into AY, into the tree. And then, so they just had this avatar in a tank and then all of a sudden it got pregnant. They don't know who pregnant it, it was pregnant and then it came birth and it's a little, it's a little Sigourney Weaver. Okay, okay. There's been a lot of talk about, you know, community and togetherness on Pandora. Okay, the one Na'vi that knocked that avatar up and gave us this Sigourney Weaver child,

that guy is out of the community. That guy is out of the vision of the future. You're a little too weird if you did that. I'm sorry. Well, I feel like, you know, it's not in my vision of the future. Like, you know, her progeny is not, is not explained. That is an, that is a question that remains open at the end of this movie. And, you know, like I said, I think, I think it's heading in sort of a Jesus, like she is the Jesus Christ of Awa. Yeah, I hope. Like she is the virgin birth of the physical manifestation of Awa. And then they have like

sort of a, like a fourth kid who just sort of like is in the crew, Spider, who's a human, a white kid with dreadlocks, which again, I thought would be really annoying, but, you know, I kind of fucked with Spider. Spider was cool. And Spider is, you know, the, the, in this universe, you cannot put an infant in a cryo stasis, descended back to Earth. So like he was an infant at the time of the end of the first Avatar movie. And like he's a teenager now. And he's just sort of part of the crew. He, he sort of wants to be Navi. He paints himself blue. He wears a loincloth, runs around in the jungle. And people pointed this out about the Spider character. It exists, if not for any other reason, it is just a flex for Cameron.

Because if you see these beautiful Navi interacting in this jungle environment and running through the forest and like you said, feel like there's a weight and like light and shadow and it all feels real. But if they're all Navi, then you're like, okay, what I'm seeing is 100% digital. But if they just include a human actor and like their body and movement and performance seamlessly integrated into the, into the other bodies and spaces in this fucking movie is such a stunning. And it's like, you don't even notice it. And like that's how impressive the, the, the visual effects work in this movie is, is that you don't really even notice it for the most part. Like I said, there was no part in my brain where I was like, oh, well, that was a

really good special effect. I'm like, no, this is just reality. This is a dream given, given form. Right. And okay, it's special that he's a white guy with dreadlocks because it's not just any human, you know, where, where you're doing that tech demo. It is a human that in real life, if you saw this person in real life, your attention could would not be taken away from them. It's someone, someone that is in the center of every scene of your life, the white guy with dreadlocks, a classic American character. So that's, that sort of sets the stage for like the little, the little prelude is reintroduced to the planet of Pandora and the Navi people and what these characters are put up to. And they were one of them enough to is just being happy, having a life,

starting a family. Then of course, that ends because the human beings come back. They're on date night and their little, their little, their little night away from the kids interrupted because they notice a new star in the sky. And that can be an only one thing. Giant human colonial ships decelerating after making the years long voyage across the abyss of space to just even thought they were done with Pandora wrong. They're back. And I would really like to talk now about the truly, I think maybe my favorite scene in the movie or truly one of the most powerful moments in the movie for me was that very early on in the movie, the scene of humanity coming back to Pandora. And I actually talked about this a little bit with Ben Clarkson,

our genius animator who did a chapeau ball Z for us, among other, among other great works. But that scene, like it basically sums up the stakes of the movie and it sums up the entire first movie we just all visually. This movie, it really makes you realize how truly gifted a visual storyteller Cameron is. And you really realize how much of film making has lost that ability, like how much information he conveys with just images. And for me, like the image, like the image that was just so powerful and so horrifying with these like arcs, like from the human spaceships, these arcs that are lowered into the atmosphere from orbit. They lowered into atmosphere and just scorch the planet of Navi. And Clarkson described it to me

as like a birth scene, because it's almost like they're like these arcs are being sort of a emerging from between two legs kind of, but they have like these enormous like monolith like arcs are lowered from orbit onto the surface of Pandora. And just it's like a nuclear blast, just just incinerating square miles of jungle space. And I don't know if you guys noticed this, but in that scene, you see all these jungle animals shrieking and running as they're consumed in this wall of flame. And among them was like the really scary like Alpha Predator like jump like Tiger type Pandora creature from the first movie that was so scary and menacing. They're just all like running together in their death rows as they're incinerated by the birth of the human

species on Pandora once again. And it's a profoundly and again it's like the arc opens up and like the mech suits waddle out of it and these huge bulldozers and like each one of them like as it lands just clear just clear cuts everything around it. And it's like this cancer that will be the beachhead for humanity's reconquest of the planet Pandora. And then like that's essentially where the movie begins. We jump ahead another year in time and Jake Sully and his family have begun, you know, once again, their insurgency against the human presence on Pandora and there's their exploitation of it. But then we are introduced to Miles Courage played by Stephen Lang. You may remember him as the bad guy, Colonel Miles Courage, the bad guy from the first movie.

Wait a minute, he got killed at the end of the first one. No, no, no, my friend. Yeah, no, he's not dead. He's back in Avatar 4. So basically what happened is they've explained this right before the battle at the end of the first Avatar. Colonel Courage has all of his memories downloaded into like a thumb drive and sent back to Earth just as like a backup. So he died, but like, you know, hey, he's an investment. So what do they do? They create a Navi body for him and download all of his human thoughts and memories. She has every thought and memory he had up to the point of which the copy was made, but he doesn't remember his death because like it wasn't part of the backup. So like Jake Sully in the first movie, he wakes up now on Pandora in his like

eight foot tall Navi body. And it takes a second and then you realize that this is now all part of you know, the human conquest of Navi because like, you know, they can't breathe the air. And also, you know, like each one of these military, these jarhead assholes, this is a big investment in their training. And they have in-country experience, you know, like he says, we need the saltiest operators, you know, saltiest on world operators. And like, as he's explaining to like all the all the jarhead assholes who were killed in the first movie, it just, no, like they've just been rebooted as even more, you know, an even more powerful and dangerous adversary. Cause as Quarrit says, you know, you've got their speed, their endurance, their agility, their

strength, but with like all of the fucking training of like a recon Marine, you know, powerful combo, all of them dressed up. That's a potent mix. All of them dressed up within the dickhead operator fashion of the 21st century because I love that and does not progress. We are the Aegean bad infinity. That's what is our pursuit of individual ego extension into eternity is what that's what creates a culture that cannot move forward. The guy's got a no fear tattoo. It was, I love, I love this plot device too, because it's, it's like Cameron's nod to the US military naming its hardware and its bases, like the Apache helicopters, all the helicopters and then after Indian tribes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. His, his genius interpretation of America

