The Bulwark Podcast - BONUS EPISODE: The Bulwark Goes Across the Movie Aisle

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

The Across the Movie Aisle pod returns to Pandora for James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water. Is the sequel — 13 years in the making — worth the wait? Plus, the streaming programming crunch. Sonny Bunch, Alyssa Rosenberg, and Peter Suderman take over the Bulwark pod for this special bonus episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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October is the season for wearing masks and costumes, but some of us feel like we wear a mask and hide more often than we want to. At work, in social settings, around our family. Therapy can help you learn to accept all parts of yourself, so you can stop hiding and take off the mask. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Whether you're navigating workplace stresses, complex relationships, or family dynamics, therapy is a great tool for facing your fears and finding

a way to overcome them. If you're thinking of starting therapy but you're afraid of what you might uncover, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P, dot com. Hey, this is Sonny Bunch. I'm culture editor at The Bulwark. I'm happy to be presenting an episode of Across the Movie Isle to you folks today. It's a great episode.

We're talking about Avatar, The Way of Water, and whether or not you should go see it in theaters. And on the show, we always have a controversies or non-troversies segment where we talk about what's happening in the business of Hollywood side of things. This week, we're talking about the decline in streaming content. There's just less of it. There's fewer shows being greenlit, fewer movies being produced, et cetera.

So it's going to have pretty big impact, not just on what you see, but also just on the whole business of Hollywood. There's a very decent chance that this is going to hasten the onset of a writer's strike coming up. And, you know, there's all sorts of downstream effects from that. So hope you check out the show. You can subscribe to us at Bulwark Plus or,

you know, on Apple, all the other podcast platforms. We have bonus episodes every Friday, only at Bulwark Plus. You got to sign up over there for those. They're a lot of fun. This week, we're doing a James Cameron movie draft, which should be very fun. Yeah, the whole thing is great. Hope you check us out some more. Welcome back to Across the Movie Aisle, presented by Bulwark+. I am your host, Sonny Bunch, culture editor of The Bulwark. I'm joined, as always, by Alyssa Rosenberg of The Washington Post and Peter Suderman of Reason Magazine. Alyssa, Peter, how are you today? I am swell. I am happy to be talking about movies with friends.

First up in controversies and non-troversies, get ready for streaming winter, folks. The era of infinite abundance on your TV is about to end. As The New York Times reports, after years of growth, streamers are finally hitting the brakes in an effort to pivot to profitability. Here's what John Koblen reports, quote, the number of adult scripted series ordered by TV networks and streaming companies aimed for U.S. audiences fell by 24% in the second half of this year compared with the same period last year, according to Ampere Analysis, a research firm. Compared to 2019, it is a 40% drop, end quote. Given how many shows are out there already and how much TV people, you know, kind of have to catch up on, I myself have a backlog that includes two seasons of White Lotus, the new season of Slow Horses, the hit series Yellow Jackets,

et cetera, et cetera. I'm kind of skeptical that audiences are going to notice any of this right away, if at all. But the industry is absolutely going to notice this because fewer shows means fewer people get employed. Actors, yes, but also writers, below-the-line workers like gaffers, customers, and the such, et cetera. And unless I'm very mistaken, this sudden crunch is only going to increase the likelihood of a Writers Guild strike.

Every writer I've talked to in recent months, every agent, every manager, every outside viewer of the system, they seem pretty sure that a writer's strike is more or less preordained for a handful of reasons, the biggest of them being the treatment by the streamers. The streamers tend to hire people to write fewer episodes of a show per season. They have a habit of staffing the shows with so-called mini rooms that save them money, but kind of kneecap the ability of writers to make money, et cetera. Money is the big thing here. Money, money, money, money. It's always the simple fact is that streamers pay less than broadcasts or cable networks. Residuals for streamers are practically non-existent, meaning that writers need to keep writing to make money, meaning that

they need to keep finding new shows, meaning that a programming crunch is going to drastically harm their ability to eat food, pay rent, that sort of thing. It's safe to say that one of the things writers are going to demand in the negotiations is the thing that streaming companies are most loathe to part with, and that's their data. Writers and their agents want to tie compensation to streams, to views, to the amount something is watched. The more a show is watched, the more writers should be paid is the thinking. Seems fair, particularly with so many rooms staffed with fewer people working for scale and the death of residuals. Again, that whole idea that you get money every time it shows up on either cable or broadcast and reruns, that doesn't exist on streaming because there are no such thing as reruns on streaming.

