Epic win.
Epic win.
Looks like it will be cool but I'm a bit disappointed that it's not the air bending Avatar.
astounding, extraordinary visuals.
emotionally lacking.
narratively lazy. INORDINATELY long, and it drags (and takes a long time to take off). terrible rhythm; no flow. badly in need of an editor -- both script and film.
moralising but morally empty.
the story and characters are not at all engaging. but it looks GOD DAMN AMAZING
yes, what you're saying is right, but it's also stinkingly obvious. it's also not new. terrible movies were always being made -- they're just more popular these days. and there's more of them -- but of course there are, because there are millions more movies these days than there were.
but it's also not fair to lump "the last 20 years of mainstream film" into that category, because as we'd all agree, some truly great movies have come out of mainstream film in the last 20 years.
Just finished watching about an hour ago. I enjoyed it. Saw it 3D and the theater was packed that I was forced to sit in the front row and the people next to me were commenting on every little thing. Spent half the movie thinking about what I could do to get those people to be quiet but something cool would come up and my mind would be blown.
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
Albert Einstein
Anyone who is refusing to see this movie or waiting for bluray is missing out. Go watch it in 3D.
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
Albert Einstein
so basically it looks amazing but the film in general isn't actually that good?
No. The movie unravels well up until in anticipation of the clashing of the forces between the natives and the humans. Everything really ramps up.
While the visuals are extraordinary, everything else is very good. Stereotypical marine colonel doing his gung-ho thing waiting to slaughter those weird looking smurfcat people that those brainy science pukes call Na'Vi. He abides his time while working with the stereotypical company executive who wants to obtain the highly valuable unobtainium(yes, that is what causes this whole buttfuck calamity, unobtainium), but the company guy has to worry about public relations and their limited resources considering that they are nearly four light years away from Earth. OH, did I mention that the biggest pile of unobtainium is underneath a tree as big as Mt. Everest where the Na'Vi live? FUCK. But you know what? These guys are the bad guys and they don't need some sophisticated back-story to why they want to kill the mother-fucking forest and every living thing so they can sell rocks for cash. They just want money, and honestly, I don't think anything more needed to be done with them or could be done to greatly improve the movie.
To be honest, they aren't really evil at all. They're just lost space wayfarers who believe money is power and power is happiness and happiness can bring a long and peaceful life, but these strange savages who love these alien animals and plants that keep killing us so much are in our way. So we got to put a stop to this and get this job over with. Its not like any person, business, or government is like that or ever has been like that ever in the history of human kind. Its all just fantasy and some Freudien psychology thing going on here and it's very entertaining.
As for the good guys, I don't know how anyone could say they are not engaging characters. I could be wrong, but I think anyone who says these characters are shallow are just regurgitating bullshit from their favorite online christian review site(http://www.movieguide.org/box-office/7/10075/avatar), but if someone can explain as to why they are shallow I would be delighted to read.
The plot is simple and formulaic, but is told well and the action great combined with the most beautiful visuals you've seen in any movie that its lameness has no overbearing effect(reiterate: unobtainium). As for the narrative, there is much that happens and you really just don't know what to expect up until when trouble brews and then you realize most of the movie was like a big introduction to getting to know and feel for the characters and one long teaser that poked the reptilian part of your brain giving you urges to secretly pet your erection through the thin lining of your pocket to giant scantily-clad smurfcat women(READ: possible pro-furry propaganda).
This movie was what Star Wars 1 - 3 should have been. You should watch this movie, and if you can, watch it in 3D.
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
Albert Einstein
well
look
this is a pretty silly discussion sycld so i'm bowing out now; seems like the thing to do
seriously?
jake is irritating. there's not all that much to him, and his narration is largely needless.
sigourney weaver is the most interesting character of the lot. and she's not all that interesting.
and as for the na'vi? typical nature-loving savages. so wise and in tune with the earth, in contrast with our ignorant cavalier consumerist "intelligence". none of them are actual CHARACTERS. not even archetypes, just simple stereotypes held up as some bland, simplistic ideal.
