Avatar

[socketlevel]

That could also be the way it's told GT. two of those three examples you mention are relatively middle of the road in regard to film making by my tastes... then again so is saving private ryan.  i know you're speaking financially, however i still think if you make it well people will come out.

there's is no doubt that the advent of the red camera and downloading torrents the studios are afraid, which echoes the birth of the television.  I'm not saying in anyway Cameron is in on it, but a movie like avatar helps push the exclusivity factor of movie making. it's like how the big studios chose the most expensive way to make film over 100 years ago because they wanted to snub out the then small studio Warner Brothers.

After Avatar was done, my friend made a very astute point. he said, "This is only good when compared to normal films." he was talking about the 3D.  I think he's got it dead right.  If 3D became the norm, which it seems they're really trying to push, it would be futile. does anyone else feel more drained after going to a 3D picture? i don't think i could do it every time. it's so amazing because it's a treat, but a steady diet of it would make me sick.

I'd like to see Avatar in 2D and see how well it holds up.  because if it doesn't, on any level, sadly this is just propagates spectacle.

[Gold Trumpet]

In regards to historical films, my examples are just three and I suppose better examples could be found that are more concurrent to appreciatable storytelling methods (as far as mainstream interest goes) but I still believe in my point that historical films do not sell as well because a person's expectations change when they are going into a historical film. The expectation isn't for Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, but something that will take them outside of the most enjoyable type of movies. Lately Gladiator and other movies have tried to dissuade historical accuracy from being relevant, but I still think the most populace story possible is one wholly within a genre or enjoyable convention.

I'll be seeing Avatar tomorrow in 2-D. I wanted to wait for 3-D but I'm stuck in my hometown for over a week longer and I am brimming with interest to see the movie. I still hope to see the 3-D later, but I'll see how 2-D holds up first. It's the only choice I have now.

[Neil]

I tend to agree with aspects of  P,  RK, as well as Myxo.

I don't feel like it's excusable to say, "james cameron could do better, but doesn't have to."  If it's assumed that the writing will be lackluster, as RK said, then wow, that's a film maker.  Someone who can draw hundreds of millions opening weekend, with people knowing that the writing is going to be shitty, and it's solely for visual appeal.  I at least had hoped for a great overall film.

I don't think it's excusable, for anyone, to let such a visually stunning film fall victim to bad writing.  It's just a shame

However, I actually enjoyed the message, and themes, the problem I had was the script. It's all been mentioned.

The music got pretty silly at times.  There was no subtlety to it.  At some points it was very pretty, in a celtic way which I enjoyed, but overall I feel that although I can say it was a bit much now, it personally didn't distract me from the film while i watched. 
.
Visually, it was a definite treat.  I saw it in 3-D and it was really impressive.  I should hope so for that kind of money. It truly is a game changer, but only in the sense that it was pretty fucking expensive, and legitimately no one has ever done anything like this.

Visually, and as an experiment this film is a success.  I can agree. I respect this as a spectacle.  I truly do, i'm glad i got to see this in the theaters 3-D.

all i'm saying is if james cameron doesn't have to write a decent script to match his beautiful vision, i'm not really on board with that.

[picolas]

Avatar holds the record by far for longest time spent with my mouth hanging open for a movie i didn't love.

*spoiler review*

i mean, there are many undeniably impressive things about this movie. the world, the ecosystem, above all the PERFORMANCE CAPTURE, which made me forget i was watching cg characters very quickly. the Na'vi work brilliantly. i was entranced by them. Zoe gave the best performance by far. Sam was pretty good too. i really wanted to love the movie for the world it created. i find it very unfortunate that despite all the wonder of that world and a few wonderful conceptual moments ('i see you', which reminded me a lot of City Lights and was quite lovely even though i saw it coming a million miles away, Sully's first moments in his new body, learning to be Na'vi, etc), i was never emotionally invested in it. because of the flimsiness of the story and characters.

before i talk about specific issues i want to say for the record that i love Cameron, and the only movie he's made before this that fell flat for me was The Abyss. seeing him talk about this movie you know he means well, but the early concerns he had about not focusing very much on story/character were well founded.

