Those who forget the history of bad plots are condemned to repeat them. For those who were bored to tears with the movie expect “Avatar II, the return of the Red Eye”. It will be shown in 1D.
This is ridiculous. Again, by that metric Alvin and the Chimpmunks: The Squeakel merits 10 times the attention that The Hurt Locker, Moon, Bright Star and A Serious Man deserve combined. Just because a film finds an audience doesn’t automatically make it great. It may be of interest from a cultural or sociological interest, but using popularity as the primary criterion of judgment is to confuse the impact of art with the impact of commerce.
1969 was the year of The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy, Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, Medium Cool, Z, Alice’s Restaurant, Shame, Andrei Rublev and If…
But the biggest moneymaker that year? Disney’s The Love Bug.
Good thing that isn’t what I said then. Let’s take another look at what I did say:
See? I said “meaningful”, not popular. There’s a difference.
So your entire point is moot…unless you want to argue that people actually found Alvin and the Chipmunks or The Love Bug to be meaningful entertainment.
But you’re equating “meaningful” with “popular”, because all you do (aside from a few anecdotals) is parade box office statistics right and left. And how do you know all $2B of that revenue signifies “meaningful” as opposed to, say, “fun” or even “curiosity”? You don’t.
Exactly.
I mean, every one of us in this thread who is criticizing the movie actually forked over our money to see it. We are a part of the box office success, and even though we are criticizing the film.
You guys are just grasping at straws now. I think I’m gonna call it a night.
If my “grasping at straws” you mean “pointing out the self-serving inanities in your argument,” you are correct.
It’s interesting that you are concerned over ArchiveGuy’s alleged misreading of your post, when you completely misrepresented his argument earlier on, were called on it, and dismissed it as irrelevant.
I engaged with you in a Cafe Society thread because i thought that, in this forum, you might abandon some of your usual tactics such as misrepresenting other people’s arguments. Plus ça change, i guess.
Now? They are the same arguments we’ve always been using–none of which you’ve managed to refute, btw. That you and other people like the film is without question. But you state that such appeal is automatic, unqualified evidence of greatness, to which the answer is simply, “Uh, no. It’s not.”
I think Cameron’s biggest mistake was his intent. Make a big budget sci-fi thriller that delivers a message about war and the environment? For god’s sake why?
Star Wars was a success because Lucas wanted to simply make a movie that harkened back to the old serial westerns. A simple story but a fun romp.
Could you even imagine what Star Wars would have been if Lucas tried to make it with the same simple story but at the same time tried to deliver a message about war and the environment? (shudder)
Star Trek?
I’ve been watching sci-fi movies for most of my life, starting with Star Wars when I was 9 years old. I’ve been reading sf for almost as long, starting with a subscription to Analog when I was 13 (a subscription which I have maintained for nearly 30 years).
My take: I thought Avatar was fantastic. Yes, it borrowed from a lot of sources, from Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series to the Pocahontas story to Dances with Wolves. However, writers have always done this. Shakespeare borrowed whole plots from earlier sources. Asimov famously based the fall of the Galactic Empire on the fall of the Roman Empire.
Yes, the plot in Avatar was simplistic. However, I did not find this to be a detriment to the film. On the contrary, a dense, complicated plot does not always work well on the screen. (I still have no idea what happened in the last two Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and found them to be all but unwatchable.) All in all, I thought that Avatar’s plot was just right. It had just enough detail to make the film work without bogging it down.
And finally, the visuals were fantastic. I don’t think that anybody disputes this.
When everything was put together, I thought it all worked, and I thought that Avatar was one of the best films I’ve ever seen.
See, my problem is not with the plot. It’s with the writing. The dialogue is bad. The exposition is clunky. The characterizations are threadbare. The larger story arc, with every beat along the way, is rote and predictable. There are plenty of movies that I love that don’t have the greatest plot, but the glory is in the detailing of the story and its inhabitants, which can flesh out a familiar or rudimentary plot with nice colors and textures. But in Avatar, I didn’t care about anyone because the writing was so thin and underdeveloped. It doesn’t have to be Shakespeare; look at Cameron’s original Terminator for smart, clean, economical writing that propels the story forward without getting lost in the bushes of its own lofty ambitions. But every film from him since then has been more and more undisciplined in the writing, structure, and pacing. So a lot of people don’t feel that way (or don’t care); that’s fine. But that’s why the film is so unremarkable to me, even with the (overpraised) eye candy.
