In the world of Entourage, James Cameron directed a massively successful version of Aquaman that let Vincent Chase, I don’t know, hook up with more models or something. In our reality, however, James Wan made his own trippy movie about the undersea hero. Cameron is not a fan.
In an interview with Yahoo, the die-hard fan of the ocean explained that, while he thought Aquaman was “great fun,†the lack of realism really bothered him. “I could have never made that film because it requires this total dreamlike disconnect from any sense of physics or reality,†he said. “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.†To paraphrase Kim Kardashian West, maybe if you had an underwater you were passionate about then you would know what it takes to shoot a film underwater, but you DON’T.
Cameron, who directed The Abyss and Titanic, continued by getting into the fact that Aquaman doesn’t have much sense of environmental responsibility. “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,†he 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. 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.†We imagine James Cameron could very much have continued laying into Aquaman, but he had to get back to working with Kate Winslet on holding her breath for more than seven minutes for the Avatar sequels.