Nope, sorry. It is 100 percent fact that Titanic is a great movie. Cite.
Okay, okay, maybe that doesn’t work as well as I thought it should…but it’s still a good movie, dammit! :mad:
Wiley Quixote wrote: “I’ll hardly be the first to point out that the story is basically a predictable and hackneyed Dances with Wolves with funny blue aliens.”
I’ve heard “Dances with Giant Smurfs”.
Seriously, I’m a progressive who’s also a big SF fan. If anybody should have liked Avatar, it would be me. I didn’t.
No. Avatar had a lot more in common with FernGully, and that already has a sequel.
Channeling Aldebaran probably isn’t your best move here. 
Since I think Cameron is a low-talent hack, I’m hoping he crashes and burns with these movies. Yes, his movies are visually stunning. But they have zero plot, hackneyed characters and holes in the “plots” large enough to sail the Titanic through.
Death ray, fiddlesticks! Why, it hardly even slows them up.
It’s a drama, that is, a genre film. Genre films can’t be “great” in a real sense.
The part that completely baffles me is the time lag. Who makes sequels a decade later, after everyone’s forgotten about the original? A large part of the appeal of Avatar was the visual effects, which had only just become possible, and which were a lot more advanced than what had come before. If he had made sequels on the usual couple of years timescale, then the effects would still have been relatively new, and would still have drawing power. But by now, they’re not only routine, but passe (a fate that might have been avoided if there had been more movies in the interim doing 3D well, as Avatar sequels presumably would have). Is he hoping for another revolution in visual effects? With what, Smell-o-Vision? And if he is hoping for some unspecified new revolution to carry the sequels, then why the next three sequels in such rapid succession?
Well, according to James Cameron, Avatar 2 will cause us to “shit ourselves with our mouth wide open”. So I can’t wait to experience that.
But this article from 2014 makes an interesting point about how 5 years after Avatar, no one cares about it.
For some reason, Avatar never stuck in the collective pop-media consciousness the way films like Star Wars, Alien, Terminator 1 and 2 and Lord of the Rings have. And by now, I’d say it’s largely overshadowed by the new Star Wars, the Marvel and DC film universes, and Harry Potter. So IOW, Cameron mostly succeeded in creating a slightly better Wachowski CGI sci fi blockbuster.
With 3 new Avatars, is Hollywood going to start trying to make Sam Worthington a “thing” again?
My only beef with James Cameron is that he’s sitting on the movie rights to Gunnm, which I really, really want to be made into a movie, and the more Avatar sequels there are the less likely that is to happen.
Just briefly, who is the historical person portrayed incorrectly in the movie? Thanks.
I wonder if that’s J Bruce Ismay? Though he was considered a coward from the time the survivors hit NYC, he didn’t steal someone’s place on a lifeboat. If he didn’t get on, there would have been an empty place.
Could be Benjamin Guggenheim. After he says his famous line about going down like gentlemen, he is seen looking very panicky as the water comes in. I believe that Cameron hated rich people, and perhaps intended this scene to “put him in his place”; in reality it would take superhuman bravery (or lack of imagination) to not feel scared at the moment of your death.
Or it could be First Officer Murdoch, shown shooting himself as the ship sinks. Whether or not that happened has been in dispute in April 15, 1912, but of course Cameron used it anyway. Titanic treated Murdoch as bad as The Right Stuff treated Gus Grissom.
Capt Smith was portrayed more paralyzed into inaction than cowardly, but his character didn’t get treated all that well either.
nm
this, really, is the key thing. Forget whether “Avatar” is a good or great or shitty movie. It doesn’t matter. “Moonlight” is a masterpeice and “Cars” was pretty hackneyed, but “Cars” has made more money in merchandising sales every month since it was released eleven years ago than “Moonlight” has made at the box office. Kids love Cars shit. I don’t know why.
Avatar was pretty cool but as God is my witness I do not remember the name of any character in it. (ETA: before I was finished the post, I remember the main character is named Jake Sully.) It was a fine movie that told a coherent story, but it just hasn’t stuck. People don’t really care a lot about it anymore. It doesn’t sell much in the way of toys or merchandise. There’s little demand for crossover media products. I’ve never heard a person say “I’d love to see another Avatar movie.”
I’m not sure why that is. I think most of the Avengers stream of movies stink on ice but they seem to just fire people up to spend more, more, more on sequels, toys, costumes and the like. To my eyes “Captain America: Civil War” was a piece of shit and a way worse movie than "Avatar"but it is beloved, and but the public will absolutely rush out to see the next one just as soon as they can produce it. And it’s not like you need a giant “cinematic universe” to force the issue, as Star Wars showed. People were thrilled when The Empire Strikes Back came out. They were hungry for more.
I am very, very dubious there will be an Avatar 5.
I’d love to see another Avatar movie.
It was a very good Spectacle movie. It wasn’t a Plot movie. It wasn’t a Clever movie. It was all spectacle, and it did that better any movie I can remember. There’ve been other 3D movies, but the experience with them wasn’t nearly as immersive as the 3D in Avatar. There’ve been other Alien World movies, but their alien worlds weren’t nearly as detailed or complete as in Avatar.
If Transformers can still be churning out closeups-of-spinny-things-on-robots-made-of-spinny-things movies that compete with Star Wars and Marvel movies, I think Avatar can too.
I think where the Avatar franchise will fall down is with the same diminishing returns that every other franchise suffers: Avatar, however, starts at a big disadvantage because it was so much more expensive to make than, say, Transformers. It’ll reach the point where the next movie won’t be profitable, quicker than other franchises. Disney will probably do a multimedia push to counteract this - like, a theme park tie-in.
I’m not so sure about the plausibility of animals with interspecific USB ports. And the credit for the alien world goes to Wayne Barlowe, and he did it better in his 1990 book Expedition.
Avatar was visually stunning and did a great job at showing some really cool scenes and using 3-d to make it pop. But it didn’t have any hooks other than ‘it looks cool’. The story isn’t original and doesn’t have any twists, and was competently done but nothing to write home about. The characters worked but weren’t especially memorable or quirky. The dialogue worked but didn’t have any catchphrases or speeches. The world looks cool but lacks depth and texture, and isn’t very original or unique. It was great to watch but had nothing further to hook into.
I expect the sequels to do good, but not record setting, as long as they’re breaking ground with the visuals, and to flop when people feel like they’re just more of the same. I don’t think it’s going to have the longevity Cameron thinks it will.
Huh? What does this mean? (sincere question).
And if “drama” is a genre film, what are some examples of non-genre films?
(sorry for the hijack).
I agree and think this must make Disney very nervous about their “Avatar Land” at Animal Kingdom. A massive part of making these “attractions” profitable is banking on the merchandising within the theme parks. They sell boatloads of Star Wars light sabers, HP magic wands, super hero t-shirts, Mickey Mouse everything, princess everything, etc. etc.
Good luck pushing Avatar blue alien anything.
Perfectly plausible, once you realize that they were intelligently engineered and designed. Why wouldn’t Eywa give them convenient com ports?
It’s the same reason why the Na’vi look so much like humans, and so unlike the other Pandoran fauna. Eywa observed Earth from a distance, and anticipated the need to someday interact with these humans, and so she engineered a species for the purpose of interacting with us.
Also, part of what makes them profitable is when people build their vacations around these attractions. How many people planned a trip to Universal Studios Florida just to go to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter? How many of those chose to go there instead of WDW or had no plans to visit Orlando except for interest in the Harry Potter stuff?