Avatar

[Derek]

Can't wait for the Hobbit. There's a huge 3D opportunity there waiting to be cashed in on.

Del Toro has already stated the movie won't be in 3D. Depending on what happens with Avatar's B.O., maybe that could change.

I've gotta ask, why did Cameron design the robots to carry guns? Surely it would have been more efficient that they would be built into the arms somehow? And where did all that water from the waterfalls on the floating mountains come from?

[picolas]

bet you a million dollars they pee on the audience at some point.

[Redlum]

Complaints about this film are equally valid and invalid.  If character and story are the most important part of a film to you then why are you watching Avatar in the first place?  Of course it's frustrating that this kind of visual mastery is "wasted" on something with a crummy script.... but that's usually the way it goes so why not enjoy what it does have to offer?

I suppose you're right...but having said that I feel like in Aliens his writing was made somewhat more palettable by the confined nature of the setup. He was kind of forced to write actual conversations rather than a bunch of people walking around making explanatory statements or cornball exclamations. I actually loved Aliens when I rewatched it recently and it struck a really nice balance between the story and the spectacle - I'm not being facetious when I say that I was thrilled more by the showdown of that film than of any sequence in Avatar. This leads me to think I'm struggling to comprehend the sheer scope of Avatar but I don't think an increased appreciation of the visual mastery will allow me to forgive the script.

I did love the grunts awakening from deep-freeze and going to their lockers in zero-G and the subsequent descent to Pandora - so full of promise and Worthingtons dialogue sounded like the film would have some almost noirish internal musings but the voice-over soon became a way of re-iterating what we were seeing. But the contrast of Worthington working from a wheelchair to flying around in his Avatar was really quite compelling. It just worked so much better when it shut its mouth.

I can accept 1d characters in a 90 minute movie but not in one nearly twice that length.

[RegularKarate]

I don't think I disagree with anything you just said, redlum.  I am just more forgiving in the case of Avatar than you are.

Near, Far, Where-AVATAR

[polkablues]

bet you a million dollars they pee on the audience at some point.

The robots???

[Ravi]

I saw this last night in IMAX 3D and visually the film is remarkable.  This is the first film I've seen where I felt motion-capture made sense.  In purely animated films I generally think its a waste because animation should evoke real movement through exaggeration and artistry instead of mimicking reality.  But in Avatar, these creatures exist in the real world, so they have to have a recognizable movement, gravity, etc.  I mostly forgot that I was looking at CG creations during the scenes with the Na'vi.  The world of Pandora is gorgeous.  The 3D in the film enhances the visuals and is never gimmicky.

The humans in the film are not very interesting.  Sam Worthington is so blah in non-Avatar form.  Only Sigourney Weaver showed much spark.  Joel Moore was wasted.

Also, fuck that song that played over the end credits.

Overall, it was a blast, though I don't have any desire to watch this again.  Take out the IMAX 3Dness of it and I'm not especially interested.

[cronopio 2]

Also, fuck that song that played over the end credits.

oh yes. and what about that fucking papyrus font for the subtitles and thoseawful green glowy letters before the end credits. crass. mind as well use comic sans.

[Myxo]

Also, fuck that song that played over the end credits.

oh yes. and what about that fucking papyrus font for the subtitles and thoseawful green glowy letters before the end credits. crass.

Spielberg's composer is better than Cameron's composer.

I didn't like the score for Avatar.

[Redlum]

Also, fuck that song that played over the end credits.

...a 2006/2007 Pop Idol winner in the UK. Yes. I guess they were looking for My Heart Will Go on and On

[Pubrick]

*takes deep breath*

i think people are being a bit cynical about the characters in avatar being '1D'. i'm not into this 'fad' about expecting multi-dimensional characters, all the time, in every contemporary story. i had the same impression about giovani ribisi's character being a caricature of corporate greed. i am okay with that. he plays golf in his office, who gives a shit. we know what he and that orange-tanned marine stand for.

but what i want to say is that, aside from the media mammoth it needed to be in order to work, this movie is an event.  yesterday, i went to a nativity play with my sister. we have a cousin who's a priest from the missionaries of the holy spirit. if you don't know who they are , they're this really laid back congregation. i'm not very religious but these guys drink and smoke and talk about god in a way that's not intimidating. so after the nativity play, there was a party and i was talking to an ex priest who's now teaching philosophy and theology, and he was saying that after he saw the movie he couldn't wait to go back and talk about it to his students, because of how dense the story and its universe are. to me, that's fucking cool. i like it when teachers talk about neo to explain shit from the aeneid. or when they bring up darth vader to explain the concept of a tragic hero. i think i prefer that level of enjoyment from movies to technical discussions about lighting or directing or 'a weak third act', and i know that makes me sound ignorant to some of you. i don't think i'll ever be able to talk about a movie in the same level of detail some of you do. but i  think it has to do with a difference of understanding what stories are and mean. stories bring sense to our lives.