wearing the skin of its murdered, murdered, genocided races. Yep. And contrast their outfits. Like, remember, we talked about how the, the, the vital contrast at the, in the fight at the end of the first one between the Navi fighters and their like feathers and jewels and like they're all looking like these, you know, and body beings again, all these bug humans all dressed in the same fucking like plate carriers. And here you have these gorgeous Navi, just looking like YouTube assholes. We're going to, well, we're going to test the Kimberna, uh, for 1911 today with giant Oakley's. They, they, they made them giant avatar Oakley Oakley's. Right. The tactical operator gear worn by Corniches and his crew, I thought was such a good detail. And it

just, it was so evil. It was, it was such a, it was such a blast for me because they all look like, oh God, they all look like such operator shitheads, but they're eight feet tall and blue. And like you said, Matt are wearing oversized Oakley's and have fucking the worst tattoos ever. So like, they get to be Navi, but they're still Marines. Yep. A potent mix indeed. So you're like, okay, so Corniches, you know, he's in country now and you know, he has one mission, the same one he had fucking 18 years ago or whatever, killed Jake Sully, leader of the Navi resistance. And you know, they go into like, you know, the, the, the human, you know, colony on Navi is there's like huge industrial city. And you know, like they're just, you know, like it's

a, they're just getting ready to, you know, just, just pillage this planet. But then we meet, I don't know if you guys, you know, I don't know if you guys saw I faced as hard as I did when, when Edie Falco shows up in this movie. But yes, she, she is the general now leading the, the human, uh, conquest of Pandora. And she's introduced in this, you know, uh, spry and very, very, very flexible and fashionable mech suit. And I really like this because I found the, the mech, the mechs in the first one a little too clunky and boxy, whereas these ones are very live and like flexible. And where she's introduced and she's like working a heavy bag with mechanical arms and like walking around on stilts. But then she starts talking a quarry and she's sipping coffee. And she's like,

she's using her, her human arm to use the motion of sipping coffee, but her mechanical arm is holding the cup and daintily allowing her to have a little sip of coffee. And that to me summed up all of camera and sort of interests and fetishes, uh, quite nicely is sipping coffee with a robot, perfect robot mech arm. Yeah. For, uh, mech aficionados, the difference between the mechs in the first film and this film is the difference between armored core and zone of the enders. Got it. I'll take your word for it. Take your word for it. And Edie Falco, um, she explains the courage that, yeah, like, you know, your, the, the, the mission is, you know, like, uh, uh, Sully and his people have been like, you know, the, we see them attack a, a maglev train and

loot it of weapons, you know, like they've been there. They've been, they're, you know, mounting an effective and disciplined resistance against the human occupation. So, you know, his message is, uh, to, you know, his, his mission is take out Jake Sully, but also we're introduced to like, the ball has been moved forward in the time that has passed between these, between the first movie and the second, because what she tells him now is that like, this isn't, this isn't just a military, uh, providing security for a mining operation anymore to, to get unobtainium, the, the mineral of the future. No, this is all now a military operation to colonize Pandora to make it earth too, because we fucked up our own planet. And to do that,

as Edie Falco says, we got to subdue the hostiles. So it's no longer about, oh, we have to stop the hostile. So we're attacking the mining operation. This is about, we are taking over the planet. We are, we are, we are colonizing Pandora for human immigration colonization. We're taking, it's, it's, it's earth now. We need it. Wait till Felix gets back. Uh, I'll just say, uh, while we're waiting, I thought the subtle, but persistent, uh, use of coffee among all the occupying forces coffee when they blow up the home tree. They're always, all the military earthlings are always consuming coffee, which is, you know, I think, uh, of something very intentional. That's both a stimulant, something that we extractively take

out of, uh, you know, often, um, exploited, uh, third world. I don't know if that's the right term anymore, uh, countries. I think it's something that he's very much, uh, commenting on specifically coffee. And it, and it, and it emphasizes the banality of American office culture and how like, even in this amazing place, you're still just sitting there with a desk, like that asshole, the Giovanni Revisi playing fucking pit, putting green in his fucking office. They should put Lorelai Gilmore in charge of the human occupation of coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee. I think he loves coffee. Yeah. Um, right. So, so like, so then like, you know, uh, court courts and his people, you know, like, uh, they, they,

they set out into the jungle to, uh, track down Jake, Jake Sully. And what do you know what they're lucky enough to come across Jake Sully and his kids who are out? I don't know, Jake Sully's kids who are out exploring in the jungle and like, they get the drop on them. And then, but also Courage, uh, goes back to the scene of his own death and discovers his own body. He, he looks at his own skeleton, rippled with arrows. I thought that was a very, very interesting and profound scene as well. Um, but you know, uh, of course, like Sully's kids are, are, are saved by Jake and Natiri. Um, but you know, he realized that, that Courage is back and he's, he's now, he has a, his demon form and that, that he's aware of where they live and, you know, like,

and he's going to track them down. So they have to leave. They have to leave the forest people because as long as they're there, uh, Courage and his people are just going to keep attacking them, keep coming back. Like they're the threat to, to, to, to the people, to the people of the forest. And they got, they, they just got to, they got to light out. So they, they pack the family up, you know, you, you crammed everything in the, your dinosaur station wagon. You crammed all your stuff. It's time, time for a trip. You know, kids are going to be, are we there yet? And, and this is of course, you know, like what, what, the way of what this is where they seek refuge among the sea non-ve, which is really what most of the movie is about. This is, there's forest non-ve, they

live in the jungle, but then there's this like the whole other biomes and ecosystems on the planet Pandora and that have corresponding navi to go along with them. And, uh, uh, shout out Cameron from a pot about list. He had the, uh, the best, uh, review of the way of the water, in my opinion, where he said, in the first movie, Cameron showed us the forest navi. In this movie, he showed us the ocean navi. In the third one, he'll just show us the normal navi who like live in houses and drive cars. Avatar three, the way of the automobile. Um, so yeah, they have to come to, uh, you know, they have to come as a family to this new community as outsiders and just sort of being like, hey, guys, can we crash here? And, you know, like, uh, you know, there's a little bit of a little bit

of a culture clash here, you know, because, uh, they, they have, uh, their tails are too small. And, you know, like the sea people navi have big forearms of like fins on them. And, and, and, and like the children of the ocean tribe leader, they have bus and haircuts. They do. They've got, they've got zoomer haircuts. Yeah. Yeah. Talk about time standing still. They do all look like, uh, TikTok Bradens. And, you know, they have to, they have to learn, uh, the customs and then they, because, you know, like, uh, as, as the leader are played by Cliff Curtis and like, his wife played by Kate Winslet as well. You may have missed that in case you, you know, you weren't, weren't aware of it already, but, uh, that's another thing about this movie. Even

