Warner Bros./Frazer Harrison, Getty
- James Cameron criticized "Aquaman" for not being realistic enough, and not helping people understand the ocean.
- "You buy it on its own terms," Cameron said. "But I've spent thousands of hours underwater. I'm very literal about my underwater. It needs to look like it's real."
- Cameron made an "Aquaman" movie in the fictional universe of the "Entourage" TV series.
- Cameron has criticized another DC Comics superhero movie in the past, calling "Wonder Woman" a "step backwards."
James Cameron has mixed feelings on "Aquaman."
The director of the two highest-grossing movies of all time, "Avatar" and "Titanic," told Yahoo that he thinks the movie is fun, but not realistic enough.
"I think it's great fun," he said. "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."
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"Aquaman" director James Wan would likely disagree. He called it a "f---ing disgrace" when the movie wasn't nominated for visual effects at this year's Oscars.
Cameron also said "Aquaman" didn't help audiences understand the ocean.
"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," Cameron said. "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."
Though Cameron said in the Yahoo interview that he couldn't have made "Aquaman," in a funny twist, he did actually make an "Aquaman" movie once - on a TV show, anyway. In the fictional universe of HBO's "Entourage," Cameron directed an "Aquaman" movie starring Vincent Chase that made a record-breaking $116 million at the US box office its opening weekend. The real "Aquaman" movie didn't make quite as much when it opened in December, but it went on to be the fifth highest-grossing movie of 2018 with over $1 billion.
In real life, Cameron has been busy making back-to-back sequels to "Avatar," set for release in December 2020 and 2021.
This isn't the first time Cameron has criticized a DC superhero movie. He said that 2017's "Wonder Woman" was a "step backwards" and called the character an "objectified icon."
Cameron has never made a superhero movie, but was close to making a "Spider-Man" one. He wrote a long, and creepy, treatment for his vision in the 1990s, but it never saw the light of day because Cameron didn't want to deal with a long bidding war after the original studio went bankrupt.
Maybe the genre just isn't for him.