James Cameron – the director of Aliens, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and Avatar – has criticised Aquaman for being unrealistic.
Quizzed about the James Wan film by Yahoo, Cameron revealed he was bugged by the leading character’s ability to swim around without kicking his legs.
“I think its great fun,” he said of Aquaman. “I think its a movie I could have never made. Truthfully. I could have never made that film because it requires this total dreamlike disconnect from any sense of physics or reality. It exists somewhere between a Greek mythic landscape and a fairy tale landscape.
“And people just kind of zoom around underwater because… they propel themselves mentally? I guess? I don’t know. But it’s cool. You buy it on its own terms. But I’ve spent thousands of hours underwater. I’m very literal about my underwater. It needs to look like it’s real. And while I can enjoy that film I don’t resonate with it because it doesn’t look real.”
Cameron has spent hours underwater. As well as previously directing The Abyss and Titanic, the filmmaker’s upcoming Avatar sequels are set to feature heavy underwater sequences. Cameron has even pioneered never-before-seen filming techniques to capture the underwater feeling properly.
“And by the way,” he continued, “[Aquaman] doesn’t help us with our issues of actually understanding the ocean and exploring the ocean and preserving the ocean — though they did throw in a couple things like whales and things like that to remind us we are using the ocean as a garbage dump, so I applaud the film for that. Yeah, I couldn’t have made that movie. We’re doing a lot of underwater in the Avatar sequels and it’s going to have such a different feel.”
Cameron has a history with Aquaman, having previously starred as himself, directing the fictional James Cameron’s Aquaman, in the HBO series Entourage.