But the only way to audit such payments is to get access to the actual data for every show and not just whatever Datik Dotes, Netflix or HBO Max or whoever else chooses to release. Spoiler, the streamers would rather hire AI programs to write their shows than hand this over. They are so scared of doing this. They will burn the whole system to the ground, I think. A kid, but only slightly. Alyssa, what's going to happen in the coming winter of content discontent? I mean, I hope that John Landgraf, who coined the term Peak TV, head of the FX network, really great executive, is somewhere like having a really nice scotch to reward himself for having said, hey, this is unsustainable for an incredibly long time. I think that there are scenarios in which this is doomsday and there are scenarios in which

this is maybe actually kind of fine. You know, I think for a lot of writers who have come in, particularly through the studio's diversity initiatives in recent years, this contraction is really frightening, right? I mean, they were sort of getting their feet in the door at a moment when TV writing felt more financially precarious than it ever had before. And I mean, you know, the difference between three residuals from things that were airing on network television and things that were airing sort of in different ways are astonishing, right? I mean, we're talking not about, you know, differences even at 50%, but of like hundreds of percentage point. 99%. Exactly. And so for writers who felt like they were getting their foot in the door

through these programs, even at a time when the industry was much more precarious, I think there is real fear that they are going to get shut out of the industry, that it's going to revert to a sort of very white male monolithic mean. And maybe that will be the case, right? I mean, I don't think anyone can promise writers who have, you know, busted into the industry at a moment when it was sort of reconsidering its historical demographics. I don't think anyone can promise them they're going to stay or that it's going to work out, right? But it's also possible that a contraction will produce opportunities for stuff to be better and more interesting. I mean, there's a lot of garbage that's getting produced in the current environment, right? We've talked on this podcast before about Netflix's turn away from trying to be a sort of

prestige-y outlet to one that produces a certain amount of low volume trash and that, you know, routinely cancel stuff after three seasons. And so if there is less of this stuff, and there is more time to develop it better and more thoughtfully, then maybe television will be better. And also, frankly, you know, I don't know that if we're going to get a contraction down to the point where a real sort of mass culture starts emerging again, frankly, you know, I don't know that if we're going to get a contraction down to the point where a real sort of mass culture starts emerging again, because, you know, the great fragmentation driven by streaming has been one of my bugbears for really the whole decade that I've been in this business. And I hope we're not going to go down to like, the three broadcast networks plus HBO, because I think that there is space in between, you know, three networks and one

cable network and what we're in right now that would be supported by the audience appetite. But if there are fewer things, maybe more of us can glom onto one of them and have an actual national cultural conversation again. And that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. Well, Peter, let me ask, let me go full Bernie Sanders on you here and suggest, you know, 37 deodorants, too many. You know, we need fewer TV shows so we can make better TV shows and also so we actually know what people are watching and can then talk about. I'm sorry, Sonny, you need to be saying this in Bernie Sanders voice. And with a coat. I'm not going to do that.

That would get me very canceled trying to imitate Bernie Sanders. I won't do that. But I do think there's something to this. I do think that there is too much TV and too much of it is not very good. So if we have less TV that is better, that could actually be good for everyone. I think nobody knows the answer to that. And the bet for streaming, particularly from Netflix, was that more is better and that quality was a secondary concern. That has been increasingly true over the last couple of years at Netflix, where they've basically decided to focus on volume above all. Other streamers kind of followed suit there, right? And themselves thought that they needed to compete in the volume game. There was a fairly famous meeting with the HBO staff a few years ago before the Discovery merger,

in which new management came in and said, well, you know, they were responding to some concerns that were in the air about, are you going to make us be like Netflix? And they'd said, oh no, we're not going to make you be like Netflix. At the same time, you're producing however many shows a year they're producing and the number is going to have to go up. You are all going to have to do more because what they wanted was for HBO not to be a boutique shop that polished diamonds up until the point they were ready, and then just released however many they had. They wanted HBO to be sort of working its magic at scale, sort of in a more assembly line kind of way. And it's never been totally clear whether that is the right strategy or not for gaining and retaining viewers.