i'll stop this for a bit.

i will never forget the day i went to see avatar. i'm not saying this movie is perfection, but man, look around you. a big part of the world has embraced mediocrity. twilight, the books and movies, are huge. think about the useless works of creativity that get produced every day. all the bad music. to me that is a genuinely depressing thought. we're very distracted. it's increasingly hard to find something that inspires you massively that doesn't happpen on your computer screen or your blackberry.  avatar is big and it is inspiring.  say that it's an overblown, opportunistic vehicle to cash in merchandise and wanting to be a pop phenomenon badly, but don't call it mediocre.   cameron is not a hack.
compared to the formalism of peter jackson , or the exhaustion of lucas' and spielberg's creativity, james cameron is the best fucking director working in that scale. he doesn't need to throw that bullshit about making movies 'for the fans' to sound convincing, he knows that his legacy has to do with quality and making a movie that's a generational frame or reference.   whenever i think about john connor wearing the public enemy  t-shirt in terminator 2, i feel that.  i don't care if it's a masterpiece or a let down or if it lived up to the hype or not. i like that this movie will be discussed for years to come, because it does push a lot of ideas forward, is challenging and inspiring.

the fact most ppl are ignoring what you said reveals a lot about the big problem with talking about movies.

no one is talking about the same thing. it's worse than a philosophical argument between materialists and dualists. not only do most ppl not talk about movies in any other way than "i liked it" and "i hated it", a lot of ppl talk about the individual departments of the film as if it means anything to break it down like that. don't make the mistake of thinking that ppl who talk about the editing, acting, cinematopgraphy individually and exclusively are saying anything of great value. the most interesting things to be said about a film are precisely the kind of thing that ex-priest mentioned.

most discussions never develop past the point of trying to agree that a movie is worth talking about. ppl like to pick on petty things, and there's very few films without any flaws, but even then: look at the discussions of kubrick, or the discussions about There Will Be Blood. the conversation generated by ppl who find superficial flaws (sometimes fundamental but still structural and formal) leaves no room for any discussion on what the movie actually might MEAN. but everyone believes it's beyond our understanding -- the first thing that anyone says is don't try to guess what the director meant, that is unknown so the discussion of what a film means is subjective and therefore fruitless at best. in the words of Christian Bale: NO! NNNNOO!. ,

look at socketlevel's response to my rant against Inglourious Basterds. by bringing this kind of thing up ppl will not think you are ignorant, more like the opposite, ppl will most likely think you are being TOO INTELLECTUAL.,  that piece of shit WW2 film is no different from other tarantino wankfests in that while he wants to seem fun and like he has his finger on the pulse of what ppl want and nothing more, he has ALWAYS tried to be an "intellectual" filmmaker. he won the Palme D'Or for christ's sake! but because it's easy to just say "it was fun", without at all thinking why the hell it was fun (or wasn't AT ALL as the case may be), or what he meant by trying to make it fun (AND FAILING MISERABLY as the case may be), any attempt to bring the conversation to anything near that Aeneid shit falls flat.

the same is true for Avatar. these major directors who like to pride themselves on making cultural touchstones are extremely similar in more ways than their bluntness and appeal to popularity. ALL of them are underappreciated by the masses on the level that is truly significant, that is anything that lies beyond face value. alexandro is right in that james cameron could do better, but the truth is he just doesn't need to. his priority on paper is to make money just like tarantino's priority is for douche bags to say "FUCK YEAH! BLOOOOOD! HIS FACE IS POPPING ALL OVER THE PLACE LIKE POPCORN!" (*oh no, that observation was too interesting).

so maybe Avatar is not the best thread to bring this up, or it could be the best, cos at least it has a chance of being read (skimmed). some ideas are best presented by obvious intellectual experiments, and ideas need to be thought about so a film like Last Year at Marienbad signals loud and clear "some assembly required". the flaw in discussing those films is that once the puzzle is put together that is mistaken for the point of the film. but an art film is not about putting the plot together as if it were a standard narrative. a thing is not just and only just ABOUT something that is predigested. CMBB is not about Treasure of Sierra Madre. this film is not about Dances With Wolves.

it's about vision, pure and simple. it's consciously about the experience of watching 3D that everyone is describing the same way. it's about adjusting to a new way of seeing. it's about thinking of the possibilities BEYOND THE SURFACE. the villains are nothing but avatars themselves, their facade is expendable but their hatred is real. it is broad and simple because the story is huge and naive. we can return to Citizen Kane: the search for a life in a single word -- that is an experience (and it is just one experience) in a digestable form, where the aim is to answer the surface riddle and presumably leave it behind us neatly -- ignores the journey and the myriad ways to imagine seeing which the film seemingly exhausts.

big things are easy to overlook.

