Gee, I can’t even begin to count the amount of stupid strawmen and false premises in this post. I can only assume you got your message boards mixed up because nothing you “argue” here bears any resemblance to anything that’s preceded it in this thread.
I am not a fanboy. And yet I hated it.
Really? I thought I was incredibly spot-on. Can’t count the number of times I’ve read fanboy posts that whined, “It had CGI in it! Bad! Evil!” and every SF special effects blockbuster tends to provoke massive outraged whining from fanboys. “Of course it was a dumb movie, it was dumbed down to be popular with the masses!” is a pretty common complaint about box office winners.
Sorry, dude. I’ve been on this board long enough to know who I’m talking about.
I think you’re funny, generally. But I do think if you don’t want to hear the arguments, you could just not enter a thread entitled “Avatar is a great movie”.
Myself, as I said, I hated it…but that doesn’t mean I am not enjoying the arguments and looking at what other people see in it. So I am in the thread. Why are you here?
My apologies, fangirl.
Heh. But really, I didn’t hate it for the CGi. Honest. That was probably the only thing worthwhile about it. I hated it for the trite characters, plot, and 1D depth in everybody. 3D movie with no depth! That is a joke.
And yet you can’t even find one in this thread…
Uh, and who would these “fanboys” be in this thread? Who is saying anything close to what you’re alleging as this mass hysterial reaction?
Yeah, that was a common complaint about The Dark Knight. Oh, wait–no it wasn’t. Or about…Lord of the Rings? Nope. Some complaints, but “dumb” was rarely one of them.
Oh, I get it. This was your stand-up comedy routine. Well at least that last line was worth a laugh…
If you can’t count the number of times you’ve seen this complaint, i’m sure you’ll be able to link to a single example to support your assertion.
Hell, my own criticisms of Avatar, in this thread and elsewhere, can reasonably be boiled down to, “I thought that the CGI and the special effects in genral were the only thing that saved this movie.” Rather than asserting that it’s bad because of the CGI, i’ve been asserting that the CGI is the movie’s main redeeming feature.
See, this just shows that we all react to different movies in different ways. While i’ve been one of the more vocal critics of Avater, i thought War of the Worlds was a pretty good film. I thought it did a decent job of both remaining somewhat true to the source material, while also updating it for modern audiences and modern technologies. Although i’m not a big Tom Cruise fan, he played the role well, and Dakota Fanning was pretty convincing as a perpetually terrified child. It wasn’t perfect, but i thought it was better, overall, than Avatar.
For me, one of the tests of a big budget blockbuster like this is whether i’m interested in sitting down and watching it on TV, without the massive screen and cinema audience to enhance the experience. For War of the Worlds, the answer is “yes”; for Avatar it’s “no.”
The one thing I wouldn’t accuse Avatar of is originality. That, IMO, stops it from being an all-round great movie. But in other regards, it’s a great SF movie. As in “Science Fiction”, old school. Not a horror or even an action movie that only pays lip-service to the genre, but one that examines the consequences of something speculative as the root of the story, the way the best SF does. At least, I think so.
And I thought it was well-acted and -plotted and the characters were not 1-D cyphers. But what do I know? I loved the Final Fantasy flick too.
Oh, sure. I love the movie The Stoned Age, but I wouldn’t call it “a good film.” I think 2001 is kinda boring, but I would call it “a good film.” But that’s just semantics, really.
As others have said, I don’t need my movies to have intricate plots. I need them to not have shitty plots. Avatar has a shitty plot. It’s got shitty one-dimensional characters that aren’t even people; they are archetypes. As I said in another thread, after nearly 3 hours in the theatre, I only knew one character’s name: Grace. Everyone else was just The Hero, The Damsel, The Angry Jealous Prince, The Shaman, The Corporate Boss, The Military Guy, etc.
I’d go over it all again, but mhendo is saying pretty much what I’ve been thinking about this movie.
It’s not that we didn’t get it, SA. How could we fail to get it, when, as you spend your whole OP pointing out, there’s really not very much to get in the first place?
Cameron’s intent doesn’t matter at all. What matters is the product, and it’s crap. It’s like an illiterate supermodel with a meth habit: looks good, but nothing below the surface worth wasting any time on.
I still say he should have just scrapped the live footage and made it a complete CGI flick. It wasn’t groundbreaking to anyone who’s played a Final Fantasy game or seen a Final Fantasy movie (or Vexille or Appleseed). Those looked just as freaky and just as good and completely realistic, and they’re several years old now.
One quick thing, then I gotta go pick up my laundry:
This is ridiculous. No one had to learn to do anything left handed. I’m not saying they didn’t go ahead and do it, but ffs, they could just reverse the film image or even just the character in question for any shots of them shooting a bow. This is reaching for credibility just like the whole “but he made up a whole language thing” is. It was cool when Tolkien did it, because no one had ever done it before and because he was, in fact, a linguist, but claiming to have done so now is just marketing hype like Lucas did for RotJ.
I think you missed the point. Yes, emotionally Avatar was about environmentalism, what with its pretty nature and conveniently humanoid Noble Savages, but is it really that much on the environmentalist side? After all, the Gaia-spirit was real and scientifically verifiable, unlike fuzzy environmentalist pantheism. (In fact one character emphatically states that the biological network is “not some kind of pagan voodoo thing.”) You could read it as greenie wish-fulfillment, but from a practical point of view the environmental situation on Pandora has very few implications for our own planet.