You're joking, right?
Yeah, you MUST be joking.Originally Posted by Mad Pino Rage
Hahah good one!Originally Posted by Mad Pino Rage
This movie's plot was kludged together out of pop-history cliches from European colonialism and US westward expansion. The ruthless cavalry, err, Marines launch a brutal attack on the noble nature-loving Indians--sorry, blue cat people--because there's gold, I mean unobtainium, under their sacred hills--tree, I mean--and they won't leave so that the white men, oops I mean corporation, can get at it. So Kevin Costner's character from Dances With Wolves--uhh, some utterly forgettable chump--switches sides to help them defend it. I get that this movie was supposed to be a visually impressive action flick rather than a thought-provoking piece of art, but for fuck's sake, James Cameron can make much better movies than this; if he's willing to spend $400 million and ten years on a movie, would it really have required that much extra effort to make it even remotely good in any respect other than the visuals? It's a toss-up between which is more painful to sit through, the thematic content or the dialog. Also all the military aspects of it were pretty laughable, I know most people don't care about that but I did kind of expect better from James Cameron.
Good points of this movie included the scientifically accurate spaceship that you see for about ten seconds at the very beginning, the fact that it included a main character who smoked cigarettes without anything ever being made of it, the fact that they never tried to provide any explanation of what the unobtainium really is or what it's really used for, and the fact that they called the stuff "unobtainium" in the first place (I don't see why people have a problem with that). Plus everything did look gorgeous.
EDIT: Of all the ham-handed stereotypes in this movie, Giovanni Ribisi's character was by the far the worst. He wasn't even a stereotype, he was a caricature of a stereotype. He didn't belong in a movie about ruthless corporate exploitation, he belonged in an sketch-comedy bit about it.
Last edited by Syme; 12-21-2009 at 03:41 PM.
Point #1: syme you white man no tell me proud brown man about co-loe-nee-a-lie-zsation
Point #2:
i think people should be able to smoke if they want to, and by "smoke" i mean both tobacco and marijuana, neither of which i smoke.
but come on. i can't remember ever seeing smoking obviously demonized in the movie theater aside from some "documentaries" where there was full disclosure about the film's message and what person is sending that message, and you're telling me that you don't ever notice "good" characters smoking in movies? the majority of movies have some smoking in them, and often it's the good characters that smoke.
What I meant is that when I saw Sigourney Weaver light up for the first time, I thought to myself "man, before this movie ends, someone is going to hassle her about smoking, or she'll decide to give it up, or something". Then I was pleasantly surprised when it didn't happen. That's not the same thing as expecting smoking to be "demonized", BTW. And yeah obviously there have been recent movies where "good" characters smoked, but I think you are overstating how often it happens, at least in big-name blockbuster-type movies (like Avatar). A quick google research expedition reveals this: http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/06/03...ies/index.html, suggesting that smoking in such movies really has become fairly rare in recent years--certainly it does not appear in a "majority" of such movies, if you have to watch four such movies (on average) to see a single smoking scene. Anyhow, I don't want this thread to become a discussion about smoking in movies, so again, all I meant was that I expected something to be made of it in Avatar and nothing was. Maybe it was the overly-preachy nature of Avatar in particular that gave me that expectation, who knows. Or the way in which they had a very famous actress very prominently smoke in her first appearance in the film, that seemed like kind of a set-up. And I don't smoke tobacco either, except for the occasional cigar, and don't smoke weed at all.
Getting back to Avatar, let me also say that I had kind of a hard time cheering for the protagonists in the final battle, since it basically amounted to cheering as alien monsters slaughtered my fellow human beings. Maybe I reveal my shameful speciesist bigotry by saying so, I don't know. I was kind of left wishing that the humans would come back with a much better-equipped expeditionary force and mop the floor with the aliens. Certainly if real-life human history is any guide, and if that unobtainium stuff was valuable enough to justify the initial expedition, that's probably what will happen. Which made it kind of stupid, IMO, when the movie implied that it was all over and the humans would never come back again since their first try didn't work out. Of course they are just going to come back again with more guys and more guns.
