The first Avatar opened to an enthusiastic reception in 2009. Although the film hasn’t had a lasting impact on popular culture, at the time there were news articles aplenty about people who wanted to disappear into the film and identified with the struggles of the Na’vi, the fictional Indigenous tribe (its name means “the people”) that populates the fictional planet of Pandora. Although people also noted the racial sketchiness of its plot—it was essentially Dances With Wolves in space, i.e., a movie about how native peoples are noble savages who are closer to the earth than white people are yet need a white man to lead them—we had just elected a black president; racism was over, and therefore this movie’s well-intentioned but problematic anti-racism message felt less objectionable than it does, say, now.

After two terms of President Obama, Black Lives Matter, a Trump presidency, and a cultural swing toward the right, a sequel to Avatar is being released, with many more being threatened. Watching the trailer, it’s painfully clear how out of touch the world of Pandora now feels. Every time I see the individual strands of hair that make up a Na’vi dreadlock, I just think, Who asked for this?

The entire aesthetic of Avatar has not changed a single iota—up to and including the aesthetics of the Na’vi, which now are much more recognizable as a pastiche of indigenous cultures that exist in the real world. This trailer coming out at the tail end of Horizon Forbidden West’s relevance as a video game does not do it any favors, as they are aesthetically so similar, and similarly uninteresting and confusing. Anecdotally, I’ve heard that people unfamiliar with Avatar have laughed at the trailer in theaters, and I don’t blame them. If you weren’t around for the original surge of Avatar-fever, watching a nine-foot-tall blue guy whip out a submachine gun on the back of an alien pterodactyl looks absolutely ridiculous, the racial politics of the situation aside. (If nothing else, the CGI that James Cameron has been spending all this time spinning up already looks horribly dated.) 

It is impossible to predict if audiences will line up to see The Way of Water in the same way that they did to see Avatar, which earned $2.87 billion and set several box office records, including being the highest-grossing film of all time. But these records, too, have changed. In 2019, Avengers: Endgame surpassed Avatar’s all-time box office, and the blockbuster landscape has not yet broken free from Marvel’s hold on it.

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Avatar’s global impact upon first release a decade ago was indisputably huge. James Cameron’s sci-fi epic was Event Viewing writ large. Everyone had to go see it and had to see it in 3D. And we pretty much all did—some of us two or three times—helping it become the highest grossing film of all time, with $2.789 billion, not adjusted for inflation (a title it since lost to Avengers: Endgame). Like James Cameron’s ‘Titanic’ it was a blockbuster with critical acclaim, garnering a 82% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The late Roger Ebert gave it four out of four stars, saying “‘Avatar’ is not simply a sensational entertainment, although it is that. It’s a technical breakthrough. It has a flat-out Green and anti-war message. It is predestined to launch a cult.”

And yet 10 years later, you wouldn’t necessarily know that from its relative erasure from our collective consciousness. After ushering in the new age of 3D and capitalizing on the epic scale of IMAX, the film hung around on home media with little to show for itself. It was fun and action-packed, but there wasn’t much to talk about, and rewatches felt like an exercise in diminishing returns.

It’s hard to say when the hype died down exactly. Talk of Avatar was impossible to avoid while it lasted. The film hit theatres in December 2009, and by the time it was released on DVD and Blu-ray the following April, it beat sales records for both formats. Fears of fans taking their own lives to avoid coping with the impossibility of ever living in Cameron’s fantasy world made it into the news cycle.

But even by March at least some of the sheen had worn off when Avatar, for all its record breaking, failed to win most of the Oscars it was nominated for—including the big ticket best director and best picture awards that would have given the film a degree of industrial legitimacy not often bestowed upon big popcorn movies. An extended re-release came and went without much fanfare. And by the time Cameron announced four sequels in 2017, it felt like the franchise was running on fumes before it could even get going.

Avatar’s premise is remarkably simple, despite how much stuff is packed into it. A big faceless company is mining a rare mineral, unobtanium, from the almost habitable moon Pandora. As a way to garner legitimacy, they’ve allowed scientists to study a humanoid, blue-skinned indigenous population on Pandora, the Na’vi. To make contact, the scientists have created human/Na’vi hybrid clones, and humans can transfer their consciousnesses into these avatars. Our protagonist, Jake Sully, is one such avatar-using human, and—bonus—because he lost the use of his legs as a Marine, becoming Na’vi lets him walk again.

In a way, the whole thing is one big, self-satisfied metaphor for the immersion of watching a 3D movie. Jake can experience a realistic interaction with a fantasy world while motionless in a dark pod.

