While James Cameron has denied that Avatar 3: Fire and Ash used any generative AI. On January 24, 2026 Joe Letteri ( the visual effect supervisor from Weta Digital ) sat with the Corridor Crew for their weekly show of VFX Artists React where he said that the facial animation for the hero characters for both Avatar 2 and 3 involved a neural network. A neural network? Isn't that a fancy way to say "AI"?
Avatar: Fire and Ash adds a new villain to the Avatar universe, in a form of Varang ( Oona Chaplin, a grand-daughter of Charlie Chaplin ), an evil Na'vi lady with a tribe of fire-hungry psychopaths, traumatized by the shier insanity of human destruction. As she says in the film, when she was little she witnessed a huge fire ( probably caused by human machines ) that destroyed a lot of the forest. There was no Eywa to save them, or provide for them, so she turned to the "dark side", so to speak. So how the writer and director James Cameron show that she is evil? Well, she rapes people.
I made myself review both Avatar movies in one day, which was something I had to do to see the progress, or lack thereof of James Cameron. And there is progress. A lot of it!
I was frankly scared to re-experience the original James Cameron picture Avatar after knowing for certain that it is much worse, technically speaking, in comparison to the second film in the franchise. Yet I was confident that the film at the very least should be good. So I took my worries aside and watched it again. Does it hold up? Well let's talk about it.
In James Cameron's Avatar humans are attacking the forests of Pandora, bulldozing and killing indigenous population of the planet, to get to the natural resources their tribes are sitting at. The military is literally playing a role of guards, for the bulldozers, because the indigenous have become sort of very upset with humans, that terrorize their land. This is sort the plot of Eli Roth's horror film The Green Inferno, just Roth makes it way way more viscerally.
Predator: Badlands is Dan Trachtenberg's third Predator movie after Prey 2022 and Killer of the Killers 2025. And strangely enough non of these movies have any kind of connection to one other. They are not sequels. They are stand alone films, different in style and tone. Telling different stories and having different structure. The only thing that binds them together, so to speak, is the fact that they are all technically a part of the Predator franchise.
So it's 1990 and Kathryn Bigelow writes and directs an action thriller about a police officer. The police officer is female and the movie almost refuses to sexualize her. Bigelow casts a nice half-Jewish girl Jamie Lee Curtis. And pretty much the whole movie, not a single shot of her emphasizes or admires her body ( apart from one sex scene where we see a very erotic closeup of her stomach ). Making that movie technically feminist. Few years later, in 1994, as James Cameron ( who was married to Bigelow between 1989 and 1991 ) is trying to find the actor to play the wife in his film True Lies. He is reminded of Blue Steel by Bigelow. And decides to cast Jamie Lee Curtis in his film. Giving us that very strange, almost pornographic scene where she does a very erotic strip-tease scene with Arnold Schwarzenegger. More than a decade later, in 2009, both Bigelow and Cameron make a movie. And both of those movies are nominated for the best picture. Yet Bigelow takes home the price. Did Cameron lose due to his pussy curse?
I remember sitting at the entrance to a local cinema near me, shivering from a new kind of depression. I was waiting to enter the screening of Avatar: The Way Of Water, which was released in cinema just after The Fabelmans. The previous film I have seen in that very cinema, maybe already a week before that, was The Fabelmans and that dreadful feeling I had was caused by that movie. I was committing an act of masochism going back to cinema right after the trauma I experienced, and I was pretty sure Avatar 2 would only make it worse. I didn't care. I went anyway. Thank god that James Cameron decided to limit references to himself to a few nods to Titanic and stuff, and instead made a movie that is pretty much designed as a joyride. I don't know if I was alive today if Avatar 2 was anything like The Fabelmans.
I have a soft spot for J. J. Abrams. His masterpiece Super 8 inspired me greatly to develop film-projects when I was a teenager. But his 2009 other masterpiece Star Trek ( together with 2009'th other Sci-Fi masterpiece Avatar by James Cameron ) is what pretty much started my obsession with space movies.
We all know that James Cameron is a master when it comes to making sequels. His films like Terminator 2, Avatar 2 and Aliens are extremely good examples of how to make a sequel right. Unlike Steven Spielberg that avoids sequels. Steven avoided doing the second Jaws movie. James Cameron goes for it and wins. Speaking of Steven Spielberg's Jaws, not only sequels from that film were produced. Rip-offs, like the 1978 Piranha by Joe Dante also were produced. Those were parody material B-movie exploitation films. And so writer / director James Cameron decided to take the project of making a sequel to that Jaws rip-off, with his 1982 Piranha II: The Spawning.
Ever since Piranha IIJames Cameron shown his friendship with Luc Besson. Both directors are obsessed with marine biology, both are obsessed with strong female characters and both have a strange fascination with the youth. Luc Besson's Leon, The Family and Arthur films have strong child characters in some rather fucked up situations. James Cameron with Aliens, Terminator 2 and the Avatar franchise does the same thing. But have you ever thought how similar both the Terminator and Leon actually are?
It is funny that I was just watching Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets while drinking Valerian. I was pissed at Luc Besson because I just watched and reviewed The Fifth Element. That review was more of a ramble about my theory surrounding his personal life. Which ties in neatly into the message of the film "Love". But for some reason I completely forgot to talk about it's qualities. Which I suppose this review will fix. I will compare the two grand space-operas from Luc Besson. And hopefully we will learn something in the process.
Human life is too short to watch every single movie about monster. There is enough time to put aside for the classics, such as Mothra. Being born after the great sensation that was Gojira it steers away from what is to be expected for a monster movie, towards the line of a detective story. Mothra, more than anything, is a symbol of resistance in the world that is defiled not so much by nuclear, but by human waste.
1994 film True Lies feels like watching a James Cameron directed Michael Bay movie. It has explosions, check, it has outlandish set pieces, check, it has beautiful shots of the military, check, it has sexy ladies, check, it has teenagers with an attitude, check. It is a Michael Bay movie through and through. Yet it is a James Cameron movie, so what happened?
People change. People change! People grow. People adopt. People change their minds about things. People learn new things everyday. People form opinions. People change. And so have I. I notice something rather strange about people that come into contact with me without prior knowledge of what I do and how I think. I remember the other day on mastodon being bombarded with hate for seemingly no reason what so ever. I either said something good about Richard Stallman, or said something slightly too vague about one thing or another. I know I held opinions that I'm not proud of today. I know I probably have opinions right now that I will change in the future. People change.
Therefor I decided that it would be a good idea, both for the sake of my mental health and just as an example of said change, to talk to you about myself. To psycho-sexually analyze what I stand for. What I believe in. And most importantly: how I got to this point. How I changed to be where I am today. Yet, in a strange kind of way I am slightly afraid of strangers when it comes to my psychology. It is my private life, after all. And I don't want to reveal everybody everything about me. The good, the bad and the ugly. And then the ugly, the bad and the good. I don't want to give haters the platform to hate. So I suppose this is the perfect excuse to use the fediverse gimmick I came up with, the other day. Basically you have to be at least somewhat of a fan of me and / or my work, in order for me to feel okay with sharing with you all this private, highly emotional, stuff. Don't worry about it. If you are a fan, this is going to be a piece of cake for you. The website will just check that you are, and everything is going to be okay. For everybody else, perhaps, this article isn't for you.