Everyone loves to shit on Avatar, but when you actually ask them what’s wrong with it they’re just like “Oh…it was…uninteresting” and “bland” and “flat”. Or they just point to Dances with Wolves, because it is absolutely UNHEARD OF for successful movies to have similarities to ANY other films *cough* Inception *cough*
At the very least put some respect on Ferngully’s name before comparing Avatar to Pocahontas you skxawng.
I remember when Avatar overtook Endgame, everyone was joking about not being able to remember a single character’s name. But I can easily remember names like Jake, Grace, and Neytiri without them having to be called something like Earth Man or Scientist Lady or Lemur Woman. Is it even normal to remember names from every movie you’ve seen? Names from franchises like Star Wars and Harry Potter can be heard anywhere, and cartoon characters are literally made to be identified, but it’s not like I could name any of the kids from The Maze Runner without looking them up. And Avatar is a single, original movie, not a famous film series based on a famous book series. We really live in a time when people think Frankenstein is the monster and y’all expect anyone to know who Mo’at is.
How even is it that Endgame, which literally had a scene with a fat Thor playing Fortnite, is considered a “moving cinematic experience”, as opposed to Avatar which becomes the laughing stock of Twitter for being “cliché”. If it was Endgame with the anti-war message and Avatar with the slapstick, you just know people would be fawning over how deep the MCU is and praising it for its brilliance. But right now the biggest movie of all time is an immersive, speculative evolution sci-fi film, and no one cares. Really? In a post-Emoji Movie world? Everyone always says that Avatar had little impact on modern culture, as if that’s some horrible irredeemable flaw. And yet Jaws is a way more iconic film with no relevance and characters that no one remembers the names of (including me, despite the fact that my mom is obsessed with watching that thing), and the writer of that just WISHED people would forget about it.
So many of the people hating on Avatar have never even seen it. If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say that Jake “betrayed the army”, I could probably buy a kilogram of refined unobtanium. People try to pretend that the Avatar craze never happened, but I remember back when you would see clips of it playing on every tv and hear about people wishing they could go to Pandora. I wasn’t even into fandoms back then and I still remember when it was a thing to photoshop yourself into a Na’vi. Smh everyone denying they ever went through a blue alien phase. And it’s not like it vanished after that either. For a movie that came out 11 years ago with the sequels still pending, I honestly think it’s pretty cool that people are still learning Na’vi as an actual language. It was just last year that TheFatRat produced a song with Na’vi lyrics, and it has millions of views on YouTube. And let’s not forget all the hype surrounding Flight of Passage.
With the reveal of Frontiers of Pandora, I’m actually surprised by the amount of people complaining about it not being The Last Airbender. Even if that series is a masterpiece, I can’t believe anyone watched the cinematic for Frontiers and thought “You know what would be even cooler than this? Learning TAI CHI!” I can’t even imagine how frustrating it must be for the people who worked on ATLA to always have their project associated with and used to hate on some random alien movie just because they both use a word in their titles. It’s so embarrassing. But I guess ever since The Legend of Korra got extended from a web series last-minute and decided that giant robots with magic laser beams was the way to go, ATLA fans need a lightning rod to absorb the injustice.