Things get messy when Jake makes contact with the Na’vi, and he realizes they’re an oppressed people looking to regain their resources and way of life. As someone with a foot in both worlds, he predictably becomes a kind of leader to the Na’vi and helps them take on their oppressors. It’s admittedly a fun movie, though its white saviour theme of “going native” really can’t be masked by its sci-fi trappings. No amount of blue skin excuses the “noble savage” tropes and obvious allusions to colonial history and racist New World narratives. Cameron keeps this particular metaphor too close to the source, and it leaves a foul aftertaste.

Not that bad taste or offensive content has ever stopped a film from achieving cult status (or from earning boatloads of money in Avatar’s case). Given its mysterious fade to irrelevance, Avatar may be the exact opposite of a cult film.

Cult films usually build a reputation over time. They have a certain quotability, inspiring line readings from The Big Lebowski, Casablanca, The Room, or They Live. No one quotes Avatar. You don’t hear “I see you” or “Pandora will shit you out dead” the way you might reference “game over, man” and “get away from her, you bitch” from Cameron’s Aliens, or “I’ll be back” and “hasta la vista, baby” from his Terminator films.

Cult films also tend to invite participation, whether that’s dressing up, singing along, and yelling “slut” and “asshole,” at a midnight screening of Rocky Horror Picture Show, throwing spoons and footballs at The Room, or creating fan art and writing fiction that extends the story world of Star Trek.

The body of Avatar fanfiction is remarkably tiny. I can’t speak to what people are making and keeping private, but Archive of Our Own, one of the internet’s most popular fanfic destinations, hosts just 198 pieces of Avatar fic. Go down a few titles and you’ll find that 160,467 entries accompany the Marvel Avengers films.

Cult films also last. They endure, culturally. And they do so organically, as when fans line up to see Blade Runner at repertory screenings, or raise money for charity at yearly screenings of Joss Whedon’s Serenity. Announcing sequels ain’t it. And outside of Cameron’s quest to make new Avatar films into the next millennium, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of audience-driven effort to keep the Avatar conversation going (though dark horse presidential hopeful Marianne Williamson has apparently carried the torch for years).

Cameron’s own Titanic, the colossal hit whose records Avatar had to beat, is a great counter-example, showing how a gargantuan cinematic phenomenon can exhibit elements of the cult film. It remains the subject of think-pieces and discursive analysis more than two decades on—its title song alone would keep the film iconic even without its “I’m the king of the world” and “draw me like one of your French girls” quotability, or its debate-inspiring question marks like “why would old Rose throw the jewel away?” or “could Jack have fit on the door with Rose and survived?” (of course he could have! They gave up after trying once!).

What stands out most about Avatar now though, what assures it its place among historically pivotal films, is the fact that it literally transformed how movies are distributed and exhibited. Cameron was pretty sneaky about it too. While he sold the film’s novelty by appealing to the immersive potential of his new 3D technology, what he really did was force the hands of movie theatres resistant to the switch to digital projection. (Having seen the film in both IMAX 3D and on a 12-inch laptop, I’d argue this industrial shift was a far more exciting attraction than the film itself.) Digital broke through, while the Trojan horse that was 3D is now on the decline.

The whole Avatar experience felt like the making of a cult classic in reverse. All of Avatar’s cultural capital was used up spectacularly quickly upon release rather than building over time. It was perhaps too mainstream to build any kind of cultural movement. Or maybe it was too obvious. Blade Runner asks us to consider whether its protagonist, Rick Deckard, was a Replicant, the machines he’s been hunting, the whole time. Night of the Living Dead and Freaks ask us to question what it means to be a monster, without providing easy answers. Plan 9 From Outer Space forces us to ask, “How did this even get made?”

Cult films usually aren’t quite as neat and tidy as Avatar, a film that offers little to unpack on repeat viewings. Jokes about Cameron scratching out character names and settings from Disney’s Pocahontas were right on the money. As were comparisons to Dances With Wolves and other colonial white saviour fantasies.

All technological game-changing things considered, Avatar may have just been a little too, well, two-dimensional to develop any kind of cultural stamina.

I doubt any of that will matter when Avatar 2 hits theatres in 2021, though. Hollywood loves a spectacle, and a franchise. And for all the dunking Cameron invites, he’s more than proven himself up to the task of keeping us entertained.

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The trailer doesn’t seem to give away the film’s major twist, either, which is apparently something we have to worry about after Terminator: Genynynynynys or whatever that one was called. It actually looks… pretty good?

The film reportedly picks up where T2 left off, completely ignoring the other sequels, but according to James Cameron, those terrible movies actually played a big role in steering Dark Fate in the right direction—because they gave the crew a reminder of what not to do.

