Which of these is it that is a dark characteristic, exactly?
Crippled (Evil!)
Orphan (Evil!)
Warrior (Evil!)
I guess you could argue that the third is “bad”, but in the world of fiction I can’t say that I see it.
I too did not think Avatar was an especially good film. Other folks have already made points in better written posts, but I’m chiming in anyway. Plot is much too weak. If you’re going to retell an story that’s been told many times before, you need a better reason than flashy special effects. I am really annoyed with the noble savage cliché. All societies with simpler technologies had their good & bad elements. Nor are all military leaders crazed maniacs People really should know this by now. Oh and.Life on perfect Pandora would have gotten really dull to me after a few weeks with no books. The dialogue was flat (as in Titanic), but it’s been a while since I’ve seen it so I can’t give an example. Although they were accused of being all good or all bad, the characters in Lord of the Rings seemed to have much more complete characterization than folks in this film. Also didn’t like the impossibly perfect shaped bodies the Navi all had. And any movie that spends 10 years and millions of dollars on effects, but calls its main plot macguffin “unobtanium” is bad right there.
I liked it, up until a certain point, and then I disliked it.
So Jake has been given 3 months to become one of the Na’vi and negotiate. He’s spent much of that time just blending in, with only fleeting thoughts toward the negotiation. Okay, that’s kind of understandable, since their culture is so captivating to him. Then he’s brought back into his own body. He is told in no uncertain terms that he has one. day. to secure a deal, or the army will attack. The army has made it extra-clear that they will not budge. Everything is riding on him. It is intense.
So what does our hero do with this day? Does he plead passionately to everyone who will listen? Does he cajole, or beg, or make threats? Does he even try to warn them or anything? Nope. Instead, he has sex with a girl and falls asleep.
That just took me right out of the movie. It was painfully obvious that that scene was only here to increase the dramatic tension and advance a romantic subplot. It’s completely out of character for Jake–or if it is in character, it turns him into a deeply unsympathetic character. And I couldn’t take any of it seriously after that.
I missed the edit window - but so did the film. It’s way too long.
Heh, I actually thought that was a nice “tongue-in-cheek” reference. I have issues with the economics of the unobtanium, but I will keep that to myself.
I saw Avatar as an exploration of what makes us who we are. Is it our bodies, our “soul”, something else? I thought it was really successful in portraying the transformation of a soul from one body to another. In the beginning, the lead was a broken human. The Avatar program gave him the ability not just to walk, but to have an experience different from almost any other human. It gave him the ability to place his consciousness in two different real bodies. He was, in effect, two beings at once. How many movies have explored this idea?
In the middle of the movie, he was having difficulty distinguishing what was real and what was an Avatar. He was having trouble figuring out who he actually was. We begin to ponder the question, who is he now? The line from the marine, “Congratulations on betraying your own race” stood out to me because it really made me think, “Is he betraying anyone? He has to be one in order to betray the other. Is it his physical body that makes him, or is it his consciousness?”
In the end he realizes it is his “soul” that makes him and he awakens as a Nav’i. The final scene where he opens his eyes was very powerful. Maybe I read too much into the movie. Either way, I left thinking about what actually makes us who we are. For that reason I have to say it was a pretty good movie. Haters want to hate.
Finally, I remember the corporate character calling the natural resource unobtanium in a tongue in cheek manner, and not actually saying its name was unobtanium. People in his line of work looking for hard to find metals would probably call it that. I wonder why people get so mad about this.
I thought it was one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t have cared less that the story was dumb, and predictable; the art of the thing completely made up for that. Well, at least up to the point of the obligatory bang bang shoot-em-up at the end. That could have used some heavy editing.
Visually, the movie’s charm lies in taking undersea life, putting it on dry land, making it really large, and merging it with a rainforest. I thought the result was stunning.
I did think most of the acting was mediocre, and it’s about the worst I’ve ever seen Sigourney Weaver. But I thought that Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, and Giovanni Ribisi were perfect, although only Saldana had to work much for her pay.
Anyway, it’s a comic-book movie with a simplistic plot and equally simplistic moralizing, but I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t watch a Cameron movie, or blockbusters generally, for philosophical depth, I watch them because they’re enjoyable to watch. And I enjoyed myself thoroughly with this one.
No. At least, only to the extent that almost any story is, in the broadest way, about Good v Evil. LOTR was about the fallible characters embroiled in the larger GvE struggle.
