Why Avatar has the Most Ironic Soundtrack of All Time 

James Cameron: *wants unrecognisable music* James Horner: *makes unrecognisable music* James Cameron: ö

the fact that they actually called it unobtainium will never not be funny to me

"Something that could be understood by all from Oklahoma to South Dakota." I love this statement. Something meant to be global actually being restricted to a vertical strip of 700 miles. I'm picturing audiences all over the world scratching their heads and confusedly looking around at each other in theaters when the scene plays, while people in Nebraska and Kansas are openly weeping.

"Keep your ears open to unusual sounds. Things that you may find a little uncomfortable now, with a little bit of listening, some of those may become the favourite sounds in your musical world." What a great closing statement from her. There's so much beautiful music we could discover if we'd be a little bit more adventurous.

"From Oklahoma to South Dakota" being used to describe a breadth of all people is unbelievably funny.

Guys guys guys. “From Oklahoma to South Dakota” makes complete sense, you just need to go around the Earth the long way. 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

My favorite part of Avatar 2 is how they threw away the entire alien language they invented for the first film to have everyone speak English the whole time

Seeing this video, I’ve got two thoughts: Sideways is not being snarky, he is genuinely pissed at the colossal amount of wasted potential in such an ironic sense. Secondly, I hope these demos can see the light of day. They from the sound of it seem amazing.

Forget the snyder cut I want the Avatar music cut

*“This is not what nonwestern music sounds like. This is what western audiences think nonwestern music sounds like”*

This video perfectly explains why Avatar paradoxically feels both “well-made” & “poorly-made” at the same time! - The ppl in charge of the worldbuilding & production put a lot of care into their work. The man in charge of everything ignored their efforts.

The way directors blame the audience for these sorts of simplifications is really irritating. How do they know we wouldn't like or understand it if we never get a chance to see it in the first place?

This just sounds like the biggest waste of somebody’s time in history, they put in SO MUCH EFFORT. and Cameron was like no.

I read the title as “iconic”, not “ironic”, and was confused the whole video about why he had a negative tone

Cameron: But I don’t like the alien music you made! Horner and Bryant: Then why did you ask for it???

I'm so glad you put the part where Eywa sends wildlife charging into battle to help. The score in that scene absolutely yanked me out of the moment. It was so emotional and then suddenly it felt so... Goofy? It was so out of place and seeing this now, it makes sense why

Not to mention, all money and research in the logo using "papyrus" font.

"From Oklahoma to South Dakota" James Cameron: Ah yes multiculture

I am convinced, utterly convinced if they had let the soundtrack be the alien experimentation it could’ve been, this movie would’ve been powerful for a far better reason

God, imagine if the entire movie had instead been scored in this blend-of-cultures style instead of the Hollywood blockbuster style - or if they'd switched between one and the other depending on whose POV the camera was following or some other thing where it supported the narrative. People would have talked about it for decades as a feat of science and art. What a waste of work.

All that world building, and they still used papyrus font for the title...

James Cameron: I want it to sound non-western,something never heard before **it sounds literally alien,something nobody heard before** James Cameron: **surprised Pikachu.jpg**

Now I want to hear Hans Zimmers work with the ethnomusicologists. He's demonstrated with the DUNE soundtrack he's very capable of making something entirely alien work

The irony about the tree song is that the moment you played the first note i remembered it all. It had such beautiful feeling and a uniqueness that i loved. And now i find out THERE WAS MORE THAT WE DIDNT GET!!!!? If the whole movie was like that I'd probably like it more! I might even love it. But absolutely I'd respect it!!!!

People: Do exactly as Cameron says, and exactly what he wanted Cameron: Ew who decided this it sounds so *aLieN*

And suddenly I'm depressed at the amount of music that no one has ever heard before and no one ever will.

It is sad to find out about this because all of the different or 'alien' sounds and songs where actually my favourite parts of the movie, they sounded very intimate and spiritual and made me really emotional.

I would love to hear a follow-up now that Avatar 2 is out. And it's interested to watch this after Hans Zimmer very deliberately attempted to make an alien soundtrack with "non-Earth" instruments for Dune. The music is so much of what makes that world feel so off-worldly. It's lamentable that Avatar didn't have that effect because it didn't follow through with that intention.

Can I just LOL at the statement that everyone should relate to the music "from Oklahoma to South Dakota"? Why not just make them space cowboys singing country if that is how narrow the recipients are supposed to be. Why take all these nations that have nothing to do with English, the west and the US, to make a song for the US?

Art needs freedom. But they didn't want art. They wanted money.