one of the first movies, this movie really contains all of James Cameron's interests and previous movies in one movie. Oh yeah. And Kate, Kate Winslet's presence is just but one hell there. We can, we can discover a few other threads there. But as the, the, the, the leader of the ocean Navi, uh, tells Jake and his family, you know, uh, we will teach you our ways so you don't have to suffer the, uh, embarrassment of being useless. So that, you know, the first movie, hey, gotta learn how to fly a fucking Peridactyl. This movie, well, there's all kinds of new shit you can ride. They got, you know, dolphin, they got dolphins, they got cars, they got flying alligators. And then of course we will get to the whales, but, uh, the tokens folks. I want to talk about, uh,

the whole kind of middle, the, the middle part of this movie, it's just sort of, um, again, like for, uh, like for like, uh, a box office blockbuster movie, it's insane to me, like how much the middle third of this movie just really slows down and just lets you just spend time with these people and their lives. And you know, like, obviously this is a, this is a, you know, a demonstration of all the amazing like underwater, uh, the, the portrayal of an underwater environment in this movie is just, it's stunning. I mean, it's incredible. Like, I mean, most of the most memorable things in this movie are just like some sort of little, some sort of like jellyfish that you just see in the corner of the screen just dart away. And Jake and his kids, they have to learn how to

like, they learn, they have to learn how to ride a dolphin or like the Pandora equivalent of a dolphin. And if you're, if you're an adult, you get to ride the flying alligator. And let's talk about, um, Sigourney Weaver in this movie. Sigourney Weaver, a fascinating performance from Sigourney Weaver. Again, a James Cameron Mainstead. But in this movie, she is playing a teenage version of herself. So this is Sigourney Weaver playing a teenager, but like herself as a teenager. And she did like, she does a different voice and everything. And I don't know, I just thought it was a very interesting performance. But we also get to be, we also are given hints that the sort of the Jesus Christ of Ewa, there's a little something more going on with her. She has a

connection to the, the, the, the living neural network that is Ewa and the planet of Pandora that's a little bit different. She like, she doesn't need to use her tail to sort of port into things that there's, she's a little bit, a little bit witchy, a little bit hippy, a little bit weird, a little bit out there. But there's something going on with her. She's on air, she's on air play, not even, not even a USBC. It's like the new max, how you can do the backup just by putting them next to each other. When she, when she wires into the, the, the, the, the global hive mind underwater, she basically, she, she meets her mom in Ewa, who's of course, she's still hanging out there cause that's where you go. But then she, it also, she gets,

she has a seizure. She gets overwoded basically. Like that's how she's, she's has a different brain. And then Norm, remember Norm, we all love Norm. He's the human who still has an avatar and stayed with them. He comes along, he comes to check her out when she has her thing and tells him she has epilepsy and that they're sure he's got the brain structure that gives her like, you know, religious visions and stuff. So, and then later on in the movie, she shows that that isn't just like a, a subjective experience. It has a impulse influence on the things around her. So yeah, I will make note that Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese's last temptation of Christ also implies heavily that Jesus Christ was epileptic. Yeah. Take, take that for what it's

worth. I do, I, I, I do think that is of a piece though, right? Uh, Sigourney Wheeler's character being reborn as a teenager, but now with these religious connotations and this, this sort of holistic connection to the, the spirit neural network, but also Quadritch and his marines and their rebirth. Uh, there is, there's a, there's a major theme of just everything keeps going. Time is a flat circle and that can mean that if you dedicated your life to benevolence, if you, you know, if you were like Sigourney Wheeler's character, a pencil pusher from the fourth Reich and ended up giving your life to turn against them, that you get to live forever as this, uh, this sort of childlike innocent version of yourself with major implications for the

survival of the species that you gave your life to protect. But also if you're Quadritch and if you are these, uh, fourth Reich storm troopers, you are forever condemned to be a Nazi, to just have your conscience recycled into new Nazi bodies and Nazi missions and committing new atrocities forever and ever and ever. And to look at your own arrow riddled body and your own failures again and again and again. Yeah. Hegelian bad infinity. It's like the two ways to, to deal with the reality of, of infinity and eternity is you can accept that it is a cycle. It is a continuation, continual circle of rebirth, or you can insist that it is a straight line. But if you try to make it real and that is this human society in this, in these movies has

killed its biome in pursuit of human immortality. What is that? That is being the same asshole and suffering for it forever. Oh, and that all comes together. We'll get to it when we get to the toll cone. But like, why are they wailing the toll cone? Remember? Yeah. That's genius. It's an immortality potion that these beautiful whales that we'll talk about that they're also hunting. They're killing these gorgeous creatures because inside their brain case, their brains, which are larger and more complex than human brains bite, like many factors contains a goop that makes humans immortal, that stops the aging process and is worth like every, every whale is like a hundred million, you know, space dollars, whatever the currency they have at that time.

It's a lot, whatever it is. But before, before we get to the way of the whale though, there's one more, one more aspect of the plot. In the initial encounter between Sully's family and, and, and the reborn quadritch, a spider, the human child is captured by the marines and taken back to like the human settlement. And then much of this movie also suggests many parallels between like they are sort of like the gothic doppelgangers of one another. It takes Sully and quadritch because they're both marines, but what are they also both fathers? Spider is the child of the human body of Miles Quaritch. I mean, we didn't see any evidence of that in the first movie, but like, he, he's dead. And then the son that he had on Pandora has been raised by Jake Sully and, and

the Navi and the humans that who chose to stay behind because they were allied with the, with the Navi. So that spider who like wants to be Navi is now thrown in with these, the demon Navi, the marine Navis and this guy who he's never known, who's like his dad, but not really because he's an eight foot tall blue cat demon. So that like, yeah, like he becomes sort of their, their, like he has to embed himself with Quaritch and his squad as they go native and hunt Sully and his people. And you know, like, it's sort of like he's getting to know his father and he's getting to know human beings in a way that he really hasn't had before. So there's a question of like, divided loyalty or you know, you wonder like where he's really going to land here because

he, you know, he's never really felt like he belonged among Navi, but he sees human beings in the way they are and like what he knows of them and he's horrified by them and rightly so. So like, okay, the forest Navi in the first movie, like they had their animal kinships, they had their animal vehicles and animal friends that were very important to them. And we see in the ocean Navi, you know, they have like, they have these very sleek, not really like dolphin, but it's the closest thing I can say, these very like sleek underwater motorcycles that they're just jetting around on. And then they have like these things that are sort of a cross between a flying fish and a crocodile, if you're, you know, a little bit, if you're a warrior.