“One of the things that seemed obvious from looking at the films that came along later was that we would need to get everything back to the basics and that we would need to avoid the mistakes of making things overly complex and that we needed to avoid stories that jumps around in time and one that goes backward and forward in time,” Cameron told Deadline in a new interview. “Let’s keep it simple in the relative unity of time. With the story, let’s have the whole thing play out in 36 hours or 48 hours. In the first two movies everything plays out in less than two days in each one so there’s energy and momentum.”

It also sounds like this could be the start of a whole new Terminator franchise, too—if all goes well this time around. “We spent several weeks breaking story and figuring out what type of story we wanted to tell so we would have something to pitch Linda [Hamilton],” Cameron said, according to Deadline. “We rolled up our sleeves and started to break out the story and when we got a handle on something we looked at it as a three-film arc, so there is a greater story there to be told. If we get fortunate enough to make some money with Dark Fate we know exactly where we can go with the subsequent films.”

Give the whole interview a read over at Deadline and try to let your broken, embittered heart get excited about the prospect of a new Terminator movie. This is James Cameron, after all—first, everyone thought Titanic was going to be a gigantic flop, and then it became the biggest movie of all time. Then, everyone thought Avatar was going to be a gigantic flop, and then it became the biggest movie of all time. We should learn to trust the guy at this point.

Terminator: Dark Fate is set to hit theaters November 1.

The post Wait, the New Terminator Movie Might Actually Be… Good? appeared first on VICE.

On Thursday, Paramount Pictures released the first teaser trailer for Terminator: Dark Fate, and—uh, it actually looks pretty good?

Dark Fate is the first Terminator sequel since 1991 to actually have James Cameron attached, and he’s bringing back Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger to reprise their original roles. It’s also reportedly a direct sequel to T2, forgetting about all those other terrible sequels like we’ve collectively tried to do, too.

Cameron is only producing, though, since he’s still cranking out roughly a zillion Avatar movies right now, but he attached Tim Miller to direct, hopefully to bring some of Miller’s Deadpool energy to the franchise.

The two-and-a-half minute trailer is mysterious and doesn’t give us much of a feel for the actual film, but what we do get seems pretty promising. Arnold’s T-800 is living a quiet life in the woods? Linda Hamilton somehow looks even tougher than she did in 1991? Not one but two new Terminators? The first one—an updated T-1000 played by Gabriel Luna—seems to have the ability to split himself into a liquid form and an endoskeleton, and a nearly human Terminator (Mackenzie Davis) who’s trying to keep a young woman alive.

“Why do you care what happens to her?” Davis’s Terminator asks at one point.

“Because I was her,” Connor says.

Then everything goes completely wild and a flaming airplane falls out of the sky because, sure, why not? Give the trailer a watch above and check out Terminator: Dark Fate when it hits theaters on November 1.

The post Linda Hamilton Is Back as Sarah Connor in the First Teaser for ‘Terminator: Dark Fate’ appeared first on VICE.

Information about the upcoming films has been pretty slight—at least, until now. On Friday, the BBC released a report that supposedly reveals the titles for Avatar II-IV. According to some mysterious “documentation,” the next four Avatar movies might be called Avatar: The Way of Water, Avatar: The Seed Bearer, Avatar: The Tulkun Rider, and Avatar: The Quest for Eywa.

Yes, “The Seed Bearer.”

The names haven’t been verified, so it’s unknown if they’re the actual titles, working titles, or just entirely made up, but one thing is abundantly clear: These names suck. Slashfilm may have done a heroic job digging through the Avatar Wiki to unpack what the hell “The Quest for Eywa” might actually mean, but still. These are some really, truly, unapologetically heinous titles.

So in honor of the impending onslaught of Avatar movies with potentially godawful names, we here at VICE have taken it upon ourselves to come up with 50 better options out of the goodness of our hearts. Have at them, James Cameron:

