Avatar: The Way of Water, Christmas & End of 2022 Thoughts

This will be shorter than I planned on it being; a movie I thought would be seen theatrically will be put off until the first week of ’23 as with all the college football bowl games on, that provided me enough entertainment. As typical, nothing of note will be done on New Year’s Eve; considering that I encountered dumb people while on the way to pick up pizza earlier in the day, there’s another reason to not go out.

BTW, traffic in Florida has not gotten any better since the last few times I brought it up. Besides today, there was me travelling somewhere on Christmas Day and in a rotary I was almost sideswiped! Thankfully I was wary of that vehicle seconds before but perhaps I should have been even more wary and made sure they passed by before proceeding… but otherwise Christmas was a nice day spent with family. While that day will never feel the same after Mom passed away, there’s still the lights, the family I still have and various ephemera to make me still like the end of the year. 2022 had even more ups and downs than usual (no specifics on the various negatives) so all I can hope for is a better 2023. I’ll return sometime in January and already planned is at least one theatrical movie and me visiting a new location or two.

I’ll close this out by mentioning that despite various story issues with Avatar: The Way of Water, I was still glad to see it on the big screen earlier in December. Like with the first film, the visuals carried everything else. All that said, at least the plot itself was better… not to mention relatable with the focus on family. The spectacle and action were all better, along with the technology that brought Pandora to life. Unlike in far too many movies in recent year, it wasn’t full of bad comedy or “humor” that just wasn’t needed in a scene. There are many ways to see the sequel; I chose a giant Dolby Cinema at AMC screen showing it in 3D, which meant it was also High Frame Rate. This meant that often the picture would switch between the standard 24 frames per second to 48; the latter makes it look clearer although for some it will never appear quite right. I never had any problem with it… until this screening where the action at 48 fps looked to be in fast-forward. As up to now I haven’t seen anyone else mention that, it was my brain telling me that and it was strange, although that aspect did not ruin the experience. 2022 was a year of movies that were disappointing, mediocre, or just plain bad… at least films like Avatar 2 and the Top Gun sequel were fun.