Millennials Unimpressed by Avatar 2 Overhype
Avatar 2: The Way of Water is the most hyped movie of the year, if not the decade.
The long wait, the big profile and the wave of advertising have combined to create a truly stupendous wave of hype. By now we've reached the stage where mass media are thinking of new reasons why we must love Avatar 2 every day.
But there are signs that all this hype is starting to backfire, as evidenced by posts highly upvoted recently on /r/entertainment, in a thread dedicated to yet another article, praising aspects of Avatar 2.
Their overall tone can be summarized by one of the Redditors' plea:
"For the love of god please let me fast forward to January so I can stop seeing every god forsaken article regarding the minutiae of Avatar 2."
And some of the more specific complaints on Reddit are just pure gold.
"The movie gotta be some sort of annoying social experiment or something cause this is unreal. I predict when the thing releases digitally, we'll see it showcased in TV stores to show us how crispy the screen is, every aisle clips of Avatar. I'm telling you, this movie must also be a screen quality commercial."
Indeed, the attempts to present Avatar 2 as the sort of ground-breaking visual spectacle that the original movie was, are obvious everywhere. But as trailers and many early reviews indicate, Avatar 2 did not move far away from Avatar 1 in term of visuals and CG quality, while the industry as a whole was not standing still. Plus, viewers these days are not what they were years ago when Avatar made waves: "kids want Marvel not some weird blue sea Pocahontas sequel," as one of the Redditors put it.
Some Redditors even attribute deeper and more sinister motives to the filmmakers and their advertising machine.
"I'm starting to wonder if Cameron is planning a cult about this story like Hubbard did with his crappy sci-fi stories, because he talks about it like he's having some spiritual awakening and demanding the same of the audience." (via)
That might be a bit of an exaggeration. But Cameron got accusations of seeing his story as much deeper and more profound than it actually is since Avatar 1. As to whether they are true regarding The Way of Water, you now can judge for yourselves. With the movie only just released, the general consensus on whether its contents deserve its hype has yet to form, whether among the critics or the audience.