1. Avatar: A Very Expensive Cartoon
2. Avatar: Journey to the Uncanny Valley
3. Avatar: Avatar Chronicles Part 1: The Legend of N’S’Wing’Tho
4. Avatar and the Hunt for a Better Metaphor for Colonialism
5. Avatar: The One Where They Fuck with Their Tails Some More
6. Avatar: Back in 2-D for Some Reason
7. Avatar: In 4-D Now Which Means Gross Water Will Squirt on Your Face
8. Avatar: The Hubris of Cameron
9. Avatar: I Just Did This So They Would Pay for Submarines
10. Avatar: Don’t Ask Why the Bad Guy Is Back Even Though He Definitely Died Already
11. Avatar: Again with the Blue People
12. Avatar XI: Madea’s Return
13. Avatar: The Ear Gauger
14. Avatar: The Dancing Plant
15. Avatar: The Legend of Eywa’s Gold
16. Wet Hot American Avatar
17. Avatar: This Time Starring Oprah
18. Return to Avatar Mountain
19. Avatar: Here We Go Again
20. Avatar 2000
21. Avatar: Fine, Fine, We’ll Do Full Frontal
22. Avatar vs. Predator vs. Jason
23. Avatar: Another Movie Not as Good as the Ride
24. Avatar II: The Four Nations Used to Live in Harmony
25. Avatar III: Everything Changed When the Fire Nation Attacked
26. Avatar IV: Only the Avatar Mastered All Four Elements
27. Avatar V: But When the World Needed Him Most, He Vanished
28. Avatar VI: Somehow, the Avatar Will Return to Save the World
29. Avatar II: European Gigolo
30. The Avatar Awakens
31. Avatar: The Musical
32. Avatar: Timothée Chalamet in Conversation with Harry Styles
33. Avatar XVII: Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh, Something About the Trees?
34. Mr. Avatar Goes to Washington
35. Avatar: It’s Still Just Dances with Wolves
36. Avatar: Daba Dee Daba Die
37. Avatar: Yeah, You Saw Me, So the Fuck What
38. Avatar: Spring Break
39. Avatar After Dark
40. Avatar: TJ Miller Is in This One
41. Avatar: Is This Content?
42. Rise of the Avatars
43. Revenge of the Rise of the Planet of the Blue People
44. Avatar: Tokyo Drift
45. Avatar: In Avatar, Do the Na’vi Have Human-Like Genitals?
46. Avatar: Several People Are Typing in Slack
47. This Avatar Is Tearing Our Office Apart
48. Avatar: Literally No One Is Asking for These Movies
49. Avatar: Seriously, Show Me a Single Person Excited About This
50. Avatar: No, You Can’t Say the Horny Weirdo Who Wrote That Quora Post

You’re welcome.

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The post These Alleged Avatar Sequel Titles Are Awful, So Here Are 50 Better Ideas appeared first on VICE.

Avatar was a 161 minute-long epic sci-fi film set in a future where humans tried to colonize the planet Pandora in order to obtain a rare and expensive mineral hilariously called unobtanium.

In a blue-tinted futuristic city, Jake Scully was a paraplegic ex-marine who feels that his country had failed him. He wanted a new pair of legs, but it’s impossible for a veteran with the kind of insurance he had. He feels helpless and useless, until one night, two men dressed in black offered him an opportunity that will change his life forever, which was to replace his deceased identical twin to go on a mission on Pandora and operate a Na’vi-human hybrid called “avatar” that’s genetically matched to him. Once linked to his avatar, Jake immediately ran out of the room and into the field, excited to be running again. But in the first trip to the forest, he proved to be difficult. His hunger for adventure, unfortunately, brought danger to everyone else on the team.

The plot had peaks and valleys and borderline functional character writing that were decent enough to support the weight necessary to carry the story, but it never went beyond that. The film was weighed down by its obvious influences from Dances with Wolves and Pocahontas and its use of the white male savior trope—an untrained white man came to a foreign land and was immediately recognized as the “special” one destined to save everyone from the danger that he, in fact, brought in the first place. There’s not even an explanation why Jake, instead of Grace, a scientist with an established connection to Pandora from the time she taught English to the children of Pandora, was chosen as the special one. Instead, Grace had to witness the death of one of her students on the hand of her people, and eventually died as well.

When it came out in 2009, Avatar changed the mainstream cinema forever by introducing the world to 3D as a way to enhance a narrative. It broke records worldwide and became an instant blockbuster. The reviews were good, too.

So why did it disappear from pop culture almost completely?

Suffice to say, on paper, the movie was extraordinarily successful. But its success could only be attributed to its 3D technology, visual effects, and the blue cat people. Avatar’s visuals put the visual effect-heavy films that preceded it to shame, such as The Lord of the Rings (2001), King Kong (2005), Transformers (2007). This was no surprise, especially since Cameron said in 2014 that the first thing he did for Avatar was write 1,500 pages of notes of the world, the cultures, the clans, the animals, and the environment that makes up the film. It was heavily promoted as a visual experience that you couldn’t recreate at home. In that sense, it was true to its word. But that’s it. Its storyline, however, was underwhelming.

If you asked people what they remembered about Avatar, they would ask you back, “Which one? Avatar: The Last Airbender or Avatar, Avatar?” At least in Indonesia, they would. Then if you asked them what they thought the movie was about, some people would say it’s a love story, and others would say it’s just the lives of blue cat people. This speaks volumes of Avatar and its tragic downfall to pop culture obscurity.