But more importantly, there are the Tolkien. And this is introduced when the Jake Sully's second son, the sort of the one who is not the good soldier, not the eldest son, the one who doesn't always do what dad tells him. He's always causing trouble. He's always messing up and feels like a kind of a failure and a fuck up. He's sort of a little bit of the black sheep. He is, you know, trying to ingratiate himself to the ocean, the ocean, the bus and teenagers. And they take him out of the bus and teenagers make fun of them because not only do they have narrower tails, the camps went that can't push, propel them through the water. They don't have the fins on their arms. They also, the Sully children, because they're the sire of a avatar

and not an actual Navi have four fingers instead of three. Yes. That's like them. That's the marker. They have four, they have five fingers. They have four, you know, prime, all right, five, yeah, four fingers and a thumb. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. They keep saying like, you know, it's the mark of the demon, you know, to have to have five fingers. So that, you know, they're sort of, they're sort of demon kiss. They're sort of abominations. If you're, if you're a more orthodox traditional Navi, if you're not reform Navi, you know, having five fingers is like, you know, being uncircumcised or something. And props, props to, props to James Cameron, a non-Navi director for tastefully addressing Navi colorism.

So like the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the bus and the zoom routine sort of trick him. And they just sort of, they ditch him outside the sort of like the safety of the reef to go hunting or whatever. And then of course he, he finds himself in deep shit as like, I don't know, like some sort of a, a shark with like a three pronged jaws, essentially. This is huge fucking ocean apex predator nearly just swallows, just fucks his shit up bad. He's just like pummeling, just barreling through coral reefs, just like relentlessly trying to get him. And it's like, it looks like it's all over for the second son until this gigantic Pandora shark is fucking pancaked by an even bigger Pandora whale that comes out of nowhere and just

flattens this fucking thing. You know, and then the, the, what's it low, low tax, low tax is been reborn on Navi. I don't remember the boys names at all. I could differentiate them become from the necklaces they wore it. I could tell them the thing. I didn't matter. I could tell the difference between them and I knew they're distinct characters and I cared about whether or not they got eaten by a shark. And then when one of them met Paya Khan, I cared about their friendship so much that I care about their friendship. So this is really, listeners, this is really where like the emotional core of this movie, they're truly like for me, like the most profoundly emotionally affecting parts of this movie. We're about the relationship between

low tax and Paya Khan, the renegade til soon. Low tax finally fixed search. He takes, he goes, he goes into the forest and he leaves the forest and he goes to the sea and he discovers this amazing Navi fruit that can fix all of their problems. It's called mango steam. So yeah, like his life is saved by a whale and look, he just like, they just start hanging out and talking to each other and just, well, part of it is that, is that, is that Paya Khan has a giant parpoon in his fin. Yes. Yes. And, and low tax takes it out for him. And that's Paya Khan. He's all scarred up. He has, he has the other thing is missing, but then he has helped like it's the, it's the, you know, the, the, the miles in the mouth, the, the pie, the, the sliver out of the

part of the lion. Yeah. The amazing scene of, of them just playing together and just swimming and just having fun together and just like, just bonding. But then we find out that, okay, we need to talk about this. Then we find out the folks, folks, the Navi and the Tulkun, they've been very unfair to Paya Khan. They treat him very badly, folks. Very badly. He's been outcast. He's a renegade. He's been made, he's been shunned by the, the Tulkun whale society. Why? Because he, because the people got to know, because he was a communist. No, no. It's, it's, it's because he, he, he used violence because he, he did violence. He went against the way of the Tulkun. Yes. The Tulkun way is a radical and total pacifism because it is implied in the movie

that the whales are much smarter than anything else. They're the smartest species on the planet, smarter than humans. And they, of course, have come to the rational conclusion that all violence ends up being worse, worse than it is worth to do and that the sacrifice of not doing violence in the long run pays off. So they force through social discipline, which is the only thing you can have, absent violence, shunning if you do violence. And the thing about what we find out is that Payakon, what he did was he led a pod of like the younger whales to fight this wailing fleet that the humans have brought to Pandora to kill the whales so they can suck the immortality juice out of their brains. And that's when he gets the harpoon in his thing. But then after

that happens, and look, many, the Tulkuns are killed, humans are killed. And the Tulkun say to him, you got to go, look, it's the rules. You know, and, and, and the ocean navi who they all have their own like spirit brothers and sisters among the Tulkuns and every like season, they will come to their reef and they'll all hang out. They have a fucking cookout with the Tulkun. They'd like to say, Hey, how's your week? How's your year been? What's going on? They like chit chat. I really liked it in the, uh, when they're like the party when they all come back and they get to hang out with their like whale brothers and sisters is like the daughter of the ocean tribe leader is of course like she, she kind of a, hey, she kind of has a crush on the, on the second son

low tax. And she goes to her well sister and she goes, so I met a boy. So they're able to tell them the blue, they're the other blue not even when he tells them, Hey, I met this cool, uh, a whale guy. They're like, Oh dude. Oh, don't know. Yeah. He's outcast. I'm sorry, man. He's outcast. You can't bond with, you can't bond with the outcast. And there, there's a part in this movie where out of nowhere, um, low tax is talking to, is talking to Paikun. And when he first meets you, he talks to him and you just see Paikun's like, I looking at him. And then like, and then as the relationship develops, he's asking him, like, you know, how, how did you get the, the scars? You know, what happened? And then like the second or third time they talk out of nowhere,

Paikun just starts speaking in subtitles and he says, what happened to you? Like, it's okay. You could tell me and Paikun just goes in subtitle out of nowhere. It's too painful. That's right, bitch. Folks, folks, I was, I was balling. I was in, I was, I was devastated by that. It's just too painful for me to talk about. And it's about, then eventually, of course, they do, he ports into the whale. He got Jonah, like he is consumed in his giant bailing and then like unfurls his, his UCB cord. And then he experiences the memories of like his memory as a child of seeing his mother killed in front of him by human whalers. Bro, bro, I was like, these demons, they must die. All of them for what they did. They are not making it out. They are not making

it out. Yeah. I mean, how does a movie make you cheer for the extinction of humanity in the age of space travel? This is how this takes a shit all over Bambi. Put these two scenes together and it's like, whatever, you dumb bitch. Who cares? Who cares? I hope that Hunter made sausage. You show me this scene. You show me this scene. I am, I'm, I'm poisoning my town's water reservoir. So then we get into the, the Moby Dick part of this movie because, like, basically, like the, the humans, they get some fix on the coordinates of like, you know, the, the, they have a general idea that Jake Sully and his family are hiding out in this like chain of islands. And like, they're going to go there and to go there, they're sort of commandeer a whaling vessel and they

bring spider along for it. And like a good part of the movie takes place on this futuristic, basically a futuristic James Cameron P quad. Yeah. I would just like to talk now about Cameron's fetish for like futuristic military robotics technology really, really shines. Folks, this whaling, okay, it's like, there's the whaling mothership, which is like a hover, which is like a hydrofoil. And it can actually even like take off as a plane and fly very low. Like, you know, very, very, very low altitude. And then just sort of land on the ocean surface and these huge hydrofoils. And then it's just sort of like unfolds and open us up. There's a harpoon boat. There's sort of like speed boats. There's crab mechs. Crab mechs.

