The primary reason mine are more supportable is that they agree with the plot of the movie. Mine are corroborated by the spoken and implied restrictions created within this fictional world. It’s impossible for either of us to be objectively “right” but my presumptions don’t contradict the source material while yours do.
Where are you getting the 4.3 years?
Pandora revolves around one of the Centauri stars. Alpha, I think. 4.3 light years away.
I think you would have to assume some kind of FTL communication at least. Otherwise the concerns about the domestic reaction or the reaction of the shareholders wouldn’t make much sense if it took them 4 years to get any news and 4 years to send back any response.
Besides, there’s no evidence that anyone noticed she hadn’t fired. A regular military would debriefed pilots, checked gun cameras and compared payloads, but a mercenary outfit? Worse comes to worse, she could always claim that her firing system malfunctioned.
Wow. I found this one just short of awful all around. The plot was weak, the acting dull, the characters amazingly one-dimensional… I wasn’t even wowed by the special effects, beyond an initial few moments thinking, “Huh - CGI has come a long way lately.” After that, Pandora looked like just a bunch of neon-lit scenes from some Wii game mixed with backgrounds from “Dinotopia” - in a word, pretty lame. The Navi themselves never stopped looking vaguely cringe-inducing. The music was particularly uninspiring, a cardinal sin for this kind of movie (where’s the thrilling theme??). And not to reopen this debate, but “unobtainium” was an awful choice of name, no matter what rationale you attach to it.
Even the movie’s message was botched: the random indications that it was meant to be an anti-Iraq War parable (“shock and awe”, “winning hearts and minds”, etc.) made the movie seem that much more embarrassingly simplistic.
I’m probably “wrong” about this one. When something like this is so well regarded by both critics and audiences, the fault probably lies in me for just not getting it. Oh well. Glad so many people liked it, but to answer the person’s question upthread, no: it was not worth my $12+ and nearly three hours.
**FWIW, I saw the movie in 2D - wish I could have seen it in 3D to get the full experience, but doubt it would have changed my reaction much.
I actually laughed out loud when I heard the word “unobtainium”.
I feel for you. unfortunately, the novelty of the 3D effect wasn’t well used and I tired of it quickly. It was good but not great and without it the movie was 2 hrs and 15 minutes too long. The director didn’t understand the basics of stereo-vision and missed many opportunities to exploit it for theatrical shock and awe. For people who have never seen a movie in 3D I think the novelty of it was better received.
As I said before, I was more impressed by Cinerama than this from a visual standpoint. The obnoxiously bad script and plot really drove down the experience for me. I liked the creativity of the scenery design but the movie left me wanting to name my chain saw Pandora.
Cameron said he explicitly didn’t go for the cheap “Look! We have 3D! HERE IS A BALL IN YOUR FACE!” shots, but tried to go for a more subtle route, so it wouldn’t break the immersion of the audience. As far as I’m concerned, he did good.
So, how did he not understand stereo vision?
You lose stereo-vision quickly with distance (it’s gone beyond 300 feet). It would have been more effective if done from the first person perspective and with images close to the person.
To say that he was trying not to go for the cheap look underscores the creative aspect of it in the first place. It’s like saying I’m only going to add color to a B&W movie to be subtle. You either film for color or you don’t.
In this instance, I never perceived the 3D effect as anything but a novelty in the movie and it was poorly exploited at that. It would have been impressive if the camera angle walked around the curved holographic projection screens and zoomed in so that resolution could have enhanced the 3D effect. Compare this to Cinerama where they exploited the process by showing the breathtaking views of the Western States. In Avatar, I felt like I was watching a video game. If the movie was constructed like Toy Story where the perspective was up close it would have been much more effective. Resolution, close proximity, and rotation around (or movement passed) other objects is the cinematic realm of 3D.
The problem, as I see it, is that it is too expensive to use computer generated images as the bases for an entire movie. There was no reason to drag out the story line at the expense of a script or basic acting. This was Chuck Norris meets Jurassic Park. To make a movie like Avatar is a technical achievement of considerable note. It just wasn’t a noteworthy movie.
He very deliberately avoided the shock-and-awe factor. He wanted to draw people into the world as though you were looking through a literal window at the reality outside, rather than have things floating and zooming around in your face. It made it more accessible and real. It felt like a place I wanted to visit, rather than something flashy and just for show.
If there’s anyone who understands “stereo-vision” it’s James Cameron. After all, after studying it intently for ten years, he had to invent a whole new, more practical camera system, pretty much by himself, to achieve what he wanted.
I, for one, am glad you’re not making movies.