The only reference to Avatar in recent memory was when Saturday Night Live created a brilliant skit titled “Papyrus” that talked about the overall silliness that is Avatar, even down to its font choice. The skit featured Ryan Gosling as an increasingly-maniacal person trying to figure out why a giant, international blockbuster like Avatar would use the inferior font Papyrus as its logo. “He just got away with it. This man, this… professional graphic designer. This laziness… was it cruelty?” he lamented, while driving to the house of said graphic designer to stalk him. The skit ended with the title “Papyrus” against a black screen, written in Comic Sans.

There are other reasons as to why the movie failed to establish its own cult following. Take a look at some of the movies with record-breaking box office numbers. What do they have in similarity? Yep, continuity. Sequels that work. The seventh installments of Star Wars and Fast Furious and two Marvel Cinematic Universe movies are all in the top 10. Without question, they earned those rankings because of the well-constructed storylines, how they keep the momentum going, and how they get the audience wanting more. Avatar, though sitting on top of the list, didn’t have any of those things. It’s feel-good ending could be the reason why. When you think about it, Avatar ended so well that made you think there’s nothing else to develop. A closure—that’s what Avatar was in pop culture history.

Sure, there are four Avatar sequels in production with a release schedule stretched out until 2025. The first sequel will focus on the younger generation of the Na’vi people—Sully and Neytiri’s children—since the creators hope to bring a more youthful energy to the franchise. But we think it’s pointless to try to be relevant again, since it’s been way too long since the first film was released. The damage has been done—it’s a boring film and we’d be surprised if anybody’s willing to spend money to see the sequels.

Avatar might not be as memorable as it was intended to be or as groundbreaking as Cameron thought it was. And it might not have given us a new understanding of one other and the world around us, but it’s overall a well-paced, richly detailed, carefully choreographed, and stylized film despite some thin characters and hokey plot points. It’s a film that served its purpose at the time: to entertain and for that, we can’t complain.

The post Does ‘Avatar’ Actually Suck? appeared first on VICE.

The as-yet-untitled sixth movie in the Terminator franchise looks to be bringing all the old gang back together. James Cameron—the guy who dreamed up the original idea and directed the only two Terminator movies worth remembering—is also coming back to produce, with Deadpool‘s Tim Miller directing.

“As meaningful as [Linda Hamilton] was to gender and action stars everywhere back then, it’s going to make a huge statement to have that seasoned warrior that she’s become return,” Cameron said Tuesday at a Terminator event in LA.

“There are 50-year-old, 60-year-old guys out there killing bad guys,” he said, “but there isn’t an example of that for women.”

Hamilton has mostly popped in for TV guest roles in the years since Terminator 2: Judgement Day. She had a brief appearance on Weeds and a season-long arc on that forgettable NBC show Chuck, but she’s likely been doing chin-ups in her room and carving emo stuff on park benches waiting for the right time to play Sarah Connor again.

Cameron and Miller say that the new movie will be a direct continuation of Terminator 2, hopefully wiping the slate (and the increasingly convoluted timeline) clean so we don’t have to think about whatever Terminator: Genisys was or that time Christian Bale played John Connor.

“We’re starting a search for an 18-something woman to be the new centerpiece of the new story,” Cameron said Tuesday. “We still fold time. We will have characters from the future and the present. There will be mostly new characters, but we’ll have Arnold and Linda’s characters to anchor it.”

There’s no word yet on when Terminator 6 will go into production, but if all goes according to plan, the film will kickstart a new trilogy of films in the Terminator franchise. Cyberdyne just won’t give up, apparently.

The post Linda Hamilton Is Going to Kick Some Cyborg Ass in Terminator Again appeared first on VICE.

It all went down on the last night of filming in Nova Scotia. Five weeks of working up north was nearly over and the whole crew was about to decamp to the larger set down in Mexico. Everyone was in high spirits; the mood festive.

Then at around midnight, which was lunch hour for a filming schedule that started at dusk and went until dawn, the crew was called together for a last meal. Even James Cameron descended from his office to toast a successful wrap. The catering team turned out an impressive spread, crowned by a big batch of creamy clam chowder. People were lining up for seconds and thirds. And then it was back to work.

Marilyn McAvoy was one such crew member. A standby painter on the set, she used her background in fine art to paint forgeries, illustrate Jack’s sketchbook, and age props. Now an artist in her own right, she talks to VICE about what it was like to get extremely and accidentally high on the night of the PCP-chowder incident.

All images by Ben Thomson

VICE: Hey Marilyn, so tell me, what was that chowder like?
Marilyn McAvoy: The chowder was unbelievable. People were going back for second bowls. I really thought about going back because it was so good. And I think that was part of the problem: people ate a lot more than usual because it was so delicious.

What else do you remember about that night?
There was no indication that there was anything strange happening… until the meal. By the time we got back from eating, after about 30 minutes, that’s when I started noticing something was wrong. Everyone seemed confused. Everyone was having trouble getting their work done.

