Nah, I wasn’t enthralled. Nothing really felt “real” to me and I suspect it was a combination of the CG effects along with the already daunting task of making me buy into an eight-legged tusked cat-lizard or whatever they were showing me. It was like watching somewhat cartoonish World of Warcraft beasties. The omnipresent glowing flora and fauna didn’t help any. The experience was contrasted against movies like Jurassic Park or Aliens where I never had reason to disbelieve that what I was seeing was “real”.
To be fair, I wear glasses and I think some of the 3D didn’t physically click for me as I tried to solve whether it looked better with 3D specs over glasses or vice versa or what. A poorer 3D experience probably exaggerated the flaws of the CG animation.
Sorry if this was already covered, but did they ever explain how the Nav’i got possession of those communication necklaces? Nice little piece of high techery to have to go along with bows and arrows.
I assumed they had them in a locker on the chopper or in the trailer the science team was camped out in.
ETA: Note that we only saw four of them in circulation during that fight, Jake, Uhura, Skinny guy, and Bachelor #2. This actually lines up with about how many you’d expect the science team to bring along with them, one for each of the scientists, plus one for Trudy (who didn’t need one during the fight cause she had a radio in her chopper)
Could be. I’ll have to tune in the next time it’s playing, because my memory is that they looked a lot like the kind of stone and bone necklaces the Nav’i normally wore. Considering that the Avatar Nav’i wore their normal clothes, it would seem odd to try and disguise the communication devices as “native”.
Come to think of it, why did the Nav’vi wear those little loincloths-with the holes for thir tails?
That stunt that whats-his-name taught Jake (how to break your fall by bouncing off giant leaves)-reminded me of an old Three Stooges stunt!
that stunt reminded me immediately of the scene in Rambo, where he jumps off a cliff in the pacific northwest to escape the local police.
And a few here have offered another thing that bugged me. The bow and arrow. Really? Is that the defacto weapon of choice that people lacking in technology come up with? And shooting them off of mutant horses to boot. The Navi must have found a book about the american indians of the old west. They dressed like them, rode and fought on horseback, and used the bow and arrow! James Cameron is always touted for having a great imagination, but I think he could have done a bit better here.
Avatar owes a lot of its sensibility to the space fantasy of the early 20th century, and this is the norm for that type of work. Edgar Rice Burroughs, P.F. Nowlan, etc. - these adventure stories don’t pretend to be anything apart from fairy tales with a fantastic space setting. You’ll have heroes and villains drawn in very broad strokes, plot constructions that are well-trodden territory in oral-tradition folk tales, planetary settings that emphasise a single quality to the exclusion of all else, and “alien” cultures and creatures that are clearly cribbed from earth cultures.
It doesn’t really make any sense to attribute this to a lack of imagination; it’s just working within an established form.
Yet another “Yeah, but he meant it to be lame” defense.
There are countless examples of filmmakers referencing a tired old genre and making it fresh and relavent- from the Western’s metamorphosis from cowboys’n’Indians to moral treatises on America and manhood to Quintain Tarantino’s re-imagining of the exploitation film.
James Cameron didn’t do that. opting instead for a lowest-common-denominator generic fest that says nothing and means nothing. This might be great for selling tickets, but it makes you look like a hack and not like a great director.
To be fair, “Fights with bow and arrow and rides horses” describes a lot of cultures on Earth other than the various American Indian tribes (fun trivia: Horses were extinct from around 7,000 years ago in North America, horses were reintroduced by the Europeans in the 1490s). This just kinda reminds me of people who complain about Firefly because “Space people don’t use guns with bullets!”
Yeah, the Nav’vi could have won the battle, but then the Evil Coporation would have just come back in a month with orbital nukes, saying “It’s the only way to be sure”
Haven’t seen it. Don’t intend on seeing it. Only slogged thru this thread because I can’t sleep. I find pretty much all CGI unwatchable.
All I have to say is this: I live in 3D. If you expect me to pay $7 and sit in a dark room for 3 hours, you better have something *pretty damn good *to tell me.
Woah woah woah. Is it $15 for one ticket?! If it is then I’m sorry but no movie is worth that.
First off…I have not seen this movie nor do I really want to. I will eventually but it’s not high on my movie watching priority list. That being said I have no problem with a movie being made for the pure spectacle of it. That kind of entertainment has been made for centuries and I believe it has a legitimate place in the art world. What I do have a problem with is this type of spectacle entertainment being thrust into the same class as plot-driven, character exploration drama.
I know that I need to accept that the Oscars as I know them are forever gone but it just irks me. They have expanded the number of Best Picture nominees so clearly the Academy does not have to be as picky thus movies like Avatar get nominated.
Also I would just like to say that I appreciate the OP and his bravery in expressing his dislike of such a popular movie. Your courage will give me strength when people ask me “So you saw Inception eh? What did you think?”
Based on some of the posts in this thread, the 3D premium is roughly $3.50. IMAX 3D may be more.
I’m one who believes it’s possible to enjoy a movie multiples of “enjoyment units” more than another. That’s the value proposition for me with any movie. Risk is inherent, but in this case it paid off in spades. I’ve only seen it twice, both times in IMAX 3D. It was quite an experience both times.
How To Train Your Dragon was. I didn’t see it in theaters, but I recently watched it on Blu-Ray, and I’m really, really regretting not having seen it in 3D.
Reminds me of every November 5th when all my friends start quoting V for Vendetta. I think I’m the only one in my social circle who didn’t like the movie, or who didn’t have a geekgasm over the v-word monologue (I just thought that part sounded particularly pretentious or goofy or something)
And a few here have offered another thing that bugged me. The bow and arrow. Really? Is that the defacto weapon of choice that people lacking in technology come up with? And shooting them off of mutant horses to boot. The Navi must have found a book about the american indians of the old west. They dressed like them, rode and fought on horseback, and used the bow and arrow! James Cameron is always touted for having a great imagination, but I think he could have done a bit better here.
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Wiki is silent, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the bow & arrow, on earth, appeared in multiple places/cultures as independent, but parrallel, discoveries. (Like the use of fire, the wheel, the hammer/club/axe/sword, the lever.)
Basic tools, extensions of our bodies (or, for the wheel, something observed in nature). The Na’vi were humanoid, they are going to develope their tools in a similar fashion.
