Review of Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) by Badblocks — 21 Dec 2022

Solid film kinda ruined in the theater for me by the frame rate. Regardless of how I feel about 48 FPS, one thing I can say for sure is that they should have just stuck to one frame rate for the whole film. But the movie constantly swaps around, seemingly at random. Different shots in the same scene will jarring my change frame rate, with no rhyme or reason, and it’s super distracting every time. The characters will just be walking and talking, and then a single shot will suddenly be in 48, and then it goes back to normal. In the same scene.

That aside, I don’t like the 48 fps at all. It really highlighted how everything in this film is just computer generated. Of course it’s going to look computer generated to some degree, the whole movie is CGI essentially, but in 48 fps it’s more apparent than ever. It looks like a really advanced looking video game engine tech demo a lot of the time, instead of a movie. I wish I could comment more on the quality of the movie itself— lots of scenes and shots are gorgeous, especially the underwater ones as you’d expect, but feeling like I was watching a game cutscene took me out of it so much. Pretty disappointing.