James Cameron rules, I am in complete agreement with Felix. Avatar, also rules. You can mock it all you want for hitting you over the head with white savior shit, but at the end of the day he isn't saying anything you're saying differently. And he's right.

The Abyss and Avatar looking back were both incredibly maligned movies for daring to ask "what if there were actual consequences for the actions we do today." I don't care how corny it is, it has a pulse and every single big budget movie since has not had a pulse. Or a thesis

People can point out these movies are corny sure, but the same funko pop buying youtube reviewing dipshits who were like hueh smurfs, are rave reviewing this marvel shit which has little to no thesis and absolutely no relative meaning to the present.

The closest they attempted at that was Captain America Civil War, a movie I never saw, and never will see, about wha's better business or patriotism. Wow cool. This sure is better messaging, I give it 20 funko pops and a soy face

An addendum: James Cameron also is one of the few people left who understands that CGI in film shouldn't be used to expand a scene full of more busy bullshit than required. Avatar is visually busy, but its also colorful, there's actual color.

Thought is put into how visuals are perceived. How an audience might enjoy seeing, actually colorful things represented in CGI. Everything since is just a massive orgy of grey lifeless metal. It's embarrassing. Shit on it whatever you want to do, but you can't deny that

Cameron understands that in order to have people buy into a fantasy you need actual color in that fantasy. People enjoy color, there's a lack of it in life. The Abyss is a prototype of Avatar in many ways, where he started understanding new special effects offered new opportunity

So bring up some large budgeted movies in the last, even 30 years since, that had design this phosphorescent

Look at the initial conceptual design phase in reproduction of The Abyss done by French comic artist Jean Giraud Moebius. Its all exploration of pushing then special effects to their limit "how can we design something that pushes color and light in-camera as much as possible"

20 years later, when he tried again to "push effects to their possible limit" came with the same attitude. How much color can be represented on screen realistically. Not in-camera at that point, but still an attempt to see how far CGI could go in showing detail, light, and color

10 years after that what have we done with that technology? Absolutely nothing. There is zero attempt or need to make a colorful looking movie, but there is always room to make a "realistic looking one". Complete waste of the capacity of CGI and why it's so often maligned