How many viewers actually care how many shows Netflix has? I think the answer is probably not that many. Instead, viewers care whether Netflix has enough shows that they care about. And that's true for all the other streamers as well. You subscribe to a streamer when it provides three or six or 10 or whatever the number is that satisfies your sort of budgetary calculus, however many shows, right? And the volume thing is sort of a background concern because it's always, it is sort of like nice to turn on your favorite streaming service and see, oh, there's a bunch of stuff here rather than the same three shows that I've been watching, you know, that I've already

seen already. But we've just never really existed in a world where streamers don't seem to have a kind of endless well of content. And right now, probably every streamer has at least one show that will appeal to, well, certainly I would say anyone listening to this podcast, right? Which may not be enough to get you over the hump to actually pay for it. But this is the thing that executives don't know, that viewers themselves don't know, you know, that the whole industry and the whole sort of viewer apparatus is just very confused right now about like what they actually want from streaming television. Do they want a smaller number of more thoughtful shows or do they just want a lot of new stuff that they can kind of turn on

and, you know, not pay that much attention to while they're folding laundry. I know what we want on this podcast, because we are connoisseurs. We are appreciators of higher quality stuff. But there are a lot of viewers who I don't think we should dismiss, who treat streaming as a sort of a companion who is there, right? And it kind of always has something that they can be watching in the background. And that's a perfectly legitimate way to go about watching this stuff, and to go about using streaming services. And I would guess if I had to, that that is probably a bigger market. And so I would guess that the direction that this goes

is that in the end, there's just a lot of stuff that is aimed at that kind of viewer, at the sort of the median viewer who is there. They want something that's good enough that it doesn't annoy them. The sort of moderately amusing that's a good companion while they're making dinner, folding the laundry while they are, you know, falling asleep at the end of the day after a hard day at work. And that's maybe not the sort of thing that streaming TV has become known for, you know, the prestige products. And it's not the kind of thing that we talk about on this show as much, but it is something that I think Hollywood has produced that kind of material for a long time. It's a service to viewers. It's a service to maybe a different kind of viewer than the three of us are. It's also possible to execute that kind of, you know, lower engagement stuff

extremely well, right? I mean, my husband and I have been catching up on Abbott Elementary, which was ABC's big breakout sitcom last year. And it's, I mean, it's a very conventional sitcom in a lot of ways. It's got a, you know, sincere, younger character at the center, you know, an older figure of wisdom, a couple of like kind of chaotic, wacky characters, a love interest. It's extremely well executed. They have like a nice, you know, increasingly dense joke cadence to it. There is, you know, a certain amount of built-in heartwarming stuff because it's set at an elementary school and it's about teachers who want to do good things for their poor students. It is really nicely done. And, you know, I don't think Abbott Elementary is a show that we would ever talk about on this

podcast necessarily. It lacks the kind of high conceptness of the TV that tends to break through the schedule for us, but it's executed extremely well. And if there is stuff that feels that, like, I would like this to keep me company, you can be kept company by a mediocre friend or a good one. So let me make one more prediction here, since you brought up the likelihood of a strike, Sonny. I think this does make it more likely that the streamers will consolidate in some way, that one streamer or another will buy another one. Because the one thing that we know that viewers are annoyed by is not too many shows, but they are annoyed by too many different streaming subscriptions.