Coming back to this after the Way of Water and Jake Sully (James Cameron) has almost completely americanised the Na'Vi. Especially his kids

I read about Horner hiring an ethnomusicologist around 2007-2008, so I was really looking forward to hearing this score. The wainting was long. Sadly I must admit it was very disappointing when I finally bought the CD and heard it, and I even wondered whether the ethnomusicologist story I had read years prior was in fact true. Until today, I had always blamed Horner for being too conservative and throw away an amazing opportunity to create something really new and beautiful, but now I know it wasn´t his fault. As it often happens with Hollywood, a director-producer ruined what could have been amazing film music.

"Honey, what did you think of the film?" "It was good, but there wasn't enough of Jake weaving. The book implied there'd be more"

All that work and the title card is still just “avatar” in the papyrus font

The thing that I find utterly weird about all the worldbuilding for Avatar is they paid for it, but never really seem to have pushed it as any part of the movie promo? Focusing instead on the story (which barely existed outside of cut+paste from other films) and the SFX (which were cool, but don't engage people over time). But then, I guess creating all that worldlore & then just deviating from it whenever he felt like doing lazy storytelling would make things difficult...? 😒 When you think about how hard the LOTR team leaned into the created cultural aspects of their films, and got their audience so completely engaged.... One can only hope that with the new movies finally releasing, Cameron will allow his collaborators to get more of the limelight?? 🙄 And thank you for this, it finally explains a lot of things, inc. why that Tree of Souls song sounded so weird in the midst of the rest of the soundtrack!

After my first two weeks taking a course on film sound in college, I find topics like these fascinating. And the idea of creating a whole new type if music for a new culture sounds just too cool to have been ruined like this. Imagine how all the talented people who worked on scoring and world building felt

So they made a real language, which can’t be easy. And then just said random words so that it sounds good, why tf....

are we not gonna talk about how the subtitles in the movie are written in papyrus????

Can we make a petition to have the original song samples released because I *NEED* to hear them

I think the original concept of blending all the music is super cool. Also the fact they managed to do it is impressive, so James Cameron cutting that out makes me so maaaad

Now im disappointed, i want to hear THE ALIEN MUSIC.

Avatar: Where the worldbuilding is actually way better than the story

All jokes aside, I think what may have happened was this: James Cameron begins production and is in love. He spares no expense, calling in every kind of expert he can think of to create a thorough and complete setting with a fully developed culture. He gets lost in the sauce. Alien ecosystems, conlang, numerical system, astronomically accurate representations of the night sky. The coup de grace: an entirely alien soundtrack. The crown jewel of this completely new world. Then reality smashes back in. The honeymoon phase is over. He has to make an actual movie now, and he absolutely cannot afford it to bomb. The budget that this project accrued is unthinkable. He starts cutting chunks of content, relegating them to behind the scenes material. The story can't be too weird, this has to be as universally appealing as it can be. Creature design is also reigned in - we need these aliens to have an analogue to what most audiences will recognize. Soundtrack? If it sounds weird to Cameron, it'll sound weird to the audience. They'll be taken out of the moment! No, this needs to be sanded down and made familiar. A movie gets released. It nets unprecedented returns at the box office. Within five years, it has vanished from public discussion. What a success! What a loss...

After watching all of the Star Wars movies in a 2 day marathon, (in the correct order), I gotta say the Avatar soundtrack reminds me a lot of the orchestral brass that Lucas is known for in his movies. The scene in the forest with Neytiri and the rhino creatures literally sounds like it is straight out of an older Star Wars movie. Cameron and Lucas are always trying to one up each other though so maybe the brass is like a "I can do it too" to Lucas from Cameron.

Man, I feel offended for an ethnic group that doesn't even exist.

"There's literally nothing that sounds more european than brass" ... Well, never thought about that, but yeah hahahaha

Hearing all this really makes me sad. This is actually one of my favorite non animated movies, cuz I prefer animation over live action. I haven't watched it in a while but it firmly holds a place in my heart. But most of the music didn't really stick out to me, and I so so SO wished they'd have put in what wanted to be done with the music.