Last edited by Syme; 12-21-2009 at 05:18 PM.
While I can't comment on the benefits or appeal of extra appendages, the creatures of Pandora are a mix of both being foreign and familiar. If the creatures were created to solely be imaginative and the envionment was to be the most bizarre and alien setting of any Hollywood movie, Avatar did fail to do this. However, your dealing with James Cameron and not Michael Bay, and everything was done with a reason.
Iif you really want to knock imagination knock on some guy who wrote about humanoids living extended lifespans in the forest that lived simultaneously amongst really short and stocky humanoids that lived in mountains that loved rocks that lived during a time of giant eagles. And furry-feeted hobbits.
Well, they are incredibly wise and and in touch with higher spiritual knowledge because they can connect with all things of nature including Pandora and their ancestors either to listen to or speak with.Originally Posted by Gwahir
That is not deus ex machina. Jake's prayer was answered by Eywa. This is the biggest piece of evidence that more than suggests that everything is connected in way that transcends science. It was a "big fuck you and get out of my solar system" of nature as a unified front trumping the overbearing firepower of science. Maybe if the Na'Vi never had the ability to connect with animals or nature, which would of course change a lot of the movie, would I agree to saying "Wtf, where did all these animals come from?" and believe Avatar to be a visual pleasing romp through bad story.Originally Posted by Gwahir
I think that was his point, so the audiences could relate to the Na'Vi and to the destruction of the planet/their home. You have to give our writer and director a lot of credit here. This guy is tops amongst Spielberg and Lucas. There is no doubt he could have done something crazy and show us an alien world akin to that of a space version of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
The characters all had their own motives, but I wish a little more backstory was shown rather than leaving the audience to draw its own conclusions. Jake Sully's character alone is diverse and ever changing - being a crippled Marine veteran turned down from regenerative therapy who is offered a once in a lifetime opportunity to take his late brother's place as an avatar operator and earn bank to possibly pay for the procedure. He even goes as far as once again taking orders like a good marine in exchange for his legs back. But being a worn out and tired veteran has taken its toll on him, and he's given a second chance as an avatar to fall in love, find acceptance through perilous trials all in a brand new and better body, and discover a whole new spiritual meaning through the network of the planet which ultimately leads him to deny his own kind and a chance to get his legs.Originally Posted by Syme
Heck, the Colonel and and Giovanni Ribisi's character, Parker Selfridge, are not as bad as anyone makes them out to be. They had been their for years trying to assimilate the indigenous population by offering them education, medicine, and other prospects only to be rejected and refusing to move or be a part of. They could have easily annihilated or force move them despite the bad PR and have easily justified it through the energy crisis. But they didn't. They tried endlessly with Sigourney Weaver and her scientists working on the Avatar project trying to work in harmony. But it is Jake's intervention with the bulldozer and his vlog that convinces Quaritch and Selfridge that force is the only way.
I would think they would come back seeing as they need unobtainium and the largest deposits known just happens to be on Pandora. But they have to travel a total of eight light years (four back to Earth and four back) so they gives Jake, Neytiri, and all the tribes some time to make significant advances in how we view Pandora next time around. Who knows, maybe they'll embrace some of the leftover technology.
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
Albert Einstein
Originally Posted by Mad Pino RageIf you think we're saying he should have done something closer to what Michael Bay would have done, or closer to "a space version of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory", you have radically misunderstood our complaint about the design of the Navi and other alien life in the movie.Originally Posted by Mad Pino Rage
Yes, I saw the movie, I do know what the main character did. I'm not denying that Sam Worthington's character had a potentially interesting story and character arc. There's certainly no doubt that he changed over the course of the movie. The problem is not that the character didn't develop, but that the acting and dialog were flat and uncompelling, which basically squandered the character's potential and made his change emotionally ineffective.Originally Posted by Mad Pino Rage
The character concept for Jake Sully was great. The execution of that concept was lackluster and unimpressive.
