One of the few non-CGI-powered delights of James Cameron's Avatar was the appearance of Sigourney Weaver as one of the head scientists at the corporation that has come to pillage and destroy the planet. Weaver has been a magnetic performer since she first arrived on the scene, and she's one of an alarmingly few actresses who has been able to keep working over the years in a variety of roles. Her recent performances in The Cabin in the Woods, Paul, and Cedar Rapids have revealed a performer in full control of her craft and yet capable of evoking something like gravitas outside of her measured style of creating her characters.

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Image via Sony

She's also clearly seen a lot of scripts, especially considering the fact that she probably hasn't agreed to take about half of the ones she's read over the years. So, when she talks about being impressed with a script, there good reason to take her at her word...most of the time. This is, after all, the same actress who defended the manipulative hunk of hokum known as Chappie. Nevertheless, when she spoke to Variety recently about her roles in A Monster Calls, The Defenders, and the Avatar sequels, her praise for Cameron's scripts for the sequels seemed genuine and convincing. Here's exactly what she told Variety about the Avatar sequels:

"In my opinion, the three scripts I’ve read so far are many times more amazing than the first one in terms of their scope. He did a lot of the heavy lifting in the first movie, establishing the family and the relationships and the world, and now he really gets to play."

As I said before, this should all be taken with several grains of salt, but her reasoning seems pretty sound. My bigger issues with Avatar is that it spent way, way too much time setting up backstory and tending to the mundane intricacies of the plot, which didn't make a lick of sense anyway. So, if Cameron's next move is to just have fun in his admittedly wondrous world of color and imagination, that makes the prospect of these sequels seem just a bit more enticing. We'll have to see, though. There is still the matter of making the movies, editing them, and putting them in theaters.

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Image via Paramount
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Image via Paramount