Honestly it feels like the conclusion here is pretty simple. Cameron's movies, even the good ones, are slavishly obedient to the rules of either cool or pretty. Cool and pretty, of course, as defined by Western commercial appeal. He may be an auteur in the sense of his dictatorial control, but not in the sense of creativity or artistry. He's just a stone's throw away from Michael Bay- whereas Bay is the lowbrow, explosionfest, McDonald's-level filmmaker; Cameron is a middlebrow, technonerd, Olive Garden interpretation of the exact same thing. Just look at Alien vs Aliens- while I absolutely love both, it's plain that Cameron transformed Ridley Scott's moody, philosophical, artsy vision into a mechanically precise, shut-your-brain-off techno-thriller that trades every moment of introspection for an opportunity to just ooze pre-programmed cool. The bottom line here is- any music that is authentically ethnic or alien-sounding would not be "pretty" to Western ears, so they fall back on the Hans Zimmer/Lisa Gerrard trope of just layering some generically cool and vaguely exotic-adjacent melodies and a few meaningless female vocal warbles on top of an otherwise Euro-familiar traditional Hollywood orchestral score. This shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone though, and I wonder if the millions of dollars and hundreds of hours were really spent on all that cultural research. Anyone who's seen a James Cameron film could have predicted that it never would have worked.

Thats... actually really tragic, I would've enjoyed listening to something like that. A simple fix would've been to play the alien soundtracks in the navi scenes, and the traditional blockbuster soundtracks when the military is on scene. Further emphasizing the war between the two parties.

"To be understood by all... from Oklahoma to South Dakota" This reminds me of that joke from Ryan Higa: "Alright guys, I've narrowed it down... Countries all over the United States..."

We miss your work man. I hope all is well.

So James Cameron literally colonized the fictitious culture that he himself invented. Very Ironic indeed.

I WANNA HEAR THOSE DEMOS SO BAD!

Bro you gotta come back so you can tell us why avatar 2's soundtrack is ironic😢

Thought about this video after watching the new Dune movie. I feel like Hanz Zimmer accomplished, for the most part, exactly what they were trying to do with Avatar, and it was phenomenal! Ironic how we got a very "alien" sounding soundtrack from a movie that didn't actually have any aliens lol.

“[...] understood by all, from Oklahoma to South Dakota”... Yes, all the countries in between!

this movie is the most Hollywood thing I've ever heard of.

One of the great examples of making music for a fictional culture that represents them, is the SCP foundations Sarkicism. There are literal musical scores created and based off of the languages and the type of instruments that the culture uses. As someone who is a big fan of that scp and a big fan of avatar. I feel like its fair to point that out.

I'm so glad this franchise is getting a video game. There's way too much cool lore to only be contained to just movies.

*THEY LITERALLY CULTURALLY APPROPRIATED A FICTIONAL CULTURE* 😂

"This doesn't sound right to me." "You hired me to make music that nobody has ever heard before, what did you expect?" "I had no idea what to expect, I'd never heard this music before."

I need to hear that demo track fr, I would killllll to hear what they came up with, such a shame. This is one of my fave soundtracks of all time but only for the parts that really felt Na'vi. I hope they kept the demos and will release them some day, even just for promotional purposes.

Are you making a video for the new avatar 2 music? I wanna know if the learned anything from the first one.

I'm a biologist, and I tell you, I almost weeped in the theater. I mean, I was in bio/eco heaven. Paraphrasing Weaver, I just wanted to take some samples. I apreciated the hell out of how "extra" this movie went. That said, I'd really, really, REALLY love to watch this movie with a completely remade soundtrack, this time ignoring Cameron and just going with what Horner and Dr. Brian come up.

I definitely read “iconic”, not “ironic” in the title and was thoroughly confused for a long time

Can you do a sequel to this video about Dune 2021’s score? That movie legitimately sounds alien and unreal like it succeeded where Avatar failed.

As an avatar fan, I am now summoning Sideways to come back and make a video about the metkayina clan.

I didnt even realize the N'avi had four fingers and the Avatars have five

I’m annoyed that they literally just used Papyrus font for the whole movie.

"Alien" songs is such a hilarious concept. I am from Ukraine, and I know a bunch of people who listen to songs in english just to shut their brains off and relax. Because their English is so poor, the lyrics don't get in the way. They are perceived as pure music and emotion. Read the comments below any video with Made in Abyss soundtrack Hanezeve. It's a mumbo-jumbo and people acknowledge it and call this the deepest song that communicates to them IN THE SAME SENTENCE😆 Dumbledoor was correct, music is magic

One of my favourite rock artists is a guy who has no musical training, no idea about music theory at all, and so while the instrumentation feels very familiar, it's kind of hard to get inside the music to start off with. But ultimately, it's incredible stuff and I would recommend everyone to invest some time into understanding it. The artist name is Surface To Air Missive.

Why the hell did they not create some generic Hollywood score for the humans (brass and whatnot), and actually use the unusual alien-like score for the Navi? Wtf?? Too much of a statement for a blockbuster?