I almost fell out of my seat when they unveiled the crab mechs. They're personal submersibles. And then we're also introduced to Jemaine Clements character, which is an odd choice for him to be speaking in an American accent when the captain of the whale boat is like, all right, listen, Mike, we're going to get these bloody wiles. We're going to get them. And okay, but I want to talk about the Jemaine Clements character for a second, because I thought this is an interesting character who's sort of a mirror with the Sigourney Weir character in the first movie is that he is essentially, he's a human marine biologist who is a scientist who studies the marine life forms of the planet Pandora and

the Tolkien specifically, but he's only doing it. He only has a job because his knowledge is useful in exterminating them and sucking out their brains to make fucking immortality juice for humanity. He is aware of how intelligent and how how big the minds and how deep the reserve of emotional emotion and memory that these living, self-aware beings have, but just has to watch them be butchered by these fucking tattooed shitheads for money. And the most emotionally affecting scene in the movie for me is when Spider has to watch them do a wailing, they wail a pod of whales and they just zone it as human whalers do on a mother and her calf. Why? Because the mother will never abandon the calf and it makes her easier to kill. Once again, I was like,

just help. There is no redemption for what they did to that fucking whale mother and her calf. I was dying. I was fucking dying. And think for what? Immortality. Amazing. But for who? They stress this is the most valuable stuff of the universe, which means that it is keeping the richest people on earth alive. Imagine these scumbags that are going to be kept alive forever off of this. Imagine who gets this potion. Like 22nd century Sheldon Adelson gets to fucking get the pope fiction injection into his heart and live forever as a disgusting golem because it just stops aging. So you know these gross old people that had like 17,000 plastic surgeries look like Kathleen Hellman in Brazil are just going to live forever as these horrifying golems.

And that's what we're getting for the death of these creatures. And you know, Jim Inclement, like he has guilt about what he does. But like, I mean, like to me, like that is a stand in for you in the audience. Like he's aware of the evil that undergirds everything about our life and economy and like our comfort and jobs and everything. He's aware of it. But what does he do about it? He's like, I drink. That's how I deal with it. That's why I drink. Because I'm just like, because, you know, like unlike Jake Swaley, like he has not yet, he's not willing to sacrifice his life. He's not willing to, you have to be willing to abandon everything you are and everything you ever will be or

know or have to have any hope of escape. Yep. And I don't know, like just like all the details of how they kill this whale, like they fucking. Oh yeah, they got it all set up. They hit it with the harpoons. They hit it with sonic. The harpoons have these quick sound cannons, buoys that like pull them to the surface. Oh yeah. Like they hit it with a harpoon that explodes into these huge like fucking airbags to pull it up to the surface. And of course, like the, the Quarish character makes them do this because like usually they whale way further away from like Navi settlements because like they know if they kill one, it's like, it's on site. It's on site. And the whole point is like they do this because like they, they want them to

attack them because they're going to draw out Jake and his people. And like, what do they do? They kill like the best friend of like Kate Winslet, like, you know, her sister, they fucking butcher her and her fucking baby. So like from then it's just, it, it's on. It's, it's worn out. Like it's, there's no peace. It is, it is time to attack. There's no more of this hiding out or like, no, like they, they killed our brothers. There's only one thing for them, death. They, like they must be killed. You know, which takes us to the climax of the movie, which was just, just thrilling. I mean, I got, it's like just the, the attack on the whaling boat, man. Like, I don't even know where you go with this. Oh my God. It's like a 40 minute scene. The battle

between this is just, it's just astonishing. Somebody has pointed this out. I forget who it was, but they pointed out that between these two movies, there are approximately 50 shots of one of those gigantic fucking Navi arrows going through the cockpit of a helicopter spear and a guy. And every time it rules, it does not get old. Every time just this, this, this, this massive concussive eruption of this fucking guy's got a pool cue coming out of his chest. And then it's amazing. I have not seen, yeah, there have not been as, the only arrow scene I can even compare it to is the end of the movie hero. That's it. But yeah, no, this climax was, okay, I'm going to make a little admission.

I have seen this movie twice. I saw it in freestyle. I saw it in theaters, where I enjoyed the Coke freestyle machine. It was wonderful. But I had to say, I saw, you know, weeks before because we had scheduled to record this much sooner. So I did, I downloaded, I did a very legal download of this movie. So I could, you saw, you saw in the theater, you're, you're absolved. Yeah, I did already pay for it. That's true. But anyway, okay, I got a torrent of this movie just to, just to, you know, as a refresher before this episode. And it is, first of all, it's a cam. It's a terrible cam. And not just as, not just a cam, every 20 minutes, there is a voice ad for an India based cricket gambling service.

The way it was meant to be seen. Yeah. And it plays throughout this amazing climax. And it made it no less emotionally impactful for me. It was still just as good. I'm still going to go back and watch the worst torrent I've ever downloaded until I can get this on streaming or blu-ray. Um, yeah, like it's, it's, it's a battle between, because, you know, like, the wheeling ship, like they, they tag our boy Paikoon and like the kids, they have to go out and save him. But then like, you know, like, oh, shit, like there's a lot of cases in this movie where Jake tells his kids, hey, don't do that. And then they do. And then they're like, oh, shit. Well, I guess action has to happen now. They gotta learn somehow. Yeah. Um, so it's,

yeah, it's Navi versus, versus the demon non-V and they're, and they're whaling compatriots. And it's on, which leads to, in my opinion, probably one of the most satisfying moments of cinema in recent memory, if not this century, which is at the exact right moment when it, when it's looking grim for our heroes, that the whaling ship is like, you know, it's, it's, it's leviathan of like human technology and industry and, and everything that represents our boy Paikoon on the bottom of the ocean. He spins around. He charges up an R2 attack, breaches the service of the ocean and fucking belly flops onto the deck of this whaling ship, crushing about a dozen guys at once, just scattering cranes, just the whole fucking ship just is like, has sinking. He's