I thought Avatar was as good a movie as I thought Star Wars was.
The only thing Avatar lacked was, of course, orbital bombardment… of all the endless parade of Internet whiners complaining that other people might not share their opinion.
A good movie doesn’t need a good plot. See any good porno ever made. Avatar was special effects porn. I liked it… it was fun to watch while inhaling popcorn.
You do see the irony…?
The irony of using “orbital bombardment” to comment about Avatar-haters, since that meme is right at the top of their tired, tired list of complaints? Yes.
Or have you mistakenly identified my noticing about too many damn Avatar complaint threads as somehow ironic? Because I don’t recall an endless succession of threads started to complain about the endless whining. Months after the movie had been released. Repeating any number of prior threads on the same topic. As soon as that starts happening, I’ll probably comment on how annoying that is, too.
Until then, not irony. Unless Alanis has finally won.
Here, let me see if I can help.
Though, according to that definition, I suppose if you understood the incongruity of your statement, it wouldn’t be irony. Carry on, then. 
If I were making this argument - and I’m not sure I would bother - I would say he’s duplicitous and has conflicting loyalties. His mission is to help destroy the Na’vi, and even as he gets interested in their culture he continues to sell them out. It’s a pretty simple blackmail plot so I don’t think it makes him a very complex character, but it’s something.
IMO, Titanic also featured cartoon special effects. Hated every moment of it.
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Sully is quite a complex character and I thought Worthington gave a nicely underplayed performance in his human scenes. The first fifteen minutes of the film does a good job of showing Sully’s alienation from other humans which sets up his eventual “betrayal” of his species. It also sets up one of the important themes of the film: the limits of self-interest in winning loyalty. The colonel thinks he can buy Sully’s loyalty by getting back his legs but what he really wants is a cause to believe in and that is not something a corporation can provide.
Am I the only one who didn’t like the 3-D effects in Avatar? I found the movie to be pretty trivial in general, and the 3-D effects didn’t help. Why are we supposed to be impressed by a bunch of crap floating in front of our eyes?
I suspect that a large proportion of the people who claim to have hated Avatar from the get go saw the movie in 2D.
The most frustrating thing for me in this ongoing Avatar debate is that no one seems to give any credit to the scope of what was accomplished. Avatar and The Hurt Locker have been the obvious comparison and while I enjoyed both movies they simply aren’t in the same ballpark when it comes to filmmaking.
The Hurt Locker had a paper thin story. It barely had a story frankly, in the most basic sense of the word. It was a fantastic character study and it created a couple interesting characters with some interesting choices to make. But, the story could have been outlined on the back of a napkin. Sgt. James was every bit the caricature that Sully was. But what can’t be denied is that The Hurt Locker was set in a real world, a real world with real characters and a real background. The director based the movie on source material that was actually seen and reported. She didn’t need to spend any energy whatsoever setting up the conflict, everyone already knew about the insurgency. She didn’t need to explain any of the nuances of the politics involved or the consequences to anyone actions. The entire premise is one that anyone with a passing acquaintance of the news understands and that real world has inherent depth. I see little reason to give the director of that movie credit for this depth.
The Hurt Locker had 2 hours to spend developing characters and creating drama and emotional response. That was pretty much the entire point of the film and it did a fantastic job of that.
Avatar was a completely different animal. Cameron had to essentially build this entire thing from scratch. With the exception of the few dozen human characters this entire thing was created out of whole cloth. The world it takes place on is a figment of the directors imagination and it needed to be fleshed out on film in order for it to make any sense. The Na’vi are completely new characters and they needed to be fleshed out from scratch. The director can take nothing for granted because the audience is coming in as a blank slate. This movie doesn’t take place in our world and therefore that world needs to be constructed piece by piece. The politics that exist are entirely new and unfamiliar. The technology of the setting is new and invented. The mercenary weapons and capabilities are new to us as are the Na’vi creatures. There’s very little in the film that isn’t unfamiliar and all of that needed to be fleshed out by the director.
Given 2.5 hours of screen time that Cameron was able to flesh all of this out and make it coherent is a huge accomplishment. Him using a familiar trope and occasionally paper thin characters is understandable. To give this world it’s scope and depth and then subsequently give the heroes and villains equal depth would have required a 5 hour movie. Criticizing the depth of the characters by comparing to movies who’s only purpose is to develop characters is incredibly unfair. Using familiar archetypes is a logical method to ensure the audience understands the movie.