What were you doing at the time?
I was given a lab coat to age down, which is a super simple procedure. You just make a tea bath. I needed some stuff upstairs as well as some other equipment down in another area. And I remember just walking around trying to figure out the best way to get my supplies. Things just seemed fuzzy.

How did the rest of the crew react?
While I was trying to figure out what was going on, everyone else seemed to be going outside. They were all gathering outside of the giant doors of the building we were working in.
I also heard later on that as soon as James Cameron realised something had been put in the chowder, he ran up to his room and forced himself to throw up.

When did everyone realise what had happened?
It was actually kind of comical. It was like that game kids play, Red Rover: there were the people who were ok, who hadn’t gotten any effects yet, and the people who were getting high. And there were these two lines apart from each other, with some people in the “good” line slowly trickling into the “bad” line. It was at about this point that people realised that everyone who had eaten the chowder were experiencing the effects of some sort of hallucinogen.

So what happened next?
The crew vans came and picked everybody up and took us to the Dartmouth General Hospital. En masse, we went through these hospital doors at 1 AM in the morning. They did not know what to do with us. It became pretty chaotic. Some people were having a really hard time. I think maybe the people who had more experience with drugs were having flashbacks and bad trips.

How did it affect you?
For me, the whole situation was pretty surreal. But in terms of effects, it was kind of like a combination of being high on marijuana and being drunk. I was functioning, I was reading magazines. It was like a dream.

What was your experience with hallucinogens before this?
None. So when it started happening, I was pretty scared because I had no experience to base [this high] on. We didn’t know then what it had been spiked with. But because it was such an unexpected thing to have happened, I didn’t have time at the moment to fully take in how dangerous something like this could have been.

How did the hospital deal with all of you?
Well we were there all night. Eventually we all got put in these cubicles with the curtains around us, but no one wanted to stay in their cubicles. Everyone was out in the aisles and jumping into other people’s cubicles. People had a lot of energy. Some were in wheelchairs, flying down the hallways. I mean, everyone was high! So they gave us this drink that had charcoal in it, to remove the toxins. By sunup, we had started to come down. People were playing hacky sack. Everyone just wanted to get home.

What was the aftermath like?
Well, we had to go home and get right to sleep and then back to work that night to finish the shooting that had been interrupted. It was very strange. In terms of what had happened, there were some investigations. Nothing was ever officially determined, as far as I know. Among the crew there were rumours that it had been a disgruntled chef that had been let go, but nothing ever came of that.

It seems like, since it happened at the end of the shoot, there wasn’t much time for paranoia to brew among the crew.
Yeah, that’s true. I never thought about that. I probably would have started bringing my own lunch. Because it was, while funny, pretty traumatic. So, you’re right, it would have led to a very mistrustful situation.

Did this whole thing affect your attitude towards drug-taking, illegal or otherwise?
No, not really. Although, it made me realise how fragile, how delicate, these things can be. Had I gone back for that second bowl, I might have had an entirely different kind of experience.

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The good news is that sports serves these moments up with regularity; whatever other problems contemporary life throws at us, we can take some solace in the fact that the universe is alive with buzzer beaters, always. But finding the right frame, the most apposite and engaging soundtrack, bringing it all into synchronicity—that’s the challenge. It’s a problem that the Twitter user @TitanicHoops has solved by picking one chunk of one song and making every sports moment rhyme with it. Our auteur—he did not want to be identified, and so I will not identify him—recognized what is arguably the most histrionic chunk of Celine Dion’s historically overwrought “My Heart Will Go On,” and further recognized that it would elevate just about any sports highlight into a soaring comic masterwork. And so he has done that, with just about any sports highlight.

Given that this is one of the greatest recent online ideas, it’s perhaps surprising that there is no grand creation myth, here. “I wish I could say that I was playing a really meaningful basketball game, the clock was running down, and I pulled up and hit a dramatic 35-footer and everything was in slow motion and that the song just popped into my head at that moment,” @TitanicHoops told me. But the actual story is that TH, an ardent soccer fan, saw a tweet from one of the legion of sketchy soccer shitposting accounts on Twitter that used Madame Celine’s caterwauling as the soundtrack to a great goal. It occurred to TH that it would work well for basketball, which it does. It later occurred to him that it could work for anything else, which is why he’s used it with varying degrees of success as the soundtrack for moments ranging from Barcelona’s wild comeback against Paris Saint-Germain to the Academy Awards’ climactic Best Picture flub-stravaganza. It worked. It just continued to work.