Again, you are misunderstanding the criticism. It's not that I found those two characters' actions to be unbelievable or implausible. It's that the characters themselves--in their dialog, mannerisms, etc.--were pretty ridiculous, ham-handed, exaggerated caricatures of their archetypes. Compare Paul Reiser's character in Aliens with Giovanni Ribisi's character in Avatar. Both are clearly derived from the "greedy unethical corporate bastard" trope or archetype. But Paul Reiser's character makes it convincing and believable, while Giovanni Ribisi's character comes out as an almost comically overstated cliche. That's not a problem with Giovanni Ribisi either, he's a good actor and I like him in other stuff. It was a problem with his dialog and the way he was directed. Same deal for Stephen Lang's character (although he was less offensively over-the-top than the corporate guy).Originally Posted by Mad Pino Rage
Maybe so, maybe not; either way, that's not really relevant to my complaint about the tone of the movie's ending. Although now that it's apparently going to be a trilogy, that particular complaint isn't so meaningful.
Last edited by Syme; 12-24-2009 at 02:03 PM.
Yeah, it does sound pretty stereotypical to me mpr...the stereotypical marine you were talking about, the nature loving race etc as gwahir put them...
I'll probably still watch it, but it sounds like another generic 'lots of special effects with nothing really to it' film to me.
Was interesting until the end. Ending was weak and expectedha
The characters in the first Star Wars movie aren't stereotypical, they're archetypal, and the story is certainly something special.
Pandora is lacking in imagination. Big cats, angry lemurs and things that are basically horses. Riiiiiight. Someone got paid a whole lot to come up with animals that already exist and give them another leg or something. It's not even done with panache. It's done with tedium, it just thinks it's being really imaginative.
I'm fine with aliens slaughtering humans, and I'm even fine with a guy having to shed his human form in order to truly be one of the good guys. I get that it's a metaphor for shedding the uglier parts of humanity, etc. The Na'vi are people just as much as humans are -- except that they're lacking in any depth of character. That's what I can't get on board with. Cameron obviously thinks the Na'vi are incredibly wise and in touch with higher spiritual knowledge, but they're idiots who talk to trees and have no personality whatsoever.
If you want to make up a race that is wise and spiritual, make them wise and spiritual. The only reason they weren't pummelled in the final battle is that Cameron resorted to a literal (!) deus ex machina. There was nothing new, special or clever about them, just tired old Deepak Chopra-style hack spiritualism.
Yeah, I agree with gwahir. I just found the Navi incredibly uncompelling. Maybe I would have been able to take them a little more seriously if they weren't such an incredibly thinly veiled pastiche of Native American references and generic, shallow "noble savage"/"respect for nature" stereotypes. More effort should have been put into making them and their culture truly alien, and different from anything we've ever seen on Earth. Yeah, it would have been hard--it would have required a lot of intelligent, innovative conceptual design and writing. But if any movie had the capability to pull it off, this one did.
And yeah, it also made me roll my eyes that the Pandoran wildlife was all "space versions" of Earth wildlife. You had your space horses, space wolves, space panthers, space pterodactyls, a big space dragon, and so forth. With a guy like James Cameron, and such a huge budget and project development cycle, and such an imaginative vision behind it all, I was kind of hoping for some alien life that was a little more innovative and truly alien. Not taking Earth animals, adding an extra set of legs and some long tentacle-ears, making them blue with glow-in-the-dark spots, and calling it a day. But while the wildlife was fairly unimaginative, it was nothing compared to the Navi themselves--nearly identical to human beings except bigger, bluer, with tails and broad noses and elf ears. I guess Cameron felt he needed them to be so human-like so audiences could relate to them? I don't know.