Fundamentally the movie is about property rights, how forcible expropriation is a Very Mean Thing to do. So long as the humans were mining their stuff on land not owned or used by the natives, and so long as they were negotiating for use of mineral-rich land, all was well and good. It was the resort to force that firmly moved the humans from “slightly dingy but decent” to “big fat meanies.”
More interesting is the nativist angle. The Na’vi, by virtue of being the guys who are currently resident on Pandora, are presumed to have the moral right to include or exclude the newcomer humans. In a climactic speech, the blue head honcho said “[humans] cannot come and take what they want. This is our land!” This ties back to the property rights angle above, but step back a minute and consider how easy it is to imagine Pat Buchanan saying the same thing. The end of the movie features the eviction of all but the most extremely assimilated humans – not only did Sully give up the entirety of his culture, but the ending even shows him adopting a Na’vi body. It is strongly implied that the Na’vi wouldn’t welcome any humans who returned and maintained their own culture, even if they were peaceful miners as at the beginning of the movie. Frankly, you can’t really blame them, but this attitude would make even the Minutemen look like rabid open-borders advocates.
(‘Course I’m being facetious; I don’t think that Cameron *intended *Avatar to be an anti-immigration screed, or even an anti-eminent domain piece, but the facts and emotional reactions are entirely consistent, and more interesting than the surface environmentalism)
Thanks! Could you be more specific?
I participated in the anti-thread, so I didn’t want to be left out. You’d think *that *thread would contain all the criticisms of *Avatar *and this one would contain all the accolades, but perplexingly, both threads seem to contain both!
I actually thought of it as “Pulp Planetary Romance”, myself. Rather Barsoomish.
And the acting was good (not Oscar-worthy, of course). And the characters not one-dimensional or pigeon-holed into a stereotype.
Jake should be the “hero” stereotype – yet he actually does betray the Na’vi, and then loses the climactic battle. Both seriously breaking the stereotype he’s supposedly cast as.
Parker is obviously conflicted about what is going on. Norm turns from envious scientist to Rambo-wannabe. Even Quarich – about the most seemingly over-the-top stereotype in the film – has some nuance relating to Jake.
And, again, I must compare to Star Wars, whose cast of characters may as well have worn signs proclaiming which archetype they were: Farmboy Hero, Plucky Princess, Aged Mentor, Scoundrel With A Heart Of Gold. Just because Star Wars used stereotype characters and a tired, hamfisted plot did not make it/them bad movies.
(It took the prequel trilogy to do that. Jar-Jar Binks = stereotype character that makes the movie bad by serving no purpose.)
Frankly, I think you guys who are criticizing the movie are still missing the point. James Cameron set out to make a movie with several goals in mind. I outlined them in the OP so I won’t list them again here. But there is no question that he succeeded to an extraordinary degree. The beauty, the immersive experience, the messages, and the emotions the movie evokes in most of the people who see it almost exactly what he hoped they would be, with the exception that it seems to be more successful in accomplishing that than even he had hoped. Audiences from diverse cultures the world over are all getting the same things out of the movie and they are flocking to it in droves. In only two months or so it became the largest grossing movie worldwide of all time. Yes, the Godfather was a good film, but it basically entertainment. It didn’t ask you to question your longheld beliefs and to look at the possible consequences of those beliefs from the standpoint of those on the receiving end of them.
In almost every respect, Cameron succeeded beyond even his own dreams in creating a movie that did what he wanted it to do. And this is why I say it’s a great film. It did what it was supposed to do and it did it exceedingly well.
As Lightray said upthread, you aren’t judging Avatar for what it is but for what you think it should have been, and what you think it should have been was never intended in the first place. It isn’t kosher to be critizing Cameron for the way he created A because you think he should have created B instead.
I don’t think he should have created B.
I think he should have done a better job of A.
Not sure why that concept is so difficult for you to grasp.
As I said in the other thread, tho: at the end of Star Wars, you knew those character’s names: Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Han Solo, etc. The characters in Avatar are so one-dimensional, the acting so wooden, that they could have not had names at all, and no one would have ever noticed the difference. I know I didn’t. It wasn’t until a couple of days or a week later when I was posting here that I realized I had no idea what anyone’s name was, except Grace.
And Star Wars used plotlines straight out of Campbell’s mythologies, which are time-tested favorites from cultures all over the world. Avatar didn’t, except that it sort of shadowed the noble savage thing, but that’s hardly an ancient archetype.
If there’s no question, then what is this (and the other Avatar threads) all about? You’re wrong on this point. There is a question, and for quite a few of us, the answer is no, he didn’t.
I came out of the movie knowing all the names except for Neytiri’s parents. And I keep forgetting the pilot chick’s Latina-ish name.
Even so, I don’t regard whether your or my memory holds up as evidence of whether the movie was good or bad.
And the characters in Star Wars could have not had names at all, and it also would have made no difference. … in fact, things would have improved considerably had we been left without disbelief-suspender snappers like “Count Dooku” and instead just gone with “Evil Count” (or maybe, “Badass Saruman”).
And your Cambell point makes no sense – Avatar’s plot was bad because it’s an old plot we’ve seen too many times before, but Star Wars’ plot was good because it’s an even older plot that we’ve seen many times before?
They’re both plots good enough to be reused multiple times – how many times have we seen someone ‘cleverly’ call Avatar ‘Dances With Smurfs’? – either recycled plot is good, or its bad.
Me, I’ll stick with Will Shakespeare and say “Recycled plot: not so bad, sometimes.”