Michelle Rodriguez is a great example of how this movie disregards motivation and just.. makes characters do things because they have to. we know so little about her. suddenly she disowns the military and doesn't fire on the giant tree. NO ONE notices or reprimands her for it, and she's able to break Sully and the crew out of prison. wouldn't it have made more sense and been more interesting for her to be in prison with them and break them out from the inside using her knowledge of the security or something? or the bearded guy from Drag Me To Hell we barely got to know could've helped break them out. then he would've been more than just a techie who barely does anything.

the romance between Jake and Neytiri just feels like a default/predestined one to me. i understand why they're together, but it's not an interesting relationship. it just has to exist. and i know Cameron is capable of bringing characters together in far more compelling/well-realized ways (Jack/Rose, Sarah Connor/Kyle Reese, Ripley/Hicks). when Jake flies in with the really big dragon, Neytiri immediately forgets her anger towards him. it's a very sudden, easy emotional shift that rang false to me. i also couldn't get my head around why the Na'vi never figured out how to convert the really big dragons themselves. after however many years of being Na'vi, living on Pandora, how could no one ever try that? it was also bizarre to me how the animals never attacked the military until the end. wouldn't they be naturally defensive when confronted with such violence? they were naturally predatory around Jake when he first landed. there are a lot of inconsistencies on Pandora, like p has pointed out with their treatment of Sigourney (who STUNK in this role. completely unconvincing. and typically i really like her too.) and wasn't it a big deal for Neytiri to be engaged or whatever to the other Na'vi guy? this was only ever alluded to by the techie and never really brought up on Pandora. why have that idea in the movie at all if it's just hanging there doing nothing?

i thought the direct references to "fighting terror with terror" and "shock and awe" were clumsily on-the-nose and will damage the movie's lasting impact because they're so specific.. have these characters from the future never heard of the bush administration?

the ending is pretty harsh on humanity. the idea that Jake is leaving mankind behind forever and that's somehow transcendent and wonderful is kind of disturbing as a message. just give up on everyone? i think District 9 handled the idea of what it means to feel alienated from your entire species far more powerfully.

3D is still a gimmick, and it actually distracted me far more than making the action on screen resonate in a new way.. i felt like i was really watching a bunch of 2D figures on screen moving between the middle, fore, and background. i was not immersed by it. i wanted to watch it in 2D.

i really want this to be another great movie by James Cameron as so many other people find it to be. but it isn't. and that's such a shame because it's so beautiful otherwise.

[Pubrick]

excellent points picolbug.

i agree with all the flaws you pointed out. i chose to limit my complaints cos i had an overall positive reaction so i'd like to expand on some of yours and add some good things now everyone's seen it:

sucked
-sigourney's character not only was underdeveloped, she was very unattractive, even for a blue thing.
-where were the kids? no blue thing kids anywhere except for a few that touched sig's hair when they met her. that's why i think some scenes were cut.
-totally idiotic that no one had thought of jumping on the dragons before. and considering how hard it was to land the mini dragons the fact it just went to black when he got on the big ones is just a cop out. that never happened, as stefen would say.
-fact is that no alien life should look like us in any way, these aliens must somehow be related to us somewhere in the past cos they resemble us so much.

that brings me to this:
i HATED that the blue things immediately called him "zheyk SOO-lee". i don't mind the inexplicable french twist on the hard J in Jake but what i can't get over is how they changed the SUH in SULLY to SOO (like the girl name "Sue"). there is no justification for this instant change except that in america when you encounter a foreign speaker they probably speak spanish, and if you speak spanish then you get the weird thing happening that sometimes vowels are pronounced phonetically AS IF THEY ARE BEING READ OUT LOUD. so for example the word "loud" instead of having the english diphthong "ow" in the middle, would, to a really dumb spanish person who can at least imagine how the word is spelled in their own alphabet (which is the same as english cos of the common linguistic ancestor Latin), end up being spoken as LOH-OOD. cos the vowel U has the sound of "ooh" in spanish, so you might now understand the confusion.

NO such confusion could possibly occur in pandora. they have their own language, and as far as i can tell no written form, so if they were going to mispronounce things in any way it should only be as an exaggeration of the sounds they are already hearing. so the name "Jake Sully" would probably become "jik-SUH-lee", which would make sense since they only seem to have one name and upon hearing this riduculous english name would try to appropriate it to their own standards of acceptable nomenclature.