EDIT:
I dunno, I guess different people have different standards for what makes a setting rich or engrossing. I mean yeah, they never acted so ridiculously that I was jolted out of the movies reality, and of course I agree that the setting was rich and engrossing in visual terms, but I couldn't really get into the film on a deep level because of the flat acting and crappy dialog. For me, real immersion requires that the human elements as well as the visual elements be compelling. The acting/dialog/characters don't have to be Oscar-worthy but they do have to be good enough to be convincing. That's what makes Aliens (for instance) a much better movie than Avatar, IMO. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed watching Avatar. I don't regret spending money on my ticket. It was fun. It looked great, the battles were cool, all that. But it would have been a much better movie if the characters (especially Sam Worthington) were more compelling. To me, an eye-rolling plot and unimpressive acting/dialog surrounded by really cool CGI environments isn't enough to create a world that's truly engrossing.Originally Posted by UnreasonablyReasonable
Frankly, I don't buy this. Since he couldn't produce compelling characters, dialog, etc., in the first movie, I doubt the sequels will be much better. I would love to be proven wrong on that point, but when a director shows so little concern for those aspects in one movie (especially one that he's apparently been working on for so long and cares about so much), I'm skeptical that it was because he was just "setting the scene" for sequels where he will do a better job. I don't expect much of an improvement in these areas in the sequels.Originally Posted by UnreasonablyReasonable
I don't think this analogy holds up; the characters in New Hope may have been fairly steretypical (farmboy who wants to see the wider world, self-interested rogue with a heart of gold, etc.), but their actors do a fairly good job and the dialog isn't cringe-inducing. The characters and plot in New Hope are a good bit more compelling than anything in Avatar; New Hope is a much better-executed even if it's built just as solidly on well-worn archetypes. And while New Hope's plot isn't anything special, I think it is still a good bit better than Avatar's in concept as well as execution.Originally Posted by UnreasonablyReasonable
Last edited by Syme; 12-22-2009 at 12:08 PM.
He wasn't literally working on it for 10 years. He was ready to make it 10 years ago, but he didn't have the tech. After he watched LOTR: TTT and saw how Gollum interacted with everyone, he started work on a new filming/CGI system. So it really took like, 4 years.
Also, I loved it. I didn't consider the characters to be cliches, I considered them to be tropes. And I was glad to have a plot that was a little easier to follow than most sci-fi fare because I was being constantly bombarded every fucking second by how gorgeous everything was. Not just the forest, but the military base. I don't really mind that it was Dances with Smurfs; it was a familiar plot. While I did find the Na'Vi to be a little hard to take, there were humanizing touches throughout the entire thing, especially with Neytiri. She went from callous soldier/don't fucking like humans one bit no sir Action Girl to a fairly compassionate central character. And uh, Tek-Ruh or whatever the fuck his retarded name was, the de-facto leader after the elder kicks it - he wasn't constantly scheming to kill Jake or anything. In fact, I thought they would be at odds until the end, but they seemed to work out their differences quite well. And quickly.
And the nerd fucker, the guy from Bones. I expected him to rat out Sully at several points, but his character - a jealous side-kick - managed to swallow his goddamn pride and realize that Jake was doing something that wasn't entirely awful, no matter how jealous he was.
I think there was a little more substance than people are willing to give it credit for. Familiar plot =/= bad plot.
Also, I wish I could USB link with horses And keep a Tree of Souls in my basement to store all my music and movies on. Just walk over, wrap my hair around it, upload, download. Yeah. It could work.
I guess the line seperating cliche from trope, stereotype from archetype, is vague or thin or in different places for different people. It's one of those eye of the beholder type deals, what strikes one person as an archetypal character strikes another person as a stereotypical one. But at least in the case of Avatar's main villains--Stephen Lang's character and especially Giovanni Ribisi's character--James Cameron blasted across that line, wherever it lies, without even slowing down. In fact he kept going beyond that line and plowed across the NEXT line, the one separating stereotype from ridiculously overdone caricature. I'm okay with a movie that assumes a black-and-white moral difference between antagonists and protagonists, but come on.Originally Posted by MalReynolds
And like gwahir said, I don't really have a problem with a plot that's less than totally original (Alien is basically just a haunted-house horror flick with a spaceship instead of a house, yet it's a great movie); but there are degrees of unoriginality, and to a large degree, how much unoriginality you can get away with depends on how well-executed the movie is in plot terms. Avatar falls pretty flat there, so the unoriginality of it's plot is really in-your-face and irritating/tedious. A plot that incorporates elements that have been used in other movies, but still does something interesting and maybe new with them (e.g. Alien) is a little different from a plot that transparently rips off a bunch of cliches that are frankly already tired, and tries to serve them up like they are fresh and thought-provoking.