just flopping about on the deck of this fucking ship, just smashing shit up. People are screaming. Oh, it's just, it's so satisfying. And then the, the, the, the, the, the, the Ahab character, the head of the P quad, he spins back around on the harpoon boat and it's got this huge like rocket tipped harpoon right in front of it. And he's like, bring us around for a shot, bring us around. And you know, it's a whale on the deck of the ship. So you think it's like vulnerable. It's just sort of like thrashing about. And he comes up close to it. He aims the rocket harpoon right at its head. And he's like, I need a good shot. He gets it off. What does Paikon do? He just tilts his head down just a slight bit. And the, the, the, the bone, like the huge

armored skull. Yeah. You got to hit their underbelly or they're not going to hit and feel it. You got to hit him from the bottom, whether or not armored. He just tilts his head down and this rocket fired harpoon at point blank range. Just go, just bounces off of his dome and just explodes elsewhere in the pure cinema, pure cinema. And then he gets back in the water and the, the Ahab guy comes around and of course Jermaine Clement is in the boat. And now he's like, ha, fuck you. Of course he's also going to die, but you know, at least he's enjoying it in the moment. But then I thought this was interesting. They, they, uh, Cameron, it pains to show that like as the, as the boat is going, is the guy is getting owned, like there's a wire that like

gets over his arm. And then he, the, the whole boat like goes over a rock and he goes flying off of the boat with his arm flying in the other direction. And I'm willing to bet he comes back in the third one with like a robot arm and a fanatical desire to kill payakon. They have mode. He's nailing that gold doubloon to the AWA earth trade. Um, but yeah, like, and then like eventually like the, the ocean, Navi, like all the, all the whalers are dead for the most part. The ocean Navi are like, all right, uh, we did, we did our thing. We're done. Yeah. We're done. Cause then basically it just caught through the gun to the head of like Jake Sully's kids. And then it's just about, it's about one of you one, uh, you know, like the, the,

these two sort of, uh, mirrored, the mirrored opposites of each other. You know, like the two jar heads, but like both in Navi for me, like they, they act had their, their final confrontation. I will say, um, Natiri, there's always sell Donya character. Uh, she's very good at the end of this movie too. She, she goes demon mode too. There's, there's a great scene of her just killing like a half dozen people, just stabbing them, shooting them through the head with arrows, just going beast mode. And then like courage has a knife to Sigourney Weaver's throat. And then what does she do? She grabs that bitch as a dreadlock kid, spider, just puts a knife to his throat and says one for the other. And she's, and like, I thought it was an effective scene

because like I really bought that she would have killed him, that she was going to kill him. Yeah. Well, but that's because that happens after when they're, when the kids are trying to escape the boat, her eldest son gets killed. Oh right. Whose name I don't remember. The good boy. But I was still sad when he died. You know what I mean? The way, the way less interesting son who is just everything the right way. I was shocked when he ended up dead. Yeah. Yeah. No. So Jake, Jake solid, Jake solid loses a kid. You know, I mean, you know, it was effective. This is a movie about family. Yeah. Movie about family. When, when she cuts spider across the chest, I mean, as you said, amazing scene because

again, you know, you think you're, you really buy that she could slit this child's throat. But also Cameron flexing his technical abilities. Not only has he shown a real human characters next to these giant CGI blue guys, the entire movie. Now he has one penetrate the skin of a real human and it looks amazing. It looks great. You completely buy it. So then like, you know, Jake and Miles, they, they have a knife fight. But then this is all as the giant wailing hydrofoil is sinking. We get now, of course, the, another one of Cameron's big fetishes being in a room on a sinking ship as, as it rapidly fills with water. Yep. As we talked about the forensics of a sinking ship. Cameron loves that shit. Water flowing in. There's a mini titanic within

Avatar, the way of water. And, you know, of course, Jake defeats, defeats Miles, who sinks to the bottom. Then of course, you know, he's going to be around spider saves his dad. He saves his dad. He drags him out from the bottom of the ship. But then of course, Jake is also Jake and Nathiri and their kids are trapped in the, in the sinking ship. And you think Jake is going to die. But then, you know, the, the prodigal son returns, he teaches his dad how to slow his breathing. And then there's a, I thought a really great scene where Sigourney Weaver uses her airplay abilities to like send these streams of sort of bioluminescent jellyfish into the wreckage of the ship to give them to light their path out of this sinking ship and into

daylight or into the surface. Oh, and earlier she has a badass mode where she gets a bunch of giant sea cucumbers. Oh God, that was good. Strangle some motherfuckers. Oh, that was good. She like, like these big sea enemies, like, like crush one of the little like personal submersibles. They crush it and the guys are like, mass, we got to get out, got to get out. They get out of the hatch and then the tentacles just grab them. Oh God. It was great. It was great. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I mean, like, I mean, like that's pretty much the movie. Like you know, Miles, of course, will be back. Like, Spider saves his father, but then rejects him and is sort of like reabsorbed into Sully and his family. And then as Sully says,

you know, a son for a son, basically, like he killed my son, but like I have now taken his son as my own. And like, he like, you know, like he lost, he has lost his son, even though his son saved his life. And then at the end, you know, like they, they have funeral rights for the good son who died. And his body is absorbed into like into a Y into the ocean version of their, their, their spirit world tree. And here, okay, like here's where I want to end up with like my overarching thought I had about this movie or where I think the end of this movie would have made me feel. The last scene of the movie is Jake and Nittiri after the funeral of their son. They, they tap into Ewa and like the ocean people's like world tree, like they're, they're

port to the, like I said, the planet wide neural network of all life on Pandora. And they port into it. And in doing so, Jake experiences a memory he has of his son. But here's the thing, it's a memory that his son also has, because it's something they experienced together. And that when he dies, his son, all of his memories do not go away. They did not become nothing. They are data that is now housed in this like, like I said, planet wide, organic supercomputer. Exactly, an organic supercomputer. So that the like when, when, when they tap in, like when, when Jake, who's still alive and experiencing reality as a discrete individual, his memory, like they, like him and his dead son, both experience as they did when they were alive, a memory that

they both had. It's real. It's real because they, it's a memory that they both had and all of like the record stored in your brain of like the memory itself, but also like the physical feeling of it is there. And obviously Jake and Niteri, because they are still like, you know, they are still alive as discrete individuals are aware in this moment that like this is not life life. This is just there. They're allowed to gain access to something that still exists of their son, his memories, his feelings, everything that he is, is not, is not nothingness. It has been, it is stored somewhere. It does not go away forever. It still exists and that they can gain access to it. And I thought I was like, I was very moved by that. But also I want to come back to something Felix

said earlier on. The thing, the idea that stuck most with me in this movie is the competing depictions of life after death off of this movie. Because we already mentioned how Quadritch is in this, like you said, Matt Hagel's bad infinity. Quadritch is able to transcend death, the death of his physical body, because through human technology, they're able to like record and create a backup of all of his thoughts and memories and then just, you know, download it into a new body. But that is a vision of afterlife in which your soul, your memories, which is really like that is what your soul is. We are nothing other than just a collection of memories. That is who we are, nothing else. That means that your soul is owned forever by a military corporation.