The ONLY reason i can think of why James Cameron would have insisted they mispronounce it so blatantly, and it was definitely not a mistake because they payed a goddamn linguist to invent the language from scratch, is that like pretty much everything else in the film, it was meant to be a thinly veiled reference to something really obvious. my best guess, and i 100% confident this was intentional, is that Cameron was making a reference to Shaka Zulu. for those who don't know, please read the article. the significance is quite clear, the name sounds the same and he brought together the tribes of the Zulu nation against the white invaders.

this is a pretty cool reference, but an infuriating way to make it. and that's pretty much my attitude to the film the more i think of it. it's just too much effort to try to make anyone see beyond the flaws. and i think the truth is most ppl just don't want to. so who cares, here's more things..

not actually a flaw cos i figured it out after the film
the dude never sleeps! it's still hard to believe that no one ever bothered to wake him up before sunrise or whenever these blue things get up. they spend their day hunting, it seems, and getting high on brain trees, so maybe they are so fucking tired they just never bother waking anybody else up. but the explanation i figure is that we can't assume that Pandora has exactly the same number of hours in a day that Earth does. so a pandoran day can be 35 earth hours which gives Jake enough time to sleep and then sleep again.

goodish reference no one has mentioned:
FMJ to the extreme with the guy who just couldn't say anything except "GET SOME GET SOME" as he shot at the blue things.


excellent reference everyone noticed but no one has mentioned:
the use of the robot suit has been mentioned but only cos it's ridiculous that it had a gun. but what about the fact Jim stole that directly from ALIENS where it is the one thing that saves us from the just-as-bad-as-the-humans-here incredibly unbelievably evil alien? it's a great role reversal and it sort of makes sense in a really perverted way that technology has become the enemy because military advances are still the main drive behind it. it's perverted too in the way picolbug describes, that the film promotes such a severe reversal of allegiance. this reminds me of a quick aside: my favourite fight and death was the other main blue thing that was Jake's rival but then became his compadre. i loved his hand to hand, more like hand to torso combat against humans.. all i could think was "we are the earth intruders, marching with twigs and branches".. i love that humans are so tiny!


excellent reference i don't think anyone has noticed and might not even be a reference:
when michelle rodriguez fights against the mothership, before she gets shot down, she evades enemy fire by going behind the floating mountains. are you kidding me?

[modage]

Avatar holds the record by far for longest time spent with my mouth hanging open for a movie i didn't love.

Exactly.  The way I have been describing it to people is: I saw the film the day after it opened in IMAX 3D with a sold-out crowd but during the film no one made a sound.  No one laughed during the funny parts, clapped or cheered during the cool parts, as best as I can figure just sat there mouth agape for 2 1/2 hours admiring the scenery without being pulled completely into the story.

[polkablues]

I'm waiting for it to come out on VHS.

[Neil]

P, nice.  I Pico, you pretty much nailed it, except the 3-D was fine for me.  I'm sure the film will be beautiful in 2-D blu-ray as well, but, from where i was sitting with 3-D hipster shades, it was fucking legit.  nothing was lost for sure, at least not for me

Minor Spoils

I want to approach the giant red dragon issue.  I believe it's about circumstance, and the film is about being forced into destiny, kind of.  I thought the same thing, really, when i left the theater, i was thinking 'this was how to start a revolution, and no one thought of this?'

But, the reason no one had ever tried that, since the last revolution, is because there would be no need.  They were flourishing as a populace, until we came along, or at least I can assume this due to the inter-connectivity of their whole ecosystem, and the fact that we're to understand that the ancestry that has long gone, was a part of providing this peace. 

This may not be a justification, or even a good answer, but it was clear to me, that after they mentioned the last few revolutionaries (when Jake is being told about the big bird skeleton, that was killed by his loves grandpa) that the whole situation regarding the dragon, and such is about being pushed so far, that you attempt to tame the most powerful beast on Pandora.  Plus, the Na'vi clearly believed that you could have only one mini dragon for life, so obviously there was no attempt or thought that this type of thing could happen.



