The alternation is rarely seamless. The first three shots of Edie Falco as General Ardmore are at 48 frames per second, but the fourth shot switches to the standard rate. Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) hugs one child at 48 frames per second and then two children together at 24. Spider (Jack Champion) grabs a fire extinguisher at 24 frames per second, then uses it to smash controls on a panel at 48. When the poacher Scoresby (Brendan Cowell) loses his arm, there are two shots of the severed limb. The first is at 24; the second, the reverse angle, is at 48. You wouldn’t want any blur on a flying arm.
Shots submerged from beginning to end are in the high frame rate, and in general, the device is less unnerving when the image simply involves water, Na’vi and tulkun, the whale-like creatures, because we’re watching visuals heavily augmented with effects. But the format becomes a liability when a human being — or any recognizable, real-world object — enters the frame. Suddenly the actors-in-costume, documentary effect is back, and it has the paradoxical consequence of making this $600 million movie look cheap. Certain shots during the tulkun hunt resemble a first-person video game — partly because some video games adopted high frame rates long ago.
Furthermore, whenever the movie downshifts from 48 frames per second to 24, the image — to my eyes — momentarily looks flickery, almost like a form of slow motion, as if your mind is once again learning how to convert still images into a movie. Those of us who have heard the hype about high frame rates have long wondered whether they constitute progress or gaslighting. If eliminating blur was always a white whale for technicians, for viewers it might be a solution in search of a problem. By toggling between two frame rates, “Avatar: The Way of Water” implicitly concedes that more isn’t always better.
Still, if you had talked to the late Douglas Trumbull, who got his start designing photographic effects for “2001: A Space Odyssey,” you would get the impression that nearly everyone toying with high frame rates has been doing it wrong. Trumbull was one of the pioneers of the technology; beginning in the 1970s, he developed a format called Showscan that would have played movies at 60 frames per second. In more recent years, he was pushing a system he called Magi, in which movies could run in 3-D at 120 frames per second.
When we met for coffee in February 2020, he explained — as he had in 2016 — how his system differed from those used by the high-frame rate movies that had been released so far. He promised that movies shot with it would look “fully cinematic,” not like soap operas.
“I have to show it to people,” he said. “I’m so tired of talking about it and explaining this and being put in this defensive position by Ang Lee and ‘Gemini Man’ and ‘Billy Lynn.’”
