An Avatar Sequel

Welp, I saw Avatar 2. 

Spoilers. 

It was beautiful, of course. Better graphics than the first one. 

I loved the first Avatar. I was cautiously hopeful that I would like the second one too. Until I saw a trailer. Actually, it wasn't even a trailer I saw. I just heard a line from a trailer while I was in a different room. It said that humans were coming back to Pandora. That line told me pretty much everything I needed to know. Instead of the story moving on, they were going to bring back the same enemies and same problems that they spent the whole first movie fixing. Though I didn't expect them to literally bring back one specific enemy. They did the thing that drives me crazy: the sequel essentially wiped out all progress that they made in the first movie.

And it just feels weird to think that humans want to come live on Pandora. It's not like it's a particularly welcoming home to them. And this time the attempted colonization is funded by a bit of liquid that comes from the brains of alien whales. How the hell would anyone discover that such an impossible-to-get liquid prevents humans from aging? Did they just take samples of every single fluid on the planet and test for immortality effects?

The movie started with a big info dump, covering years and several new characters. It took a long time before I could figure out which character was which. 

But also the characters were frustrating. At least Jake and Neytiri were. I guess you could say that concern for their kids was affecting their behavior, but I just felt disappointed in them during most of the movie (like Neytiri's behavior toward Spider). But they were mostly overshadowed - there were too many characters to let them all shine. 

Why did Jake think that running away was going to protect his family? In the first movie, he said that the humans would come like a rain that never ends. He knew that running away wouldn't help anything if humans continued to spread. And he abandoned the rest of their people to fight the humans alone. And also, half the time I didn't have any idea why he was mad at his younger son? He was just randomly bullying him. 

Quaritch declares that during his hunt, he's going to think and act like the Na-vi. But he never does. He just gets an ikran. 

The one girl has such a strong connection to Ehwa. And we never see her reaction when she learns that she can never connect directly to the Ehwa's trees. 

Killing the whale was basically a repeat of cutting down the great tree in the first movie. And the final battle was like a mashup of Avatar and Titanic. Blue people fighting on a sinking ship.

And killing a kid seems like a violation of trust between viewer and creator. It just leaves such a bitter feeling at the end of a movie.