I mean really saying he's been working on it for 10 years is like saying one of my stories, which I wrote 15 years ago and I re-wrote for publication now, has been in the making for 15 years. It's technically true, but ignorant of circumstance.
If he was ready to make it 10 years ago but lacked the tech, that's even less excuse. He had all that time to work on story, dialogue and character. Your humanising touches didn't do it for me. They were just character turnarounds. I mean I didn't have a problem with any one turnaround, I just didn't think they were executed at all well enough to be a "humanising touch". Just more plot.
I didn't have a problem with the plot being familiar. I don't really care. Lots of plots are familiar. I just think it was lazy, uninspired, and meandering. But EVEN THAT is not really my problem with the movie; that one goes to the characters. They were way more than tropes. They fell asleep on the train and blew right past Tropes Station. They're cliches and then some. They're cliches who lack the depth of character that cliches usually have.
well i mean ham-handed moralizing relying on overused cliches is the best way to make an impact with the audience
avatar gets completely ruined in discussion itt
still will see it though i imagine
there is no way to ruin this movie in discussion; the only way the movie could be ruined for someone is by blinding them
lol is that a compliment to the film or an insult
i think it could be either tbh
but i mean ill assume insult
well it's a compliment to its uncontroversially stunning visuals and an insult to everything else
i'm gonna echo gwahir here and mention that, at the time of it's writing, lord of the rings was totally original work. it synthesized common folklore of mythological creatures and turned that into lore and ancient, mysterious history, something which hadn't been done on that scope before. he created that world (and the attendant languages, which is incredibly impressive from a dedication standpoint, although the end result is pretentious fanboys learning them to LARP their faggoty hearts out) entirely on his own, establishing the archetypes that haunt every pulp-fantasy story that have followed ever since. you really can't compare cameron to tolkien in any respect, especially not avatar to lotr
Wait, how can Yoda be wise without the Force? What are you even basing that assumption off of? All those times Yoda was stripped of the force and was totally wise? I'll give you Gandalf. He seems absolutely level-headed, but once again, what are you basing his wisdom off of? You never see him without his wizardry. Each character plays by the rules that were created specifically for their universes. The Na'vi are no different.
I'd argue the fact that they aren't wise is more based off the fact that nothing they do shows wisdom. They have confirmed that their God is real, therefore, their worship comes from fact, not faith, and their 'wisdom' is handed down from a higher being. All they're doing is following orders.
I still liked them, but if every time I stepped outside my hair tangled with the trees and God went, "Hey, by the way, I'm real, and all your friends are in heaven with me," it would not make me wise to believe in God. It would, however, make me quite stupid not to.
You misunderstand; I'm not saying that it's not the Force that makes Yoda wise, or that it's not his powers that make Gandalf wise. I'm saying they're wise in ways that don't relate only to the Force -- the things they say and the wisdom they espouse is actually relevant in this universe, without wizarding powers and the Force. "Do or do not; there is no try" is a wise thing for anyone to have said, with or without the Force. The wisdom high-handedly spouted by Cameron and the Na'vi, on the other hand, is only "wisdom" on Pandora. I'm saying this makes it false, cheap, imitation wisdom, and Cameron should have done better.
But you're right as well.
That's another good point, actually. The movie's environmental message loses some of it's relevance when you think it through and notice that the Pandoran environment and ecosystem had special traits which real-life environments and ecosystems don't, and which created a reason to save them that doesn't apply to their real-life counterparts. That weakened the film's thematic content (which was already pretty cookie-cutter).
if you'd read this thread you'd hear several people saying several bad things about this movie!
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