Director James Cameron is showing his age in the latest interview he had with Empire, in which the Avatar director tries, and fails, to take to task internet trolls, people who hate long movies, and binge watchers.

While promoting Avatar: The Way of Water (Man, that title), Cameron gets rather bent out of shape by movie goers crapping on the original Avatar, which, in retrospect, isn't all that hard to do. He says:

"The trolls will have it that nobody gives a shit and they can't remember the characters' names or one damn thing that happened in the movie. Then they see the movie again and go, 'Oh, okay, excuse me, let me just shut the f*ck up right now.' So I'm not worried about that."

First off, I have seen the film, both in theaters and years later. Guess what: It wasn't great then. It isn't great now. Once you strip away the glitz and glamor of CGI and merely focus on story, Avatar is a dull, rehashed mess of a screenplay that shoves its message so far down your gullet there is little room for any $9 popcorn.

Moving on.

Cameron then goes on to old-man-rant about people wanting a movie that won't take up their entire day at the cinema, adding a sub-complaint about binge watching habits:

"I don't want anybody whining about length when they sit and binge-watch [television] for eight hours. I can almost write this part of the review. 'The agonizingly long three-hour movie...' It's like, give me a f*cking break. I've watched my kids sit and do five one-hour episodes in a row. Here's the big social paradigm shift that has to happen: it's okay to get up and go pee."

Guess what, James? You're wrong. You just are. When I'm at home, I can pause, take a break, GO PEE, without missing a minute of your precious masterwork, and not have to be in a confined theater with other people mucking about because they are seeing water imagery for THREE HOURS and have to take a piss every five minutes.

This is simply a man who has given the world of film some of the greatest works of a generation, only to have the technology, evolution of storytelling, and his own hubris blind him to the fact that he's not actually "king of the world" - and just because your movie was huge over a decade ago does not mean that everybody remembers it forever. Even Nickelback makes the charts sometimes.

That, and you have not shut the f*ck up - as you put it - about these follow-ups since the first one came out, THIRTEEN YEARS AGO. It can't have taken this long to throw together a CGI spectacle that - and I've said this before - Marvel can do three times over every year (not that I don't ALSO think that Marvel needs to slow up a touch; a happy medium between four months and thirteen years would be good).

Maybe this is why he wants to pass the baton over to other directors for the last THREE Avatar films.

So, in summation, James, take a breath. Stop being mad you're not 'The King of the World' anymore, and just be proud of the path you created for other young filmmakers to follow. You have done more in one career than many could ever claim, and this kind of sour grapes is not going to help the box office receipts.

Tags
James Cameron, Avatar