Woohoo!
I can't speak for anyone else's take on rewatchability but I saw this three times in one week (9 hours!
) so yes it definitely holds up for me, lol.
I'm not going to bother with spoiler warnings since it's been two full weekends now so if you haven't seen it (and haven't let the whole movie be spoiled by YouTube parodies which is just crazy to me) then continue reading at your own risk.
I did like that Quaritch yielded for the sake of Spider. IMO they planted the seeds for that with him interrupting the mind probe interrogation and continued it with their growing camaraderie throughout the film. In fact I thought they had established it so well that I was actually surprised when he first acted like he
didn't care if Spider died. I was even a little disappointed that they were seemingly taking the easy road of making him a one-dimensional "evil" villain. But when he showed his cards and yielded I immediately realized that to me he is an absolutely awesome character and easily the best movie villain of the year.
Obviously Spider's existence is a retcon to expand the story (more on retcons later, a couple of them are strikes against the movie) but I think that introducing him in a seeming vacuum with no connection whatsoever to his father as portrayed in the previous film actually allowed the audience to see him as nu-Quaritch did. Just a kid with an intellectual connection to the character (implanted memories) but not actually by blood and with no real history to speak of. But Spider's character was so well written and so well portrayed by the actor that I found it very easy to believe that Quaritch would allow his mental awareness of Spider's connection to his previous life to develop into a real bond. And of course it offers another facet to the overarching theme that fathers protect their kids at the expense of all else.
And this might be the single most pro-father movie we've seen in a generation! Two dads willing to give up everything to protect even their adopted kids (Kiri and Spider) while Neytiri was willing to sacrifice both!
A father portrayed as logical and pragmatic and a mother portrayed as emotional to a fault? What year is this again?? lol
Going back to Quaritch though I didn't realize it at first but I also love that we're getting an evolution of the "Uncle Bob" thematics. You take the villain from the first movie, put all of his intelligence/knowledge onto a little rectangular CPU, put it in a new body that can learn on its own and voila, Uncle Bob "Avatar" style. And it was awesome!
And yeah, I can't say enough about the kids. I finally learned the girls' names after three showings (Kiri and Tuk) but I'm still working on the brothers, lol. The younger brother was pretty much the main character of this movie and man did he do an unbelievable job of carrying his scenes. The acting across the board was just on a whole other level compared to the first, especially Sam Worthington. He conveyed so much even in silence when reacting to everything that was going on around him. I got emotional all three times he "visited" his son at the end.
My only nitpicks are what I consider to be some minor dumbing down of the lore to make way for the new direction he is taking the story. Things like the super isolated sea Na'vi already knowing English when the first film was quite clear that the only Na'vi who spoke it were the ones educated at Grace's school. Also the viperwolves ignoring Quaritch's team on account of them being avatars contradicts the pack that attacked Jake his first night in the woods. But that's pretty much it and on the scale of "headcanon tweaks" are pretty easy to justify. I'll just assume that in the 15 or so years since the first movie Jake used his Tarok Motko status to get the word out on learning the Sky People's language and I guess I'll have to assume that the viperwolves attacked Jake because they were annoyed by his fire, lol.
This movie was an epic rollercoaster of both thrills and emotions, I can't believe Cameron is now 3/3 when it comes to directing sequels and kudos to him for bringing the new Planet of the Apes writers on board to help with the script because it was much more solid than the first.