Like that is very clear that people think that there's a lot of people out there who just think this is too many streaming networks. I am not going to pay for all of these. And in a world where there are fewer things being produced, the business logic for one of these companies buying another one, Paramount Plus is probably the one that is most likely to be purchased and folded in to some other streaming service. I think the business logic there is going to become even more compelling for consolidation. Yeah, I mean, the real issue here is that it doesn't make sense for these companies to be producing so much content as they shift from trying to gather subscribers to making a profit. I mean, I like, you know, everybody hated the head of

Warner Brothers Discovery, David Zasloff shelving Batgirl and, you know, throwing the negatives in the trash and lighting it on fire and all that for the tax. Canceling Westworld. Canceling Westworld. And FBoy Island. The simple fact of the matter is that it is insane to spend $90 million on a two-hour movie that you're only going to show on HBO Max. There's no universe in which that sort of thing gains you enough subscribers to be sustainable. It just doesn't make any sense.

You know, a show like West show like Westworld canceling Westworld like Westworld was not pulling in numbers anymore. It was hugely popular the first season and like steadily went down. Do you think that's big budget Netflix films like Red Notice and Birdwatch and The Gray Man, The Gray Man, which is supposed to be, you know, the start of a whole franchise with a bunch of sequels and was very expensive? I believe it was over $200 million to produce, possibly with some of the back-end deals in place. But do you think that that sort of thing, which Netflix seems to be very bullish on, is a bad idea? And do you think that anybody else could replicate it? Netflix is playing in a different ballgame because Netflix has so many subscribers. I mean, Netflix's revenue base is essentially,

I think, two-thirds of the entire global box office in 2019. I mean, it's making an enormous amount of money. And they can do slightly different things. But I will say that I don't think that a Netflix that consists solely of gray mans and red notices would work. The reason why Netflix works, the real secret, Julia Alexander at Puck has written about this. The real secret for Netflix is that they make a ton of very cheap movies in the rom

com genre that appeal to enormous numbers of women and younger audiences and do huge, huge numbers for them, despite only costing, you know, five to 15 million dollars to make. I mean, that's that's where the actual in a way you would you could argue that those movies actually subsidize the big red notice type vehicles. Now, that said, I mean, look, a movie like Knives Out, you know, Netflix spent four hundred and fifty million dollars or something like that on the rights to both of the Knives Out sequels that Rian Johnson is making. Just insane when you realize that the actual production budget for the new sequel was $40 million.

Rian Johnson's pocketing a lot of money, I think. But the simple fact of the matter is like that movie is going to get a billion hours watched or whatever, right? It's going to do an enormous amount of business for them, which is their whole thing is to keep people on the site and to keep them from going to movie theaters, to keep them from flipping over to HBO Max. I think that works for them, but you could not build a whole business around that. It just wouldn't work. I think that what that tells us is that a world in which streamers are producing fewer shows and fewer movies and sort of fewer things overall probably means a world in which

they are falling back on cheap things that perform well, even if critics don't love them. And so that's things like, you know, Christmas movies and rom-coms that are cheap to make and maybe fly under the radar. But there is a big enough audience of viewers who just want to watch them as comfort food. All right. So what do we think? Is it a controversy or an controversy that streamers are cutting back on content? Peter? It's not a controversy. It's an inevitability. Alyssa? Ditto.

Yeah, it's a non-troversy, though I do think it is going to be a controversy when you've got people on the picket line outside of Netflix demanding, you know, I want to see my numbers on a sign. I don't know. No numbers, no peace. I don't know how you make that rhyme. But yeah, it's a non-troversy for now, but I think it has a possibility of being a real controversy later on. On this week's bonus episode, we're going to try something a little bit fun. James Cameron draft. He's directed nine feature films, which means we'll each get to pick three. What's the ideal James Cameron movie lineup? What would you program at your theater if you owned one? That's what we're going to be drafting here. So swing by Bulwark Plus on Friday to find out what we all pick.