Also, as far as jake leaving this world for theirs.  I don't think it's a stretch, i'll be shallow here and say he got legs, and fell in love.  What's not to stick around about?plus his brother just died.  I don't know, i don't think this is about turning your back on the human species, he's probably lucky to get to stay on Pandora, because remember, "there is no green left on our planet anymore,"  who knows. just wanted to throw that out there.


I don't know.

[Myxo]

Also, as far as jake leaving this world for theirs.  I don't think it's a stretch, i'll be shallow here and say he got legs, and fell in love.  What's not to stick around about?plus his brother just died.  I don't know, i don't think this is about turning your back on the human species, he's probably lucky to get to stay on Pandora, because remember, "there is no green left on our planet anymore,"  who knows. just wanted to throw that out there.


I don't know.

Why wouldn't Jake stay on Pandora? Sequel money baby.

[picolas]

p, i want to look beyond the flaws. i actually feel more positive about it with a couple days distance, forgetting many of the human parts. it could've been cool if it was completely from the Na'vi perspective. a total reverse alien invasion story. wait a minute... that's Planet 51. i did notice the total role reversal from aliens, actually. i was thinking it's also kind of a reverse-T2 reference because the good robot has now become the bad one. i thought they sort of dealt with the lack of sleep during that one scene where Jake notices how thin his legs have gotten and he's lacking strength somehow. Neil, that's not a bad explanation actually. but the cut to black is definitely a case of James Cameron sitting at his keyboard being like "awwww dammit.. i don't want to describe this in great detail then choreograph it then direct it then supervise the cg and sound design and editing of it for another month... cut to black."

[Derek]

Has there been any word if the blu ray will be in 3D as well? I kept my glasses from the theater, don't know if they will work on the tv though. Maybe I should rent Coraline or something and give it a whirl.

[polkablues]

The Coraline blu-ray uses the old-school red-and-blue glasses style 3D. It's almost unwatchable.

[Myxo]

Reading stories like this pretty much sums up why this movie is a B+ for me.

http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/hmg-avatar-hidden-messages.html

Ed Morrissey writes, "Conservatives have more or less primed themselves to hate this film because of the presumed anti-war politics of the movie. It's there -- in fact, it's unmistakable -- but it's not as bad as one might presume." He goes on to note that "Avatar" is "entertaining" though "hardly a deep intellectual exercise."

Ugh.

[Alexandro]

hidden messages? jesus.
there's nothing hidden in avatar. "allegory" implies a subtlety that the film doesn't even try to achieve.

[Pozer]

excellent reference i don't think anyone has noticed and might not even be a reference:
when michelle rodriguez fights against the mothership, before she gets shot down, she evades enemy fire by going behind the floating mountains. are you kidding me?

that is too awesome.

some classic posts up in this thread.

p, i want to look beyond the flaws. i actually feel more positive about it with a couple days distance, forgetting many of the human parts. it could've been cool if it was completely from the Na'vi perspective. a total reverse alien invasion story. wait a minute... that's Planet 51. i did notice the total role reversal from aliens, actually. i was thinking it's also kind of a reverse-T2 reference because the good robot has now become the bad one. i thought they sort of dealt with the lack of sleep during that one scene where Jake notices how thin his legs have gotten and he's lacking strength somehow. Neil, that's not a bad explanation actually. but the cut to black is definitely a case of James Cameron sitting at his keyboard being like "awwww dammit.. i don't want to describe this in great detail then choreograph it then direct it then supervise the cg and sound design and editing of it for another month... cut to black."

thx to pre-warnings of bad dialogue, cardboard cutout characters and poorly written scenes i was able to let that stuff take a backseat and let their mouth flapping directions pretty much go ignored. i didnt even mind the big dragon copout so much cos it couldve just been repetitive action of the mini-dragon stuff. and a montage edit of a battle mighta been worse than going to black. Michelle Rod rescue was ghastly done though. whatever. all that stuff needed to be ironed out to a sky-high extreme for this thing to head toward revolutionary status but i was able to enjoy the movie for what it is. it is a movie that's nearly impossible not to fall for visually and because you do so early on you just roll with it's amusement. the better and the worse of it.