That is hell. That is a vision of hell that is inescapable now. Yeah. Oh, congratulations. There's life after death. But what that entails is that you get to be a marine forever and like you're only alive because there's some utility in killing people and continuing to be a fucking, wearing big oak leaves and fucking acting like an asshole. It is a vision of hell as compared to the vision of Ewa and the promise of something of yourself existing that you can interact with, that you can interact with the thoughts and memories of people who are dead that are now part of, like you said, a planet-wide like neural spiritual supercomputer of which everything that you ever are or will be, it does not go away. That it still exists and it is a part of

a universal chain of being. That we, again, once again, Earth is Pandora. It is no different. And what it suggests is like the first movie, Jake Sutley isn't nobody. He's a cypher. He's a zero. He only matters because he is willing to take a moral stand and die for something bigger than himself, which is the only hope of escape. And I think what Cameron is saying is that if we believed in or understood Earth, this experience of reality that we have when we leave the movie theater, as being part of something larger than ourselves, that our memories, our spirit, whatever you want to call it, that there is something that will exist after our death, that we will not just disappear into nothingness forever, that we would lose our fear of death and thus, in thus

so doing, be able to stop the death of everything on this planet. Yep. Because what are we doing this for? We're doing this so that a handful of Silicon Valley Freaks can find this singularity. Singularity already exists, bitch. You're living in it. This is the singularity. There is only one point in the universe. It's the point you're in. You fucking dumbass. And it's that psychotic, literally psychotic separation of the self from everything around it. That insistence that eternity is only eternal if it's me forever, which as we said, is eventually and very quickly hell, even for the rich people who buy the potion, that their life will become to the point where all earthly pleasure, all newness will fade into

just dull nothingness. It is that cyclical rebirth that defines life. And like, yeah, you can live forever, but only if you let go of the fantasy of living forever. It is your choice, whether you want all your good memories, all your connections, every moment of beauty in your life to be a moment of eternity, accessible forever because it is a part of an eternity that you share. Or you can live forever in call of duty. Yeah. I'll tell you, it sounds good if you're 15, but if you do it long enough, guess what? It gets to be shitty. It sucks. Yeah. It gets bad. And then the thing is, once it gets bad, it only gets worse. It never gets better. It can only get worse with time. It can never get better as opposed to life in a cycle which goes up and down, but stabilizes around

a stillness, a certainty of an existence of something beyond your fucking self. Although I do want to call this, I think this is going to happen in the future ones. Quorich is going to switch because part of what he's trying to get at is that you can change, that there is hope for people as long as they're alive to recognize their conditions. And I really do think that Quorich is connection to spider and the fact that spider saved his life. It is going to be a bridge that is going to see him. He's going to have a face turn. He's going to have a face turn in the next couple of movies for sure. But as long as we're talking about Quorich, I just like to point out that in the first movie, as is that Stephen Lang, a truly great villain performance. And I

mean truly great because he is very frightening and ruthless and evil, but also has credible motivations and feelings for why he does the things he does. I mean, there is a humanity in there that buttresses his villainy. And like I said, so many modern action movies, the villains are just not satisfyingly scary or relatable. Or just like, I thought Quorich is an excellent, excellent villain in these movies. You know what the distinction is? You know why? It's because the villains in most shit, their explanation that we get for why they're a villain is something innate to them, some evil that is innate to their character. And that is alien to most normal people who don't think of themselves as a beyond the pale evil. The thing that is

evil about Quorich is his job. The thing that is evil about Quorich is the degree to which he has been instrumentalized by his society. And then he is a guy with human recognizable human values who whose values have been warped around living in the society that he lives in. And that is why he is compelling and scary and evil, but also human. So I think the overall message of this movie is that we, is that we must, we must befriend whales. You gotta get a whale buddy. We must befriend whales, but we also need to teach them to kill, kill, kill. That's very important. Killing whales, killing whales is bad. Killing people, it must be done. They need to be taught to drink blood. They can teach us so much

about the balance of life and the meaning of life, but we can teach them how to kill. We can teach them violence. Well, again, the Tolkien way is the correct way. They're smarter than us. They get that, but they, the Tolkien way was developed in the environment of the homeostatic natural environment of Pandora, the life they've only ever known. They don't know what humans are capable of. They can't know no matter how smart they are. And so they're not going to violate the Tolkien way because it's the, held them together for, for their entire millennium. Someone's going to have to teach them. Someone's going to have to let them know this is different. We have to make an exception because yes, you need to be able to break the glass in case of emergency.

And the Tolkien got to get there. They have to realize that. And that is why that communication is the key to anything and not a time to tell people something or tell a reach, reaching out from a point of vulnerability where you're like, I'm willing to learn from you. I'm willing to submit in some way to, to a knowledge of someone or something that is not mine to accept being wrong, to accept being short-sighted. That is the only way that meaningful, productive communication can occur. And that's like, you leave the theater with this ache. I want a whale buddy. And of course, you know, you can turn it into a meme and you can just be sad about it because there are no Tolkien and we do have whales, but we can't really be friends with them. You know, it's hard to do.