Speaking of James Cameron, on to the main event. Avatar, The Way of Water. It's a sequel 13 years in the making that Cameron famously spent years perfecting the technology to allow him to shoot like 3D CGI and see it rendered in real time all while underwater. Magic. Was it worth the wait? All right, I'm going to be blunt here. There are two ways to look at this movie. The first is through a narrative lens and the way of water, like its predecessor, is, shall we say, light on that front. It's a pretty straightforward kind of action revenge type movie with invading

humans trying to despoil the paradise of Pandora. It's very similar to the first. Stephen Lang returns as Colonel Quaritch, who's been resurrected in a Na'vi avatar. He's hunting Jake Sully, who's played by Sam Worthington, and he's forced to flee with his family into the forest, or I'm sorry, from the forest into the island tribes, whatever. He's going to learn the way of water. Look, this is not The Godfather Part II. I'm just going to put that out there. Second way to look at this movie is as pure visual spectacle. Call it a ride, call it a visual experience, call it whatever you like.

The simple fact of the matter is that nothing has ever looked exactly like this movie. Yes, other films have been released in 3D high frame rate, or HFR as it's called, in IMAX and Dolby and other premium large formats. That has happened. But none of them have been done this well or rendered this immaculately. The Hobbit looks like Dog Dude next to this.

Ang Lee's Gemini Man is a better and more immersive work than The Hobbit was, but it's not as good as this. It just doesn't have the effects work. It doesn't all come together. Between the advancements in motion capture technology, Cameron's understanding of how to frame, light, and shoot a 3D sequence, and the hyper-reality of HFR,

the movie is just, it's a sui generis demonstration of cinematic art and one of the best cases ever made for the theatrical experience. It is immersive. It is amazing. It is different. And look, some folks are not going to like the difference, right? I've seen complaints that this looks like motion smoothing, the HFR. That setting on the TV that triggers that uncanny valley response in your brain

because it looks so unnatural, motion smoothing, everybody hates it. And I kind of get why people see this and think motion smoothing because it looks similarly smooth, right? It's not right, though. It's not right. For reasons we might get into a little bit, but the very short version is that motion smoothing is inventing information. It's creating information that your brain can't process, while HFR just shows you more information. I get it, though. Again, different, not going to be for everybody. But I do think that everyone should at least give it a shot, and they should give it a shot in the format that James Cameron prefers,

which is the 3D HFR format. It's something new, and it's kind of amazing, and we don't get new and amazing stuff that often. Peter, what did you make of the spectacle of Avatar The Way of Water? So I will just start by saying I did not care that much for the first Avatar. I didn't hate it, but I was pretty meh on that experience. I thought it was a fairly weak film with a few good science fictional ideas in it and a real sense of scale. But I just didn't think it was that much of a movie.

And it's not one that I've gone back to all that many times since it came out. I also strongly dislike 3D and even more strongly dislike high frame rate productions as a general rule. I think high frame rate movies, I haven't seen one up until Avatar that I liked for the last several years. Every time I have had an opportunity to avoid seeing a movie in 3D, I have taken that opportunity and been happy to have done so. But gosh, guys, I loved Avatar the Way of Water in 3D high frame rate. It looks awesome. Immersive is the word you used, Sonny, and that's exactly the right word. It just sucked me in and I felt like I was in a place in a way that I don't think I had ever experienced

before at the movies. It was like watching one of those overproduced, super beautiful, you know, nature documentaries, Blue Planet or whatever that is, except it was on an alien planet and there were battle whales like murdering bad guys. And it was awesome. Right. And this is like just as a as a spectacle and as a as an immersive cinematic experience. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it. It just works totally on its own on those terms. I think it even earns its three hour and 12 minute running time. I typically think movies that, you know, run past about two and a half hours or just they're way too long. We've seen too many movies get bloated running times in the past couple of years. And this one actually works because even though the second hour in particular,

there's not a whole lot going on. You're just sort of hanging out with the sea navi in the water. You get to meet the whales and find out why they're sad. But the hangout aspect of it is great because the world is so inviting and so interesting to look at. And I just wanted to sort of be there and be in this place. Your complaints about the story, Sonny, I think are not wrong exactly. But I want to kind of argue a little bit because this story to me, it felt like Cameron, as we have known him for 35 years since the first Terminator film. And since he first came on the scene, he has always told stories or nearly always told stories about families coming together and forming bonds by overcoming challenges and then learning to kick ass together and like

