The Na'vi children did attend a school run by Grace so they aren't unwilling to learn from and interact with the humans.
It’s nowhere near a smooth road. Did you miss the part where they nearly kill him when they first meet him? Or his rivarly with Tsutey? Or where he is banished after the attack on Home Tree?
I don’t think the humans are portrayed as unrealistically evil either. Selfridge is shown as having doubts and gives the scientists quite a lot of time before resorting to violence. I don’t think even the colonel is purely evil. I like to interpret him as a pure warrior who is interested in war for its own sake. The Na’vi are the ultimate professional challenge and that’s why he wants to fight them. This theme is developed in his early scenes. And of course the scientists are portrayed as humane, decent people.
Could not disagree more, Story is esssential to any good movie, whether it is comedy, drama, horror, or what have you. In fact a good story with a very good structured is what makes us tend to attach ourselves more to certain movies than others.
And I agree with the OP, Avatar is not a great movie. It is a good movie, extremely competently executed, but totally lacking any depth. I doubt I have though twice about it in terms of its themes since I saw it.
A story is a good thing to have. But it is not a necessary thing.
Movies are a visual medium. They are, quite literally, moving pictures. The visuals are vastly, vastly more important to a movie than the story and always have been. A talking-heads movie is boring, even if the plot is interesting. I can read a book if I want pure plot, thanks.
I’ve been using a personal term lately for movies that are 100% visual and 0% story, though for all I know it’s probably in use elsewhere: spectacle film. I adore spectacle films. They’re the ultimate in eye candy, for when you want something pretty, not deep. Michael Bay’s films are like this, Avatar is like this, the recent GI Joe, the recent Speed Racer (currently my favorite spectacle film)…they’re all fun to watch, not for the cleverness of the plot but for the sheer visual spectacle.
The Marx Brothers’ best movies don’t have much in the way of a story and people have been watched them for 70 years. And I think a lot of people tend to cling to individual moments and jokes in a movie more than they get attached to the story.
On a completely different note, the story in 2001: A Space Odyssey really isn’t important either.
Avatar is a very good telling of a very shallow story. There’s nothing wrong with that. There are many, many movies made by Hollywood that are just as shallow as *Avatar *and are not nearly as well-constructed.
Was Die Hard a bad movie because it didn’t explore the dark side of John McClane’s psyche?
I hate this, Movies are not a visual medium. Movies are a story-telling medium. Of course, movies don’t need a story, or can have a thin veneer of a story, but they are not great movies. We can argue, entertaining movies is not the equivalent of a great movies.
I think Cameron had a decision to make when putting this thing together.
Did he want to make
A) A complex gripping story with complex deep characters.
or
B) A movie that would rake in billions of dollars.
The two simply do not go together in Hollywood.
The more money you want a movie to make the more dumbed down you make it.
I think Cameron knew this.
He could have made the next Bladerunner if he wanted to but the masses don’t want another Bladerunner. They want Transformers 3.
John McClane was a divorced asshole with, probably, a drinking problem. This was indeed shown and given relevance in the first movie (and to a lesser extent in the third).
It really isn’t. The atmosphere is what makes the movie interesting, and the best known sequence might be the ships docking to classical music, which does not advance the story. And the last 20-odd minutes of the movie are pure visual effects with no story at all.
Yes, they are. And having established that there are exceptions, I’ve shown you can have a great movie without a great story. Avatar isn’t a great movie anyway, but I thought the point was worth making.
This is it for me exactly. I saw it 3 times in IMAX 3D, and the 3D immersion was key to my enjoyment. During the 2nd viewing, we were too close to the screen and the 3D wasn’t in the peripheral vision sweet spot, so much of the 3D was shallow and ineffective compared to sitting in prime seats 3/4 back in the theater.
When watched without the 3D immersion, it felt like a generic CGI romp like Spiderman or X-Men, but lacking in characters. But my other viewings when the 3D clicked, it became a transcendental thrill ride (but still with weak characters).
I thought it was a really long 3d episode of “Captain Planet”. All it needed was Whoopi Goldberg.
And in a couple of cases, I thought 3d was just distracting. As in the " oh look, 3d leaf falling" “Oh look, 3d ash falling”.
And Jake Sully the crippled ex-Marine with no family and nothing to tie him to humanity, who was given a chance to become a warrior once more, was less of a complex character?
I enjoyed the hell out of Avatar. It was a fun two-and-a-half hours, and my wife and i actually contemplated shelling out another $16.50 each to see it on IMAX a second time.
i also thought it was an incredibly awful movie. Ham-fisted allegory, embarrassingly bad dialog, caricatures for characters, mediocre acting, and a storyline as banal as laundry day and as predictable as sunrise.
It had everything and nothing. It was a triumph of technology and visuals, and a disaster in every other respect. I think its long-term significance will be simply as a vehicle for introducing audiences to the new technology*; in the future, much better film-makers than James Cameron will combine that technology properly with the other aspects of film-making to produce well-rounded, interesting, and truly great movies.
It was, to a limited degree. I’m not saying that these distracting scenes would not have worked better in 2-D than in 3-D (some of them would have), and I’m not saying you’re claiming they’re a gimmick.
But most if not all of these were not instances of 3-D as intentional gimmick, but of transposing 2-D cinema sci-fi-tropes onto 3-D and accidentally producing stuff that was halfway between pretty cool and 3-d cliche.
For instance, the scene where the scientific instrument was pointing toward the camera could have been included in any 2-D sci-fi movie of the past 30 years and not have seemed out of place.