All that and we haven’t even addressed the complexity involved in creating and implementing several new filmmaking technologies and using an essentially unproven format as the primary distribution avenue.
Avatar has a simple story and some thin characters but that’s because everything else about the movie is painfully complex. Directors make interesting character studies all the time. Not many pioneer new technologies and mediums and not many invent entire new worlds from nothing.
I disagree. They are completely derivative, which is pretty much inevitable given that Cameron, smart as he is, probably isn’t a political scientist and can only derive the politics in his world from what he knows, which is our world.
Actually one thing that sort of surprised me was how familiar and, to be honest, how un-advanced the weapons seemed to be. They were just bigger and slightly better and more whiz-bang versions of stuff that American soldiers use now. Now super lasers or whatever; the firefights looked like they could be out of a slightly advanced Vietnam film.
One of the more interesting things, i thought, was the braid connection between the living creatures on the planet, such as when the Na’vi rode the animals and directed them through the connection. That was cool, although it also was derived from fairly familiar sci-fi ideas about mind connections. Edgar Rice Burroughs had John Carter controlling Martian thoats and banths with his mind back in the 1930s.
Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not; i have my doubts. But even if it is, people who prefer their movies with substantial character development and complex narrative arcs are still well within their rights to find the movie lacking.
Personally, i haven’t even seen the Hurt Locker yet. I’m not comparing the two. I’m evaluating Cameron’s film AS a film. Nothing more.
What exactly is “new” and “complex?” The fact that the Na’vi are tall and blue?
The Na’vi seem to have entirely human emotions and social relations. They even kiss and cry in an entirely human way! Their social structure is a familiar stereotyped tribal one with a chief, witch-doctor, head warrior and beautiful princess. New? Puh-leez.
Indeed, besides the magic hair thing, there is almost nothing alien about them. If they rode horses instead of dragons, you could have made nearly the same movie about native Americans and nobody would notice. Compare that to, say, Klingons, who have emotional responses that are often surprising and occasionally incomprehensible to human. Indeed, Star Trek had a number of interesting races with different emotions and social structures. Avatar just had blue Indians.
As for the landscape, it looked cool but that doesn’t really mean it was expertly fleshed out. Avatar hardly created a whole world in the way that, say, the Lord of the Rings did. As a kid, I used to play around with Bryce 3D computer rendering software. Trust me, it’s no trick to make a computer render really cool bizarre landscapes. Nor, as any Spore player will tell you, is it really that difficult to conjure up some strange creatures. If the movie had somehow tied this together to give an idea of a complex and unusual eco-system was structured, that would have been cool. But just throwing a bunch of neon plants that sparkle onto the screen really isn’t that difficult.
The politics, a ham-handed neo-colonialism metaphor, was also nothing even remotely new. If you ask anyone “Name 10 real world situations this could be a half-assed metaphor for” nobody would have any problem rattling off “Iraq, Tibet, Native Americans…” Of course we don’t expect the political complexity of Dune. But it’s completely fatuous to say that Avatar’s political conflicts were anything at all new or unfamiliar.
Indeed, I was struck by how little we ever learn about Pandora or the Na’vi. All we really know is:
[ul]
[li]The Na’vi are much like your stereotyped noble-savage native Americans, but look different. They have a bit of a warrior culture and the obvious tribal roles. They know their environment very well. They can use their hair to connect to animals and to some sort of tree based network. Their religious practice seems to consist of songs and chants and involves their ancestors, who can be reached through this tree network. They can make people switch bodies. [/li][li]Pandora has lots of neon plants that glow at night. The animal life consists of dragons and other assorted MMO type monsters. There are some very big trees that also glow. [/li][li]Humans are a colonizing force who want a rare mineral located on native lands. Humans once tried peaceful contact with the Na’vi, but have pretty much given up or forced out by the military.[/li][/ul]
That’s pretty much it! And what little is there is never really fleshed out. It’s kind of like how the Matrix named everyone these seemingly deep names, but in the end it didn’t really add up to anything. There is no complexity there, just a small illusion of it.
Anyway, there are tons of sci-fi and fantasy films that DO manage to have complex characters making difficult choices in a novel environment. There is no reason Avatar couldn’t have done that as well.