fighting off the bad guys. And that's that's what Terminator is about. Sure. It's like a big, you know, sci fi thriller. But it's also about Sarah Connor falling in love. And like, eventually she has a baby. Right. Which leads us to Terminator two, where like, which is a movie about John Connor basically adopting a robot dad and then having to like deal with his quite difficult, like emotionally strange and, you know, distanced mom. And like, it's a movie about family. True Lies is a movie about a difficult family. The Abyss is about, you know, how marriage is like kind of a pain, but you end up loving each other anyway. And like how you have to work through stuff.

And this is James Cameron's whole thing. I mean, that's certainly what Aliens is about. It's a little found family with Sigourney Weaver and Michael Byen sort of forming this familial unit. And it is the familial strength that allows them to win the day and beat back the bad guys. And that's not too different from what we see here. It is an outsider family.

Yes, it's sort of biological, it's yes it's sort of biological although i guess it's sort of weirdly kind of not since sam worthington's character was like incepted into his navi avatar doesn't matter um but like it's it's a family saga about a family that is having a bunch of struggles and having a hard time relating to each other but eventually they have to come together to protect the family unit and beat back the bad guys. It doesn't seem to me like Cameron has ever told obviously better stories. And so if you don't like this story, fair enough. It's kind of simplistic. It's kind of cheesy. The eco-spiritualism stuff is kind of silly. But it also seems like this is the story that James Cameron has been telling for 35 years. And we all liked it when it was in Aliens and when it was in T2 and when it was in True Lies.

I understand your basic point. A framework can be put on lots of different stories or lots of different, you know, specific circumstances. But I am still kind of underwhelmed by like the we're going back to the 1980s and we're going to have a Vietnam allegory and we're going to have a Vietnam allegory, and we're going to have a whaling allegory. And a whole thing about how it's difficult to be a teenager, which, you know, it is. I'm not totally sold on it. Alyssa, what did you make of it? Yeah, I found this movie probably a little bit more narratively appealing than you did, Sunny. In part because of the weirdness of the elements that Cameron is combining here, right? I mean, this is a Cowboys and Indians movie

from the point of view of the Indians, where the father is also like kind of a father's knows best 1950s type, right? Like, we've got the incredibly corny, like, silly stick together, you know, the like, it's a little too hard on his sons, he's a little bit indulgent of his daughter. And, you know, the eco-spiritualism stuff, to the extent that it's pulled off, it's pulled off because Sigourney Weaver is amazing at playing a 13-year-old girl who has this bizarre connection to, you know, the grains of sand on her planet that she can't explain. And that might be epilepsy, but also that might be a superpower, as we see when she, like, commands the plants of Pandora's Oceans to fight the bad guys. And I mean, that's a really terrific performance from Weaver. And it's interesting to compare to

Andy Serkis' performances as Gollum and as Caesar, which have been considered kind of the, you know, standards for motion capture performances, I think, because what's extraordinary about Weaver's performance here is it's so emotional, right? I mean, it's less about what she does with her body, although, you know, the sort of interesting kind of trance states that she goes into, it's more about her playing someone who is, I think, what, 60 years younger than she is, and who is having this really profound, you know, emotional and religious experience, right? I mean, in addition to all of these other elements, we have what's effectively like a teen mystic movie,

might as well be, you know, something from the annals of early Christianity. Like, that's wild. You, like, you crazy for that, James Cameron, which could be said about every single decision in this movie. But particularly the sort of crazed jamming together of narrative elements. But, I mean, I agree with what Peter said about this being a family movie, and it's one of the genres that has disappeared as like the sort of teen kid hangout movie, the teen kid adventure movie where, like, it's a long hot summer and they're going to get in some trouble, right? All that got subsumed into Stranger Things. Yes, exactly. But again, it's sort of here on the big screen and effectively integrated with and connected to the other elements here.