As befits @TitanicHoops origins as an act of appropriation, the idea of using this particular steamy lump of Dion-ian bombast under sports highlights has spread quickly beyond his account. TH holds know bitterness on that front, although the work has made him something of a stickler. “I’ll admit,” he told me, “there are times when I see a hockey goal that’s paired with it, and when that part of the song”—the introductory James Horner-ian pipe-tootling, and then Celine cannonballing in with EEEEEYYYYYYYYYAAAAAWWWW HERE—”isn’t matched with the apex of the action, it does piss me off. Like, how could you screw that up? You can’t screw that up.”

We are entering college basketball’s season of overage, and TH knows that much will be required of him in the weeks ahead. He already has nearly three dozen videos on deck featuring vintage college basketball moments, and is prepared to do whatever is necessary to make sure that each indelible moment from the NCAA Tournament gets the same appropriately indelible soundtrack. “My strategy is dictated around how epic the tournament is going to be,” he says. “In theory I could have zero videos if it’s a bunch of 20-point blowouts; like, if a team goes on a 12-2 run to cut a lead to eight, I’m not going to do one for it.” But if and when the tournament delivers as it always does, he’ll be ready to get to work. “The more buzzer beaters there are, the busier I’m going to be,” he said. “And I’m totally cool with that.”

The work is the work, and TH will do it for as long as he can, or for as long as the games and his bellowing Quebecois muse are still speaking to him. This is how the future is made, and remembered; it is how we all live. Moment by moment, beat after beat. His art—and I do not seek or even want your forgiveness for how this sentence ends—will go on.

The post Meet @TitanicHoops, The Twitter Account That Marries Buzzer Beaters And Celine Dion appeared first on VICE.

He first worked with Cameron on his 1989 science fiction film The Abyss. Nuytco Research Ltd., the Vancouver-based undersea technology and research company Nuytten founded, made the submarines and diving helmets for the film. “I at one point was very annoyed at [Cameron’s] cavalier attitude towards the work that we were doing,” Nuytten said. “We sent a crew down to film The Abyss. We had nine men involved in it. And I refused to set foot on the site because I was mad at him.”

The rift might have persisted until today, had the crew not pleaded with Nuytten to reconcile. “So I called him up and said, ‘Okay, we have to stop this kindergarten stuff,” he said. “Let’s be friends.’ We’ve been great friends ever since.” Cameron even purchased one of Nuytco’s famous deep-water submersibles for personal use alongside his yacht, making him one of a handful of luxury customers Nutyco services each year.

It’s not surprising that a kinship with such prickly origins could be brokered with Nuytten at the helm. Speaking in low, woodsy tones that belie a rapturous passion for the ocean and its mysteries, the 75-year-old Métis potlach chief for the Kwak’waka’wakw people conducts himself with a disarming beneficence. Today, his company provides submersibles and personal deep-ocean diving suits to researchers, explorers, and billionaires all over the world.

But his most far-flung goal, he told me, is to build a permanent, deep-ocean base.

Phil Nuytten in the warehouse at Nuytco Research Ltd., the undersea technology and research company he founded in Vancouver. He’s standing next to his patented Atmospheric Diving Suit, for which he is known around the world. Image: Jackie Wong

After falling in love with skindiving and spearfishing at 11, Nuytten dropped out of high school at 16 to open Vancouver’s first dive shop. From there, he worked as a commercial diver and, in 1966, founded the research and ocean technologies company that he now runs out of a nondescript North Vancouver warehouse.

Upstairs, Nuytten’s office is adorned with antique diving equipment, a framed, signed portrait of Canadian astronaut Dave Williams working on the International Space Station (“I got to know him when he trained in our DeepWorker submersibles and our Newtsuit Atmospheric Diving Suit,” said Nuytten, who’s worked with NASA for decades), and posters for undersea movies for which Nuytco made submersibles and diving equipment, including The Abyss.

Downstairs, the garage-style warehouse is full of works-in-progress, including deep-water submersibles and Nuytten’s patented, pioneering atmospheric diving suits for which is he known around the world: Made of hard metal, the suit maintains the same cabin pressure as the surface using an atmospheric technology Nuytten that invented himself. The suit enables dives of up to 2,000 feet.

Nuytco’s DeepWorker submersibles sell for approximately $1 million. They’re single-person vehicles that can take pilots up to 3,000 feet below the ocean’s surface. Image: Jackie Wong

Nuytten spends his workdays with his feet in many worlds. His clients span the spectrum of filmmakers, military personnel, astronauts, research scientists, and luxury consumers.

Most of Nuytco’s luxury consumers, like James Cameron, own yachts to which they wish to attach a sub. “Most of these very wealthy yacht owners want to do something—not just be rich and own a yacht,” Nuytten explained. “A lot of them are engaged in what we call civilian scientist programs, where they’ll take scientists on board their vessels and give them sub time that [the scientists] wouldn’t otherwise have.” There aren’t enough submersibles available to keep up for researchers’ demands, so these billionaires can help out those who want to go deep.

