Check what an award-winning sci-fi director once said about Avatar ( Photo Credit – Instagram )
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James Cameron’s visually stunning epic sci-fi blockbuster ‘Avatar’ received tremendous praise from fans and critics across the globe after its theatrical release in 2009. Avatar and its sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, are among the top five highest-grossing movies of all time globally.
Eminent filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and Edgar Wright have expressed their admiration for the film in the past.
This Award-Winning Director Wasn’t Very Happy With Avatar
However, some viewers opined that Avatar was not the best film directed by James Cameron. For instance, the immensely talented British filmmaker Duncan Jones once said (as reported by SlashFilm) that Avatar wasn’t in his top three James Cameron films.
He also questioned, “At what point in the film did you have any doubt what was going to happen next? Or were you ever surprised how it happened?” He further said that he “Would have appreciated the barest bit of explanation for the floating mountain islands in Avatar… Pumice stone full of helium? Something!”
Why Duncan Jones’ Avatar Criticism Mattered
A brutally honest criticism for a massively mounted film like Avatar, and that too coming from a reputed filmmaker of Duncan Jones’ calibre, should have held some weight and made sense, right? For the unversed, Duncan Jones is the man who made his feature film directorial debut with the critically acclaimed sci-fi film ‘Moon’ (2009), followed by the highly rated sci-fi action thriller ‘Source Code’ (2011) starring Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead. Sci-fi genre fans have huge respect for the BAFTA Award-winning director.
Coming back to Duncan Jones’ observation about James Cameron’s Avatar not being among his best three films, and the reason behind the floating islands concept, it was also one of the topics of discussion among viewers and fans at the time of the film’s release. Some viewers agreed with it, while some fans didn’t. What’s your take on that?
Why It Didn’t Matter a Lot?
Having said that, a handful of criticisms (even if they make sense) do not overshadow the fact that Avatar was loved by a majority of the audience who watched the film across the globe. Avatar registered a whopping $2.9 billion at the box office globally and eventually bagged three Oscar awards.
Moreover, the James Cameron movie received a critics’ score of 81% on reviews aggregation portal Rotten Tomatoes and a user rating of 7.9/10 on IMDb. Not the highest scores for a film on Avatar’s scale and James Cameron’s vision, but still very good.
If you want to revisit Avatar and its sequel, ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’, you can stream both these films on the Jio Hotstar OTT platform in India. The eagerly anticipated third Avatar movie, ‘Avatar: Fire And Ash’, is set for a grand theatrical release on 19th December 2025.
Avatar & Avatar: The Way of Water Trailers
You can watch the official trailers of Avatar & Avatar: The Way of Water here.
