I take pride in inventing the Fern Gully meets Halo jokes. 
I was on that shit in April '07
There’s a line in the film that specifically says it’s vice versa, when Neytiri is showing Jake the Ekrins for the first time.
I can understand the conflict Cameron must have felt on this - he can make the animals as crazy-exotic as he likes (though they still have to resemble horse-analogues and tiger-analogues), but it would be hard to sell a romantic entanglement if the humanoid creatures we’re supposed to be sympathizing with are too far removed from what we consider attractive. Hence the females have (a hint of) breasts, everyone has two eyes and four limbs, etc. The only concession I can think of offhand (pun intended) is that the avatars had five fingers while the N’avi have four.
Well, that, and they’re blue, are 9ft tall, and have tails.
Ok, still, different species.
I’ll have to watch it again, but I don’t recall any such line.
Nah, just that by that point, the lore was actually getting in the way of the story.
Yeah, but that’s just to make them cute. Besides, their facial expressions are identical to typical human reactions, to the point where we’re clearly supposed to forget that these are aliens.
I keep seeing the phrase “hive mind”, but don’t think it’s really applicable. The Pandorans apparently have the ability to interconnect, but they are also fully capable of functioning independently. There is no collective consciousness, just an intertwining of the two things that are plugged into each other temporarily.
Just because the trees are connected doesn’t make it a supercomputer. If you connect a million trees, you have a massive entity with the intelligence of a tree.
That’s not how it works. Intelligence is a matter of increased complexity and the efficiency of interconnection. The larger the intelligence the more interconnection. And of course we don’t know how intelligent a tree on Pandora is individually. But the impression I got was that all the trees were connected. Your brain is a network of nodes that are interconnected and yet you are more intelligent than a neuron. If you want to parse a large problem you break it into chunks, have one tree work on part of the problem a second tree work on another and yet a third tree working on integrating the information gleaned from the first and second tree.
OK, so the trees may have formed a neural network. But the Neytiri don’t seem to be part of the network.
Exactly. Everything else can be pretty alien, but the N’avi have to look enough like us for most audiences to indentify with them and buy that Jake would fall in love with one & go native. That would be extremely difficult (probally impossible if you go for mass appeal) if they looked say the [del]Martians[/del] Minervans from Harry Turtledove’s A World of Difference (which would be really cool to see onscreen).
I feel if they had been, it would have have been a much better movie. At the very least, a little less Dances With Wolves and a little more Apocalypto would have been nice.
Hey, major insight brewing: what if the message of the movie is that only aliens can approximate the “noble savage” ideal, since it sure as heck never existed in reality on Earth?
Cameron’s a genius!
I think it’s just you, or else they changed it for a bit while you happened to be there. I’ve been there several times over the past week and it’s always looked normal to me.
Avatar IMDB page
I suppose the big question, for everyone but especially for those who were underwhelmed by the story (which is understandable) is,
was it worth your money?
If you had it to do over again, would you have preferred to not spend the money to see it in the theater, and see it at home? At home the visuals are lost, even on the best system, so all you have left is the story.
Were the visuals worth $8 or $10 or $12 or whatever for the movie ticket? I suppose you could add in babysitter, gas, parking, concession stand snacks or whatever, but not everybody has all of those considerations. For me it’s a bus pass + $13.00, which I consider cheap entertainment for something so massive, but for someone else it might be an expensive and time-consuming night out.
I see a lot of movies in the theater, but that’s just because I like the theater experience. I fully realize that a sizable number of the films I see will lose little in the transition to the small screen. The cinema is really made for big, epic-y, event movies. Love or hate Titanic, it belonged on the big screen and visually, suffers terribly from a small screen.
It’d be interesting if everyone, especially those with many problems with the plot/story, would say if, after all was said and done, the visuals alone were/were not worth the money they spent to see Avatar on a big screen.
I don’t regret paying to see it. I didn’t regret Sky Captain, either. As for recommending it to others - I’d tell them straight out; pretty visuals, tapeworm-thin plot, and let them decide.
I’ve seen a couple of comparisons to Apocalypto here, that comparison makes very little sense. The two movies are nothing alike in story aside from the presence of a jungle and people who wear Na’vi like outfits.
As someone who knew the word Unobtainium prior to seeing the movie it bumped me every time I heard it. I knew it was always a McGuffin and I knew Cameron didn’t want to dwell too much on it but such a blatant reference bothered me. Just because I might know a object is a cliche and ultimately irrelevant to the plot doesn’t mean I want that fact thrown in my face, humor me an invent a word for me. But…the rationale that Grumman highlights totally saves it for me. I can easily convince myself that some geeky space geologist, metallurgist or engineer borrowed the term in a fit of irony once it was discovered and it stuck. Hell, some inventor may have even sketched up the plans in theory for a engine or device which relied on a yet undiscovered “unobtainium” with specific properties and upon discovering the Pandoran mineral it’s name was perfectly natural. It solved a niggling detail for me.
I talked to my family at a holiday event this weekend and urged everyone to see it. Perhaps I’ll go again around Xmas with my parents who aren’t regular movie-goers and are completely out of touch with the buzz. It will be very interesting to see how they respond to the movie. Perhaps Cameron’s simplistic plot and reliance on cliche is successful in making the movie accessible and relatable to SciFi adverse people who will have enough to acclimate to with the new 3D technology and fantasy setting. I can easily see my parents being overwhelmed and turned-off if the story were too deep, layered, complex and subtle amidst the already unfamiliar technology and base concepts.
I’ve only seen one and it looked facetious to me, with the Mac & Me reference and all.
Well, that may make it a good commercial movie, but not a good movie, though I’ll admit for Hollywood’s purposes, the two concepts may as well be identical.
:rolleyes:
I’m glad the grand arbiter of what is good in this world has weighed in.
You’re welcome. I realised my input-
Oh. You were talking about him.
Recognition, finally!