In Cameron’s case, a personal submarine allows him to indulge a passion for ocean exploration that extends beyond his undersea movies. In 2012, he famously visited the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot in Earth’s oceans, in a sub he helped design.

Luxury consumers comprise about 20 per cent of Nuytco’s submersibles market, Nuytten told me. Military clients—”not quite as draconian as one might think; it’s primarily submarine rescue,” he quipped—make up about 25 per cent of the business. The rest, he said, is a “potpourri of everything from biopharmeceutical companies to coral harvesters to marine scientists.”

Nuytco’s DeepWorker submersible, which holds one passenger, sells for approximately $1 million (all currency in CAD). Its Dual DeepWorker, which holds two, costs about $1.5 million. Both come in versions that can take submersible pilots up to 3,000 feet below the ocean’s surface.

The Dual DeepWorker, pictured here, is a two-passenger submersible priced at around $1.5 million. Luxury customers purchase them for use alongside their yachts. Image: Jackie Wong

Nuytco’s subs are actually affordable compared to others. Headquarted in Vero Beach, Florida, Triton Submarines LLC makes what its staffers call “the ‘Bentley’ of the submarine world.” Its most affordable sub is called the Triton 1000/2, is $2.57 million and has a 1,000.66-foot depth rating. Its most expensive sub is the three-passenger Triton 3300/3, which costs $3.9 million with a 3,277-foot depth rating.

“Three thousand feet is a long, long way down. Even 1,000 feet is the height of a 100-storey building,” Nuytten said. Nuytco subs can plunge 1,000 feet below the surface in five-to-10 minutes, and they hold 72 hours of life support.

Of the connections (and possible discord) between Nuytco’s luxury clients and the research-minded aims that fuel his passion for the work, Nuytten sees a simple symbiosis. “We use one to feed the other,” he said.

His vision is to establish an undersea habitat, potentially off the coast of Vancouver

All of it, he added, is in service of a dream he hopes to see to fruition in his lifetime. “I’m a blacksmith, in a sense,” he said. “My job is to build armour to take us outside of our designed limitations.”

We humans are designed to breathe 20 percent oxygen, and live at a pressure of 14.7 pounds per square inch, which is conveniently what’s found at sea level.”You can’t go down to the bottom of the ocean and survive,” Nuytten said. “The pressure is far too great.” (At 8,000 feet below, it would be comparable to having an elephant standing on your toenail—but across your entire body.)

“So here we are, stuck at sea level, Nuytten continued. “But we’re not!” At least, not if he ultimately has his way.

“What this is all in aid of—and it’s a very ambitious end goal—is I want to build an underwater habitat,” he said. The habitat would be different than the so-called “wet habs” of the 1960s that Jack Cousteau built, he explained. Unlike those habitats, where people lived for a few weeks or one month at a time, Nuytten’s habitat would be a long-term living situation. It would maintain the same pressure as what humans are accustomed to living in at sea level. “I want to build habitats that are not exposed to pressure, even though they may be 3,000 feet down,” Nuytten said.

Read More: The Aquatic Life of Dennis Chamberland: One Man’s Quest to Colonize the Sea

His vision is to establish an undersea habitat, potentially off the coast of Vancouver, called Vent Base Alpha. “We’ve already laid all the plans for it,” Nuytten said.

The habitat would be built near one of many undersea thermal vents that form polymetallic sulphides, laboratory-pure metal particles that gather like fine, wet sand on the seabed.

“If you send those to the surface, they’re semi-precious metals. And you can support a habitat [financially] on that,” Nuytten said. The thermal vent would also serve as a power source to develop electricity, he continued.

Vent Base Alpha. illustration by Ken Brown, Courtesy of Phil Nuytten

Beyond ushering in an unprecedented age of undersea exploration, Vent Base Alpha could be seen as an antidote for one of the most pressing issues we face up at sea level.

“The earth is very rapidly getting overpopulated,” Nuytten said. “The ocean is wide open. And the ocean is 3-D. We are not; gravity pulls us. There’s no such thing in the ocean. You could build a house on top of a house on top of a house and float them. So you could have strings of habitats.”

If we come to understand the oceans better, Nuytten said, they could stand to save us from ourselves—and even solve some of the biggest problems we face. Ignoring their health, on the other hand, will prove disastrous.

“What people have to begin to realize is that the ocean are the lungs of this planet,” he said. “When the lungs go down, the heart stops beating. So without the oceans, we are toast.”

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The post Meet the Submarine Inventor Who Wants Everyone to Live Under the Sea appeared first on VICE.