They want to leave us. They want to leave us. They want to be away from us for very short reasons. They're sort of flaky. It's hard to make plans. But you, but that urge, that desire to have a whale friend, that doesn't just have to sit there. You can do something with it because you're a living being surrounded by other living beings. And you can take that, that desire to transcend a barrier and apply it to the relationships that you have in your life. Like that is, that's why these movies I think are, they are at all, are worthwhile. And you might say, well, that's pathetic. We got all of our hope rested in this megalomaniacs fantasy movies to like, slowly recondition our brains until after the fifth one, we're literally like, are we all go enter a collective psychic

break that rests up free from the prison, the psychiatric prison that we're in now? Yeah, that is bad. But that is all we got. I'm sorry. No one else is coming through that door. The revolutionary proletariat is coming through that door. We're, we're here. We're, we're zoo animals. And we're entertaining ourselves at the end of the world. And I would rather have an entertainment that leaves me with it with some sort of ache, some sort of yearning that I have to deal with, rather than something that just tells me every opinion I've ever had is correct. All emotions are kind of embarrassing and you shouldn't publicly express them. And any kind of vulnerability has to be neutralized with irony. Exactly. And it, like all the knocks on Cameron throughout his

entire career and certainly with the Avatar movies, just generally boils down to people being uncomfortable with earnestness. They're uncomfortable with that. You know, he has big heart on his sleeve and you can say, Oh, like, so it's clunky or maybe you roll your eyes at it, whatever. He believes in and has the ability to, because there are people who believe in it, but they have no ability to achieve this. He, he understands that, that cinema creates an emotional experience for you. That you, you're, you sit in that theater and you come out and you have experienced and you've communed with something with, with, with feelings that we all have with the vision of the director, but he creates through like the medium of like a visual storytelling,

a comprehensive emotional experience. He does, like, you know, he does not just, it is not, it is not an experience that just like shows you or tells you things that you already believe or are correct or makes you feel good because you're like smart enough to get it. You know, like it's big, it's broad, you could say it's simple, but like, no, this is, this is about communing with, with your humanity that we all share. And shout out to our friend. And you know, it's working because shout out to our friend, Paul, who said that when he, he was, as he was leaving the theater for seeing Avatar in the way of water was a mother and daughter coming out of the theater. And the mother says to the daughter, I can't believe they killed that whole whale just

for that little bit of a gel. And the daughter goes, mom, they're doing that right now. It's true. Ron Pandora, folks. Damn. It really makes you think, you know, every, the biggest libs in liberalized Hollywood, their anti-war movie, their typical anti-war movie is called like the good division. And it's about a group of brave Marines who did the Haditha massacre and weren't given the proper body armor by the defense department. Whereas Cameron portrays all of humanity and the current order, the current way of doing things of our entire species as the fourth Reich, as Nazis, portraying us doing atrocities that just really aren't shown in big blockbusters being committed by humans,

unless it's a World War II movie. He really is the father of revolution. Yeah, because, but it's because the humans still have, can be, they can be redeemed, they can change, conditions change, and what makes them change if they stop fucking doing what they're told to do, and they stop doing what narrowly benefits them. If they sacrifice something, if they take the risk to believe in the humanity of someone other than themselves, and if they do that, then they can not be an eternal Nazi demon, like that. And that, I do think that that is going to be the story of the rest of these movies is this transformation. I kind of have a hunch that the last one, if he gets to make it, is going to end on earth.

That's, that's my, I don't know how they get there, but I think it's going to happen. Also, there's apparently going to be a red lava guys in the next one. Fire. Fire Navi. Oh boy. Oh boy. Also, yes, three hours long, three hours and 10. And yes, the middle hour is them just hanging out. It's them hanging out on the reef, talking to the tokens, finding out the way of water. And when it ended, and he goes, it ends again like the first one does with him opening his eyes after the funeral, right? And coming out of the port, seeing his son and his voice over is about how like, I can't run away anymore. I got to fight in his eyes. They had just said, here's, take five minutes to go to the bathroom. We're showing avatar three right now. I would have

gone back and watched the whole fucking thing. I would have been like, yes, give me three hours, give me Jake sully fighting back against these motherfuckers. Let's do it. Give me the lava guys, whatever. I just, I want more. This is the soma. This is, this is the, this is the thing, but that's what makes it not narcotic is that you are left with feelings you have to deal with. And that is productive. I mean, it isn't much, but it is literally what we have at the end of history where we're entertaining ourselves to death. And we should, I anyway, feel like there's value to, to reflecting on that, even if, you know, the odds don't look too good. Yeah. So I guess, like I said, I guess that sums it up. Once again, as we did in our first episode avatar episode,

you are on Pandora right now. It's true. This is Pandora. I see you. And yes, we see you. We see you. So yeah, that does it for avatar, the way of water. However, before we end out this episode and, you know, inaugurate a new year for Choppo, I feel, I feel compelled to acknowledge some, some sad news that I feel we should bring up and just acknowledge the death of gangsta boo. I found out about that yesterday and was absolutely gutted by it. I just want to send from the Choppo family here just all our thoughts, love and condolences to her friends and family. She was just an incredible talent. You know, I mean, you can talk about, you know, best female rappers if you want, but like just an incredibly influential talent for all of music. But more

than that, just in the little bit amount of time I got to hang out with her, a genuinely sweet and nice person. And I'm really sad about this. But, you know, she, for someone like her, she was just so sweet and generous with her time, not just with us, but like with the trilbillies, the amount of people she put on just, and just how nice and cool she was. Like, like I said, I did not know her very closely at all. But I really enjoyed the amount of time I got to hang out with her just a little bit. Lola changed culture and music forever. And this is really crushing for a number of reasons. But it really seemed like she was entering a second act of her life where, you know, through her engagement with, with us with trilbillies,

she had realized that there were millions of people out there that wanted to hear from her, who had, you know, her music had been the soundtrack to their adolescence. They'd grown up in the South or the Midwest. She was, as Will alluded to, just this magnetic presence that lit up every room she was in. There's just no way to make sense of this loss. But, yeah, all we can say is that we're going to miss her in every way. Yeah, a really sad way to start this new year. You know, it's just, it sucks. It was, I was really, really depressed to read that waking up on January 1st. But like, you know, as I said, just, just how influential she was, just like, you know, her DNA is everywhere in

contemporary music. You know, she said she wanted to remember it as, you know, the First Lady of Crunk, the First Lady of Three Six Mafia, the First Lady of Rap. I mean, how about just First Lady of the United States? Thanks to Boo, you'll be, I'm just, I gotta say, just to her friends and family who knew her way better than we do. I can only imagine how sad this is for them. But just, just the condolences and love to everyone who knew her. Yeah. I hate to follow up that touching tribute with plugs, but I do have to say, hell on earth, the 30 years of war and the violent rise of capitalism, preeners. Next Wednesday, that will be free. Everywhere you can get Chapo Trap House on the Chapo Trap House feed. Every subsequent

episode will be on Patreon. And then also, Matt and I are doing a little live launch party show that will be a recording of a supplemental episode plus a Q and A. Will will be there for the Q and A part. Matt Karp will be joining us. That is at Little Field the following Friday, January 20th. Tickets, some tickets are still available. Link will be in description. All right, guys. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Happy New Year, everyone. you