James Cameron says you can’t whinge about Avatar 2’s runtime – um, yes you can

James Cameron got on his soapbox this week and hit out at people unenthused about his work. He totally missed the point.

OK, I get the irony of whingeing about James Cameron having a whinge about whingers.

This is a triple-decker whinge, I get it. But, seriously, who is Cameron kidding?

The visionary filmmaker responsible for some of pop culture’s most iconic and rightly lauded work including Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Aliens and True Lies is a true master of cinema. That’s not in dispute. We all love Cameron for his contributions to the canon.

But, it’s hard to argue that he hasn’t become something of a grumpy old man who bristles at any kind of challenge to his ambitions, work or his relatively narrow view of filmmaking.

There was the time he said he hopes moviegoers will soon tire of Avengers movies because there are “other stories to tell” or when he went after Patty Jenkins and Wonder Woman for “sexualising” Gal Gadot.

His latest grievance? Audiences who aren’t particularly keen on a three-hour runtime for his Avatar sequel.

“I don’t want anybody whining about length when they sit and binge-watch [television] for eight hours,” Cameron opined to the Empire podcast. “I can almost write this part of the review, ‘The agonisingly long three-hour movie’. It’s like, give me a f**king break.

“I’ve watched my kids sit and do five one-hour episodes in a row. Here’s the big social paradigm that has to happen: it’s OK to get up and go pee.”

Director James Cameron and actor Sam Worthington on set of Avatar 2. Picture: Mark Fellman/20th Century Fox

Not sure who in Cameron’s life needs to tell him this, because he obviously missed the point, but needing to go to the bathroom is not why people don’t want a three-hour Avatar sequel.

While three hours is quite the indulgence for any film, there are plenty of epics that earn that runtime – The Godfather Part II, Schindler’s List, Zodiac, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King and JFK, to name a few.

Gone with the Wind – which is problematic now and, honestly, should’ve been problematic even at its release in 1939 given it was still glorifying the Antebellum South seven decades after the end of the American Civil War – is, rightly three hours and forty minutes. It needs that time to track Scarlett O’Hara’s tumultuous journey.

This year, the Oscar nominated Japanese film Drive My Car clocked in at 179 minutes – it’s a slow burn, texturally rich drama that luxuriously explores grief, endurance and forgiveness.

Even Titanic, with its two-parter about Jack and Rose’s heady romance and then the disaster, justifies its 194 minutes.

Cameron will loathe this but Avengers: Endgame’s 182 minutes was necessary to wrap up a 22-movie saga. There wasn’t a wasted a moment – the only time you’ve could’ve gone to the bathroom was in the Hulk diner scene.

The original Avatar was two hours and 40 minutes but felt like five hours. Photo: 20th Century Fox

But Avatar? No, definitely not. I’m not talking about Avatar: The Way of Water because, obviously, it hasn’t been released yet.

But the original Avatar movie came in at two hours and 40 minutes and, honestly, it felt about five hours long.

The 3D was obviously impressive and you have to give Cameron credit for always trying to push the boundaries in terms of what’s technologically possible in aiding storytelling. But after the first hour of going, “Ooo, that fake water looks so blue and real”, there was nothing else there.

It may be the most commercially successful movie of all time (unadjusted for inflation) but it was a shallow, clumsily plotted story about colonialism with forgettable characters and wooden performances. It’s been said before, but you would honestly get more out of watching Fern Gully again (and at only 76 minutes).

Cameron had hoodwinked everyone into thinking he had made a “good” movie just because the 3D was so innovative at the time. How many people have actually rewatched Avatar in the 13 years since? Or did you go, “Oh no, once was enough”.

Plus, we all had to suffer through the 3D craze for the next few years after that before wisdom finally prevailed and it was turfed out.

Full cards on the table, I really hated 3D because it created yet another barrier between me and the story on screen, and more often than not, it was a distraction which prevented me from being immersed in the film.

When I was ushered into a cinema recently to preview the first Avatar 2 teaser and was handed a pair of 3D glasses, the anxiety came rushing back. Not this crap again. Not for nothing, I also didn’t see anything in that teaser which suggested the 3D tech in Avatar 2 had made huge leaps to justify ushering 3D back.

Avatar: The Way of Water is in cinemas in December.

As much as Cameron’s subjectivity means he thinks Avatar 2’s “agonisingly long” runtime is justified, and maybe it will be, but he can’t dictate that everyone has to shut up and take it just because people also binge watch TV.

Binge watching TV at home is a vastly different experience. Even though the format of the TV series has evolved in the past few years, it is still mostly a medium of serialised storytelling. There are break points, where mini-arcs start and end.

And watching at home means you control when to pause, when to walk away for a bit. It’s not comparable to a three-hour cinema experience.

If Cameron wants audiences to stop whinging about the length of the movies, then make a movie which doesn’t elicit such moans. Cameron used to make extraordinary films. But he’s spent the past two decades immersed in his Avatar obsession, threatening four sequels few asked for.

He complained about the Marvel movies because “there are other stories to tell”, perhaps he could write one of those, one which doesn’t involve those blue things running around for three hours.

Originally published as James Cameron says you can’t whinge about Avatar 2’s runtime – um, yes you can