To summarise: James Cameron shouldn’t micro manage every aspect of the film and should just respect the professionals he hired

Honestly, I really enjoy Avatar's soundtrack and without this breakdown I wouldn't have known how severely it failed to do what was set out. I still think it's beautiful and it always brings me huge emotions but I hope Cameron learned his lesson and the upcoming second film will have better soundtrack. I'm sure Ill love it either way though because I've been a huge fan since the first time I saw Avatar in a cinema and it's definitely impacted my life

I just love how there was all this effort put into the lore and world and how it looks and sounds and just none of it is in the movie itself

So, basically, the Avatar soundtrack is like American Chinese food.

There's a whole lot of wasted potential throughout the whole film, and the lack of consistency in the story is just disheartening. Done right it could have been a game changer with amazing music but it was squandered. I'd love to hear those unused demos too

You need to do this for the second one too now! Loved this video by the way!

Feels funny coming back to this.

I feel like I’d probably appreciate the irony better if I actually remembered a single thing that happened in this movie.

Music team: *Makes music that sounds nothing like what people have heard before, sounding so alien that it was perfect for the story" Director:*Doesn't want it cause it sounds like something he hasn't heard before, sounding so alien that it was too weird to him* Music team: "Isn't this what you wanted?" Director: "Yes, but technically no"

Now that the second movie is out please do a follow-up video! This is one of my favorite videos of yours all because of the other irony in the grand scale of the failure lol

ugh, you are a hidden gem in the wild west of youtube. thank you for constantly creating amazing work

So let me get this straight, James Cameron managed to culturally appropriated a culture that they made FOR the film?!?!

"Here, make me some alien music but it must sound american, and not alien" Edit: Thanks for the likes guys, I didn't expect this to have so many

And Now the sequel Avatar the Way to Water: Waterworld.....but blue

Necessary rewatch rn

"understood by all from Oklahoma to South Dakota" Oh my god that's the funniest thing I've heard all month

“This is not what non-Western music sounds like. This is what Western audiences THINK non-Western music sounds like” GO OFF

17:38 a small defence of these scenes, they both feature jake sully a man who is not from navi culture so the use of these instruments makes a bit of sense... now the animal stampede has no defence it's just weird

This film is an upside down satire of itself.

When this came out, I thought it was just a big blockbuster that capitalized on cutting edge special effects and pretty much nothing else. After learning about everything else that they were trying to do with the movie, I'm beyond disappointed with how much potential they wasted. They could have pushed the boundaries of literally EVERYTHING. This literally could have been the new LOTR with added groundbreaking non-western cross cultural music being introduced to the Western world. But nope. We just got fancy blue Pocahontas instead. I guess there's a reason why people consider this movie "the most successful movie that nobody remembers." I only even remember the name Nav'i because it reminds me of Legend of Zelda...

Horner should release his original soundtrack by himself on Spotify

That's so sad, especially as someone who plays ocarina and is aware of all the unique sounds they can make. Even just adding a few different kinds of ornamentation and different instruments would have made it so much better. But there's a lot that doesn't seem to really fit.

Man I wish we could hear the unreleased sound track

As a linguistics major, the idea of having to learn ejectives made my heart stop. Those are _so_ difficult to do if you weren't raised natively with them.

As a cast member in Pandora, I've had to listen to this god forsaken soundtrack for over 2000 hours. I was afraid to watch this for fear of it triggering my flight or fight response. I can tell you that we rarely meet a fan that even knows the names of the main characters or the difference between a Navi, Avatar, and Banshee. It's weird because they make us learn the lore and then never get to use it unlike when I worked at Galaxys Edge. Also ever since they got rid of the Swotwiyeh drum circle it has never been the same.we have a running joke that the next movie will finally be released when the last person who helped open Pandora has retired or transferred away.

Brilliant video-thank you for your hard work on this!

i think it's wild that someone who went through so much effort to create an entire world, going through all the work of creating a new language, and mapping out the moon's cycle to make sure it's accurate, and all the other stuff that went into the world building, and got people to create music for this new culture... only to not accept the music, because it didn't sound right to them... you're literally creating a new culture, if you're not willing to accept the strange music of this new culture, then maybe you shouldn't have created a new culture. and the fact that the directer didn't like it, because it sounded weird to him, forgetting that other people will watch the movie, and those other people might like the weird music, is another level of wild. even if the Blockbuster crowd won't like the strange score, there are tons of music fans who would've loved to hear something they've never heard before. they had the chance to make an iconic score, up there with the likes of John William's scores, but they threw that all away because it just didn't sound right to them...

Good avatar: let's build a rich world with cool cultures by mixing asian ones. Ends up being unique even if you can recognize the inspirations. Blue avatar: let's make a unique unrecognizable culture. Ends up being obvious native American