[RegularKarate]

That robot had a gun

[socketlevel]

i can't believe you just compared those two things and in the process put words in my mouth. rather then address points i make, you chose to make a new point, on a new thread, and suggest that I'm the opposite side of the argument by loose connections at best. are you distorting my point in an attempt to justify intellectualism? sorry i never rejected intellectualism, or tried to silence it as you suggest. your rhetoric to insinuate i am a philistine is insulting. i am amazed with your shrewd tactics, which with the right lens just comes across loud and angry. sadly, in it's crafty assured strength, I'm sure you'll win some over.

My point was about over-analysis, or reaching for pretentious obscurity with symbolism as your toolbox, when it need not apply. my argument is that if you're walking into a fun movie looking for scholarly things, you just might not find them. you might be disappointed if you do. sure i could be wrong, but that's not what you're trying to do. you're not trying to argue that i'm wrong. you're just labeling.

quickly into inglorious basterds i realized i wasn't watching the thin red line. can you have both? sure, but you seemed to be too far on one side for the tone and style of that movie; like you were reviewing something else. i suggested you were using the wrong framework for your review/opinion with THAT film, not the vast world of cinema.  now ironically it could apply to Avatar as well, or any film for that matter, but your broad point to make me a mercenary for mediocrity while you're fighting the good fight in opposition is spiteful.

now please, brush off my reply and laugh. it's what i expect next. god forbid you see the point and retract your insults.

[Myxo]

With regard to P's post,

I do agree that Cameron's vision with Avatar was to raise the bar and show other filmmakers "how it's done" with regard to 3D. To that end he succeeded beyond what I hoped for. There's no doubt that Avatar is an industry-changing film. I had tons of "wow" moments right up until the Marines decided to blow up their tree of life. That's when Cameron goes CNN on us and breaks out the "terror" and "shock and awe" dialogue from the Bush era bombing of Iraq. Leading up to that sequence I felt hypnotized by a 3D Pandoran world. Once Cameron chose to draw attention to his political bias I felt like somebody snapped their fingers and I suddenly realized like most people these days, he had an agenda. The movie was less and less enjoyable from that point forward.

This has been a tumultuous decade. You can barely watch TV in America or get on the internet anymore without reading something political. The United States is divided like never before. Films are supposed to offer an escape from reality, particularly with the Sci-Fi genre. I didn't mind the "moral of the story" message in Avatar. I was disappointed that Cameron purposely created dialogue to remind American audiences of his political bias. Interesting question: How many people will see this outside of America and totally miss those references?

Why not let the story tell the story? I can imagine the production meetings now. "If I mention terror or the media's shock and awe description from the Iraq war, people will see what I'm trying to do here!" Same deal with the "you should see your faces" dialogue from the flying mountains scene. We don't need to be force-fed what we should be feeling or thinking do we? Aren't we smart enough to discover allegory for ourselves without crappy dialogue as a distraction? I can forgive petty stuff like awkward romantic scenes or even a mediocre score. But I can't give Cameron a free pass with his dialogue decisions. He wrote the screenplay. Does that make this a bad movie? Absolutely not. But his writing does detract from the beauty he created. At least it did for me.

[tpfkabi]

Titanic did have a love story that caught on with the public, but I don't believe any future films will be remiss to beat its box office just because they don't have the same love story that Titanic featured or one distinctly similar. Avatar does challenge audiences to find endearment in weird characters, but so did Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and any Speilberg science fiction story along with numerous other films.

But my ultimate point is that I didn't believe the film would stand much chance to exceed its budget, but a $220 million opening weekend worldwide is a good start to proving me wrong.

I also forgot to mention that it was about Titanic - one of the biggest, most famous, human follies of all time known world round. Not just a disaster movie, but one "based on" a real life object/event instead of a totally fiction based event.

[Gold Trumpet]

Titanic did have a love story that caught on with the public, but I don't believe any future films will be remiss to beat its box office just because they don't have the same love story that Titanic featured or one distinctly similar. Avatar does challenge audiences to find endearment in weird characters, but so did Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and any Speilberg science fiction story along with numerous other films.

But my ultimate point is that I didn't believe the film would stand much chance to exceed its budget, but a $220 million opening weekend worldwide is a good start to proving me wrong.

I also forgot to mention that it was about Titanic - one of the biggest, most famous, human follies of all time known world round. Not just a disaster movie, but one "based on" a real life object/event instead of a totally fiction based event.

If anything, that helps my case. Historical event movies are notoriously inefficent at the box office because it seems people don't want precise history lessons over pure entertainment. With all the Saving Private Ryan movies that have succeeded, there are dozens of movies like Elizabeth, The Thin Red Line, and The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc which yield little interest financially.