When it comes to James Cameron, only two things are certain: Realism and the fuckin’ ocean. So when the filmmaker, who played a fictional version of himself directing a fictional Aquaman movie in Entourage, was asked about the actual Aquaman movie, he had some strong opinions about it. To be fair, Cameron started by telling Yahoo that he found James Wan’s DC superhero flick to be “great fun” before launching into a series of back-handed compliments and passive-aggressive statements, such as:
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?
Cameron is currently working on the sequels to Avatar, an eerily realistic film about a species of highly-evolved blue aliens and the man who falls in love with one of them from inside a sophisticated VR headset. The sequels are set underwater and required Cameron to develop a new motion-capture technique. “I’ve spent thousands of hours underwater,” Cameron says. “I’m very literal about my underwater. It needs to look like it’s real. And while I can enjoy [Aquaman] I don’t resonate with it because it doesn’t look real.”
The filmmaker, who also directed wildly realistic films like The Abyss and Aliens, went on to add that he takes issue with the lack of environmental commentary in Aquaman, a film in which Nicole Kidman wields a trident with great abandon:
And by the way, [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.
He probably also couldn’t have made Aquaman because he was too busy making very important, down-to-earth films about blue aliens in between executive producing that hyper-realistic Robert Rodriguez movie about a cyborg with giant eyeballs who plays rollerball in a dystopian future.