This is a movie about pregnancy and the pregnant body in a way that is, to a certain extent, I think more explicit than anything Cameron has done before, even though this theme has come up over and over again. This is a movie where you see Natiri out hunting while she's pregnant. She's sort of active. You have this sort of strange, spontaneous pregnancy of Grace's avatar that's kind of set up as, you know, one of the mysteries that will clearly carry into subsequent movies if ones beyond three get made. You know, and you have this whole thread

of Kate Winslet's character, Ronal, the sort of matriarch of this ocean clan, who is, you know, pregnant for a lot of the movie, and also has this very intense spiritual connection with a tulcun, like a whale thing that has given birth recently. And like, you know, there are these interesting moments where her husband is like, should you really be going out to like fight these people? And she's like, I'm heavily pregnant. And also I am going to spear these guys with actual spears and murder them. There's literally an emotional plot point about how like it's particularly cruel to murder a whale who suffered from infertility.

Right. Like it's this weird sort of techno utopian feminist tract on the pregnant body. Although that that, too, is classic Cameron, right? I mean, this is the guy who made Aliens and who... But expressed much more explicitly here than any, like actual pregnancy is much more the subject of this movie. It's not a metaphor, right? Like it's the text of the film in a way that only Cameron could have pulled off

or would have attempted in the first place. And beyond the visual stuff, which is amazing. I mean, I came home from this movie and was just so amped that I couldn't sleep because it was like, I've seen something radically different. But this is a year that has had sort of complicated birth and labor and delivery and abortion stories at the center of not just a lot of controversial pop culture, but our politics, right? And so after a year that includes House of the Dragons, like violent cesarean sections and stillbirths that, you know, has the controversy over, you know, the fictional Marilyn Monroe's very intense feeling about pregnancy and an

abortion she had in Blonde that, you know, even has the realistic and compelling birth scenes in Catherine Called Birdie. It's actually really nice to see a movie that has pregnancy represented and discussed in so many different ways in a way that doesn't feel violent, that feels sort of centered in women's experiences and women's bodies. And I haven't seen a lot of discussion of this aspect of it yet. Maybe that's coming as more people see it. But it was one of the most striking things about the movie to me

and something that would probably not have registered the same way for me when Avatar came out because I wasn't a parent yet. I hadn't been pregnant twice myself. Our politics were in a different place. But I think it's really unusual. And those elements in the movie have stayed with me really strongly. Yeah. Can we talk about the battle whales just for a little bit? Because I am fascinated by this on a bunch of levels, one of them being that the movie literally closes on the free willy shot. The last image of the movie is a whale jumping out of the water

and kind of making a turn. It's something else. I'm sorry, it's just goofy. It's a goofy sequence in the film where the outsider boy, Navi, is talking to the whale, Navi, about his feelings and how they're both sad because they're both outsiders. It's a goofy sequence.

I literally laughed out loud in the theater while it was happening. But it works. It all works. Well, Cameron treats all of this stuff so earnestly, and that's part of what makes it work. But it's also clear that this is something that is truly and deeply felt for him. You know, he has made a bunch of kind of sea documentaries, including one about whales, which I have not seen. The ocean is like a deep passion for him. And he has made this movie through that passion, right? Like that comes through here in a really serious way. It is kind of goofy, but it's also, you get the sense that James Cameron has spent a bunch

of time around whales and thinks, you know what? They're kind of people, right? Like, and we could, you disagree with that or think that's a silly idea. And maybe that's a silly idea here on this planet in the real world. Maybe not. Whales are actually quite intelligent. But guess what? It's a great science fiction idea. It's a great science fiction idea. And he renders it with a surprising amount of tenderness. So that you just sort of like, OK, the blue people, the whales, they got a connection and they feel sad. And you

know what? It's like I said, it's hard to be a teenage boy and it's probably hard to be an outcast battle whale, too. Alyssa, what did you make of the movie's implicit, really explicit rejection of pacifism for battle whales? I mean, I think it's really awesome what a battle whale, like, basically breaches and temporarily beaches himself so he can murder a bunch of profit-mongering whalers. Like... I just want to explain to folks

who maybe haven't seen it and aren't going to. There's a sequence in this movie where they talk about how the whales have developed a philosophical concept of nonviolence that they all must follow. And the reason the guy has been outcast is because he tried to defend his family from being murdered. So they're like, no whale, you have to be nonviolent and let yourself die. And we're kicking you out of the pod. You're an outsider now. You're a murder whale. We don't like you anymore. And then he has to he murders a bunch of people.

