What does Avatar: Water Road on Mushroom look like?

I am ecstatic.

I heard this while walking through the concessions area of ​​the AMC cinema at Universal CityWalk Hollywood, surprised I wasn’t the one to say it. Which could only mean I was high too, and a handful of psilocybin mushrooms I dipped in the shower in nearby Margaritaville about 30 minutes ago had taken effect. Now I was part of a crowd pouring into the IMAX theater for an afternoon show Avatar: Water Road. My seat was in the fourth row.

The absurdity of this movie’s potent hallucinogens is, of course, that you don’t really need them: the oversaturated colors, immersive sound, and bleeding 3D visual effects are meant to be drugs in their own right, working on the nervous system’s production. God knows. But dosing myself served several purposes. The truth is, I’ve never seen the original symbol picture, because I was “too cool” for her at the time, and that felt stumbling would help me tell a story for which I had no frame of reference. If I had a meltdown and ran screaming off the stage to regroup at Taco Bell, it would be adequate atonement for ignoring this blockbuster franchise 13 years ago. But most of all, I wanted to see if my inner journey would match up with the vision in front of me, just as the Na’vi use their braids to join other creatures—or whatever’s going on out there.

Don’t explain it to me. I don’t care how anything works on Pandora, and I never will. Resource harvesting, Mother Earth, the concept of an “avatar” itself…isn’t important. The same goes for plot, which I refuse to attempt to summarize. I could use it less The plot, to be honest. While I’m probably in the minority who can happily sit through three hours more of a $350 million screensaver, I’m sure I’m not the only one who has a nagging sense of unease about the place. water way was the leading. The funniest part of the movie, it has to be said, was when I noticed the guy next to me looking at his phone.

And yet: “Imagine you bet on James Cameron.” So goes the current adage of Film Twitter, where the aversion to popcorn scene cliches are only overwritten if the scene is done truly. While tastemakers can dismiss Marvel fare as sloppy, algorithmic schlock, Cameron is the master craftsman who builds a world you can’t refuse. Perhaps an hour had passed by this time I had made the twin mistakes of underestimating him and Shrum. I ate more.

As any seasoned drug user knows, “This stuff ain’t shit” leads relentlessly to “What have I done?” I sealed my fate during the relatively cold story stretch, when Jake Sully’s jungle-dwelling family are on the run from bad guys and trying to adapt to the ways of the reef-dwelling Na’vi clan that have taken over. refugees. Disgruntled teenage son Jake befriends lonely Tolkon, a whale counterpart who bears a resemblance to a giant sea slug. The vibe was a ’90s Trapper Keeper, or blacklight poster. Nothing can hurt me.

This illusion is shattered when the villains, imbuing Na’vi’s bodies with the memories of the dead US Marines, ally themselves with a crew of human whalers from New Zealand(?) to hunt the Tolkon in a barbaric fashion to bring Sully out of their lair. Having basked in the peaceful biosphere, I’ve seen it invaded by greedy machines, and every kind of stuffed boat and submarine Cameron has designed since 2009. The two sides begin to clash in a massive battle, as flying creatures swarm over people in mech suits, the sea tainted with blood and oil, and I – My body now throbs with real fear – we melt in my seat. It is too late to escape now, and I have succumbed to the chain of events that have dwarfed reality.

It wasn’t until later that I was able to analyze this fugue state, and it has recovered somewhat. When my friend Saint Mads picks me up at the mall, all I can tell her is, “James Cameron is not human.” I asked what does that mean. I suppose I was struggling to say that after a certain point, there was no character left for the on-screen information. Everything was specs, physics, math, ten million simultaneous booms to make some vehicle flip or a legible bloody death. Technology has crossed another threshold, and now it’s mind-numbing and mind-numbing. I had this sense of adrenal thrust and no idea what to do with it, the inside of my skull was brushed with a clean thrust.

Despite my dim awareness of my open mouth and slow blinking, I stopped thinking of myself alive or present in that theater. Among the film’s great ironies is its meditative theme: the Na’vi must slow their heart rate and breathe deeply in order to find symbiosis in their aquatic surroundings, yet we have little chance of tapping into that calm ourselves. In the same vein, I was alarmed by the actors who came across as their distinct selves, seeing them as if they were in real danger. How did Jemaine Clement and Edie Falco get into this mess? Why would Cameron make Kate Winslet hold her breath underwater for seven minutes? Get them out of there! Perhaps my fears were evidence of the deep quality of the product, but even so, this inability reinforced the belief in my absence.

Yes, you have reached the stage of ego death, loss of identity at the height of a psychedelic experience. That it coincided with the most insane action sequence of the century underscores how insignificant I am. At this point, my gaze drifted to the rows of chairs in front of me, particularly the front and center, which were empty. I had booked this show partly because I had noticed, on the stage map, that the seat had already taken place Solo movie visitor. Whatever it was, they never showed up, dashing my hopes of a short interview.