I saw it and mostly loved it for all the reasons given.
One question I have: the ships can’t use imaging in the mountain area and had to fly and fire by “line of sight”, correct? What was the reasoning given? I ask because wouldn’t it also impact control of the avatars?
Wrong thread. Never mind. Move on, nothing to see here…
The reason given was because of the magnetic fields given off by the unobtanium(which is what made them float) in the floating mountains
I appreciated the fact that I was seeing millions of dollars worth of CGI in the service of something other than explosions and giant robots (though, of course, it had plenty of both.)
That said, the movie was pretty obvious. If you saw the trailer, you knew the entire plot. There was exactly zero suspense. Sigourney Weaver’s performance was very weak, but Worthington’s was quite good.
As has been stated before, the villain was far too cartoonishly evil to be anything but annoying to watch. Contrast him with Michael Biehn’s Lt. Coffey from The Abyss – a character just as obsessed with committing genocide as this guy and even more personally frightening. And yet, when his end came and you could see the fear in his eyes, it was hard not to feel a little sorry for him. I was just glad I wouldn’t have to see Col. Quarich again.
Oh BS, it passes a sniff test no problem, when Cameron rolls a completely ridiculous number like $20 million per kilo it raises a lot of questions in my mind. You say they did a cost benefit analysis, yes, I suppose they did, but something so valuable that a mere 10,000 lbs, or 5 short tons would be $100 Trillion, six times the GDP of the United States right now. In 150 years I doubt that we will be some factor of 100 away from that. Something so freaking valuable would actually probably not even be so easily owned by a single corporation. That is my main problem, Cameron put so much thought into other things and this movie is about the details, yet he throws out a number like $20 million per kilo without I bet giving it a second though. The corporation guy had a rock that was probably half a kilo in his office. Really? $10 million dollars worth of unobtanium just, you know, sitting on his office desk.
So yes, I think I am raising reasonable questions and I am sorry you disagree.
No argument there, but Star Wars was a huge success when it opened, and the reason it is a successful film has diddly to do with how it relates to a canonical universe that was (for the most part) developed subsequently.
This is a film with an extremely simple narrative, and archetypical characters that are drawn in the broadest of possible strokes. There is no way you can diagram the plot of Star Wars (1977) in such a way that it is going to appear to be significantly more complex or novel than that of Avatar. Don’t misunderstand me – this doesn’t denigrate it or minimize its success in any way. I am only pointing out that it is absurd to suggest that *Avatar’*s story or character development is somehow lesser.
Star Wars succeeded because it presented us with a universe with a fantastic aesthetic, through the medium of a very straightforward and exhilarating story, supported by state-of-the-art filmmaking technology. Yes, the plot is pencil thin. Yes, the characters are caricatures. It succeeds not in spite of these qualities, but in large part because of them. You come in to a faux story-in-progress, and you’re instantly oriented in it. The good guys are Good Guys, the bad guys are Bad Guys, (you can tell because their officers resemble Nazis and their cannon fodder are "Stormtroopers,) there’s a princess to rescue, and a battle to be won. Action develops as expected, Luke gets the girl, everybody cheers, roll credits. Yay! It’s not complicated, but it looks and sounds better than anything that’s gone before, and it’s a visceral, thoroughly exciting couple of hours.
Avatar succeeds in precisely the same way.
Star Wars had a very simple plot just like Avatar but the difference was that it had memorable, characters who would become pop-culture icons. I am still not sure how Lucas did it; the characters were fairly stereotypical, their lines weren’t particularly well-written or even well-acted but somehow they were unforgettable. I think it had something to do with the way they played off each other and the story. Whatever it was Avatar doesn’t have it.
OTOH I think Pandora is a more entrancing setting than anything in Star Wars even after adjusting for the better technology; especially the 45 minutes or so when Sully first explores it. I imagine audiences who saw King Kong in the 30's must have felt some of that wonder. I don't think I have ever felt it as much in any film though some parts of LOTR come close.Okay, as long as we’re picking nits…
You’d think that the natural fiber optic firewire connection, which is so integral to the entire ecology of Pandora, would be a lot easier to use. It bugged me that their cables were hanging down their backs and had to be manipulated into docking with other creatures. It should have been automatic- maybe on the surface of their palms, or something. Heck, put it on their tails, which didn’t otherwise really seem to have a use.
“unobtanium”. Really? that’s what it’s called? Is it related to upsi-daysium?
This is a fundamental mistake people make. They think that things become Iconic DESPITE being stereotypes. This is the opposite of the way it works. They become iconic BECAUSE they are stereotypes.
Repackaging Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung will result in a hit, pretty much every time.
Heh, I thought Pandora looked a lot like Kashyyk personally. 
One very important difference between Star Wars and Pandora is that Star Wars encompasses its own universe, i.e. it doesn not involve anything earthly. Avatar of course does, the antogonists are form Earth. Star Wars completely takes the viewer into another universe. Avatar takes us to another world but uses common human tropes and institutions to tell the story.
They should have just called it McGuffinium, as it had no purpose except to provide a reason for the conflict between the humans and Na’vi.
Did people get this hung up on the suitcase in Pulp Fiction?
Nobody is hung about the Unobtainium being a MacGuffin, just some folks are hung up about the name. If the briefcase had been full of Sausage McGuffin’s I am sure folks would have had the same comments.
It was used pretty recently in The Core
Except that McGuffinium is a shit name, and doesn’t make sense in-universe.
People it’s called Unobtanium because scientists are hilarious pranksters, and that’s just the kind of SciFi in-joke they love to name things!
What doesn’t pass the smell test is your assertion that not mining the substance would somehow be more lucrative. That defies all common sense.
But, why the hell wouldn’t we be? We’re a factor of 30 off of what we were 150 years ago today. Is it really so unlikely that we’d be off by a 100 when you consider that in this world we’ve developed interstellar travel and largely decimated Earth? Plus this is a substance not indigenous to Earth, so the premium of mining it and transporting it makes it tricky to compare to any known substances. If the Earth and Man have undergone this many changes, and Earth may or may not have shifted to a World Economy and Government it’d be frankly shocking if there wasn’t a bout of Hyper Inflation along the way. What would the dollar be worth if every economy in the world adopted it tomorrow?
The point is that dwelling on this nitpick is beyond pointless. The movie didn’t give any explanation but it doesn’t need to. It’s very easy to explain away the quoted value and it’s very possible that Cameron did give significant thought to assigning that value. Would the movie really have been improved by a bit of dry exposition explaining economics as they exist in 2143? Have you sat through a Macro-Economics lecture before? “Something so valuable” is a meaningless statement until we determine what the relative value of $20M is in this world, as it stands we don’t know. Drawing sweeping conclusions based on a comparison of the dollars value in today’s real world is pretty silly, and makes less logical sense than anything in the movie.
Hmm, I seem to be more and more frequently finding myself pissing someone mightily with what is really intended to be a gentle joke. ‘Unobtanium’ is a classic McGuffin: it’s there to provide a motivation for the plot, and nothing else. They didn’t even bother to think up a real name for it, fer cryin’ out loud. Hearing what it actually is supposed to be and why it’s so valuable could be interesting, but I recognize it’s irrelevant to the story Cameron wanted to tell and I don’t personally have a problem with that.