Whales are basically Mennonites in this movie. We haven't really delved into the weirdness of this movie. The reason the whales are being hunted is because they're not for precious ambergris, but for brain juices that turn people immortal. We never really see how this works or what it means. I understand that there's like 17 more Avatar movies coming, but the fact that there's not just the tossed off immortality subplot, there's also a tossed off the Earth is dying subplot that is mentioned once in like the first 30 minutes and then never again. Spontaneous pregnancy. And again, we're going to get a lot more Avatars coming in the future. So maybe these questions will be answered and they're not just dangling plot threads. Cameron did recently say that I think it's Avatar 4, but it might be Avatar 5, will take us to Earth so that we can see what has become of Earth.

And so it does seem like this is setting up a plot thread that will pay off at some point. It also seems like the immortality brain juice stuff is kind of a reset on unobtainium, which was the dumbest idea in the first movie. They're like, we're here for the unobtainium. Really? You're just going to call it unobtainium? Yes, I understand that this is sort of a goofy jargon term. It is. It is interesting. I did wonder to a certain extent if Cameron had swiped some of this

from Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, where the idea of extreme overpopulation on Earth is kind of supercharged by the discovery of a longevity treatment that can make people live, you know, turns like Mars from being sort of a scientific station to, you know, a place where people were interested in mining to a like, we need to get people out here fast. Because I mean, as a as a narrative device for like amping up that pressure, it makes a lot of sense for those two things to work in tandem. I'll just say very briefly that that sort of thing is actually part of why this movie works. It's because he is just dropping ideas that clearly like he has thought through all of this stuff. This is not it doesn't feel scattered.

It doesn't feel sort of like he's just making it up on the fly. And it's also not just Easter eggs to connect to the rest of the movie universe in the way that like Marvel gives us. It's a lot like the first Star Wars trilogy, which just sort of occasionally would like mention the stuff that happened off screen and which has now been developed into stories in some cases. But, you know, like the Clone Wars was just very, very briefly mentioned in the first Star Wars. And it's just this thing that happened in the universe that people talk about because they live in a universe that with a whole bunch of different stuff that has happened in a real history that is that had actually been thought out to some extent. James Cameron clearly has like done the imaginative work for this universe in a way that just that helps sell the depth and reality of it.

All right. So what do we think? Thumbs up or thumbs down on Avatar The Way of Water? Peter? Thumbs up. Alyssa? Thumbs up. It's awesome. Thumbs up. But again, much like the original Avatar, this is not a movie I ever expect to watch at home. I can't imagine sitting down for three hours and 15 minutes to watch it at home. I might sit down for three hours and 15 minutes

to go watch it again in theaters. I saw it on the Dolby AMC Cinema, whatever, in Dallas for the high frame rate 3D. I kind of want to see it in IMAX. I also want to see the Oppenheimer trailer, which is very important to me. We've got to get more Christopher Nolan in our lives. Again, as a piece of narrative storytelling,

but as an experience, it's an amazing thing. And if you are into experiences, you should check it out at a theater. All right, that's it for this week's show. Make sure to swing by atma.thebullwork.com for our bonus episode on Friday. Make sure to tell your friends. A strong recommendation from a friend is basically the only way to grow podcast audiences.

If we don't grow, we will die. If you did not love today's episode, please complain to me on Twitter at Sonny Bunch. I'll convince you that it is, in fact, the best show in your podcast feed. See you guys next week.