I disagree with everything you say, but these especially. I’ve seen lots of 3D movies, and Avatar is by far the best use of it. I also saw the movie in 2D and it held up beautifully and in fact was even more emotional for me. I cared about the characters more the 2nd time. If anything, Avatar is too short as it is. I could have used more scenes on Pandora.
That’s harsh. There has to be someone out there making the next generation of cartoon movies with no subtlety like Transformers and G-Force.
Did you not see the portion I bolded? A movie from the first-person perspective? You know what movie last tried that? Doom.
I saw it again today to see if I liked it any better the second time around. Yes, actually–it watches a lot better if you see it as a parody going in, with the “ayayayayay” and the biologically-evolved Indian braids and the “walk in beauty” and the “smelling the Earth to see where the game is” and all the silly Western tropes it crowds in. Also, there is a lot of dakka, and that’s fun.
I took my dad to see it. His first question, at the end:
“So, is the estate of Poul Anderson going to be suing?”
“Perhaps,” I said. Then my father paused.
“Well,” he answered his own question. “Probably not. They’d have to get in line.”
I’m not sure it’s a problem that there’s a problem that the entire movie is a Frankenstein of other movies. It’s not a serious movie; it’s a light, vaguely satiric pastiche. Worth seeing in the theatres; maybe not so much on DVD.
10 days, and it’s already made over half a billion dollars. $615,168,000 Worldwide.
‘Avatar’ And ‘Sherlock’ Crush Box Office, Break Weekend Record
Good for Avatar, and dammit, good for Guy Ritchie!
This next week is going to be delightful.
I was joking, but yeah, I didn’t get that. (I didn’t see Doom)
When I say shock and awe I’m talking about visually breath-taking. This movie had way too much motion blur to appreciate much of the 3D effect. The only thing creative was the scenery and that was lost to 3D. Good photography constitutes many things and doing this in 3D does not mean objects wizing by you for the sake of depth. For it to be appreciated, it needs to incorporate all the faucets of regular photography.
I’ve been involved with 3D and panoramic photography far longer than that. the fact that he put together a better camera system is a technological achievement, not an artistic one. There is no artistic merit in this movie beyond scenery development. At best, it deserves an academy award for best in-depth parody of a space western.
The first Star Wars movie was campy and fun. Avatar, not so much. I was expecting great things from the creator of the first 2 “Terminator” movies. Cameron made great use of special affects without destroying those movies. I was really looking forward to seeing what he would do with 3D as the next generation of computer generated special effects.
This movie represents a huge technological achievement and the money invested in it can be compared to that of “Forbidden Planet”. It paves the way for future movies. It also paves the way for 3D television, which will in turn cater to 3D games.
I thought it was beautiful. The plot was very basic, and there were some moments of clumsy dialog, but it was moving at the points that mattered. The entire scene of
Hometree’s destruction
was very compelling, forcing me to climb inside the perspective of all the people imperialist humans have displaced and destroyed throughout history.
I thought the female protagonist was the best actress. Her anguish was palpable.
I loved the creatures great and small. I believed every moment. And in a film that is almost entirely CGI, that is no small feat.
How many aliens were based on human actors?
Just saw it in 3D. Apologies, but I read this thread up to about page 6 or so, 250-ish posts, so I’m not completely up to date on the bickering, but I wanted to write some impressions.
I liked the movie a great deal. The visuals were cool as heck, the aliens and other animals moved believably in very cool ways. The humans’ armor and other tech were interesting as well, although I agree with the notion up-thread that we’d have some (more) amazing tech long before star travel, and the human tech seemed like Aliens v7.0. But what the hell, I liked Aliens, so I can forgive this.
I don’t see this movie being the generational shift that Star Wars (among other movies) was, no more so than seeing Wall-E in 3D. Its a cool movie, I found it hugely entertaining, but IMO not tectonic.
One very small thing that really lost me: at what point did Grace (and Norm) gain acceptance by the tribe? Jake was reputedly the first and only human accepted by the tribe, and a big deal was made of this. It took him months of his time to do so. Somewhere late in the movie, the next thing I know the Grace avatar is running around the tribe area in an upscaled jogging outfit trying to help the tribe, and later the Na’vi shamen is trying her best to heal Grace and bind her to the tree-entity. Why would the tribe give two shakes for this “dream walker”? Did I miss a scene?
Well, we were shown that Grace had been working with the Na’vi for years. She apparently had even run a school for the Na’vi children that had been shut down sometime before the events of the movie. So while she hadn’t been made a full member of the tribe like Jake was, they knew her and were somewhat accepting of her already, before Jake ever showed up.