If “critical modern tastes” are telling us that Star Wars is bad and Avatar is good, then critical modern tastes can go fuck themselves.
I recall some folks who said that while growing up in the fifties, they would go back and see a film over and over again. Yet “The Blob” isn’t going to be considered as influential on pop culture as Star Wars was.
(And now I’m not sure that multiple repeated viewings necessarilly makes a movie a blockbuster.)
I only brought up the Avatar example because it’s the same sort of film - trying to be technically advanced, epic, simple story, etc. It doesn’t stick out from its peers nearly as well because what we’ve become accustomed to in movies now is way different than what it was 40 years ago.
But I do find it ironic that people that love star wars will bash Avatar and usually name flaws that Star Wars is far more guilty of.
At least someone was around the ages of 9 and 10 for every single movie that ever came out - and yet you don’t hear people banging on about a lot of other movies like they do about Star Wars. Even if the original Star Wars movies had something about them that appealed in particular to 9 year olds, they clearly still have something that sets them apart from most other movies.
Such as? The flaws, that is, not the people.
Heh, if anything, Avatar is to itself what Phantom Menace is to Star Wars - a betrayal of its own fictional premise.
Most of the objections I’ve heard to avatar were along the “story is too simple”/“copies dances with wolves” line. A few were just retarded, like “why would the humans even bother to try to negotiate with the Naavi since they could just nuke them from orbit? Dumb!”
Like humanity’s reaction to meeting the first intelligent life out there that we’ve ever met would be to immediately try to kill them, and everyone would just along with this. Preposterous.
The story is simple, but consistent and well told, without gaping plot holes.
What?
Well, I can honestly say I’ve never heard anyone claim Star Wars was copying Dances with Wolves, let alone to a greater extent than Avatar.
And besides, you’re not describing Avatar’s premise correctly - it did not depict humanity’s reaction to meeting the first intelligent life out there. By the movie’s premise, humanity had been aware of the Na’vi for at several decades, at least long enough to construct that massive base on Pandora and learn enough about them to genetically engineer near-perfect replicas, while taking into account the six years necessary to make the voyage. Jake Sully wasn’t even the first “avatar” to venture into Na’vi culture - this had been going on with varying degrees of success for some time, at least long enough for some of the Na’vi to become fluent in English.
So the whole “mystery and wonder” aspect of first contact has long worn off by the time of the events in Avatar. Further, Sigourney Weaver’s character has to fight to get the resources necessary to study the Na’vi, and the mining corporation grudgingly supports her only because they’re required by law. So… yeah, nuking or exterminating the Na’vi is not at all far-fetched, given the premise as presented.
I didn’t mean specifically that Star Wars copies Dances With Wolves obviously.
And yeah, it’s wildly far fetched that the humans would nuke the Na’vi.
When we went into Iraq, the supporters were rallied by the idea that they somehow posed some sort of threat to us and it was necesary - clearly the Na’vi pose no threat. And even then, we went in with one of the most clean and bloodless wars in history. And even further, we didn’t just blatantly pillage their resources and massacre them. And yet it fractured the country - half the country was against it in the strongest possible terms. And Iraqis are not really special in terms of their historical value to humanity. On the other hand…
Now let’s take the only intelligent species that humanity has ever met. It would be the biggest news in the history of the world. People would be absolutely swept up in trying to learn about this new world more than anything that ever happened in human history. It would be something that changed our very civilization. Prime time TV would have feeds and documentaries from the new planet and people would gather around their TVs like they did for the moon landing.
But what you’re saying is that a corporation could come in and just go ahead and nuke those people in order to turn a profit on the resources they’re sitting on, and everyone would be okay with that. Like if Haliburton or BP decided on its own to go ahead and nuke Iraq and move in to pillage the oil, except on a much grander scale, wiping out this other world that humanity has become absolutely enraptured by.
It’s preposterous. Most of the criticism I’ve heard of Avatar focuses on this “uh duh, nuke them from orbit, movie over!” and it’s amazing how fucking stupid it is and yet how proud and smart people feel for saying it.
Going by this thread, it appears to be a generalization that only applies to a single person. SykoSkotty is the only person who has listed nostalgia as a significant factor in their current appreciation of the film. Everyone else who has addressed the issue has directly told you that you’re wrong.
At what point are you willing to concede that the actual fans of a film might have a better idea about why they like than someone who hates the film?
Amazing that it was able to do all of that, despite being a horrible movie. And do it so well that, thirty five years later, people still haven’t figured out it sucks!
Hell, that’s almost more impressive than simply making a good movie that people appreciate for a long time.
Then you really have no basis to complain about Vinyl Turnip’s post, do you?
Of course it’s consistent. Given a sufficient deus ex machina any story can be made consistent, and Avatar’s was the size of an entire planet. A simple story is tolerable, maybe even preferable sometimes, but it’s unsatisfying when it’s resolved entirely by magic.
No, he’s not, according to the script.
So what, are most people going to say “gee, SenorBeef is right, star wars really is stupid but I like it anyway!”?
I have no idea why you feel that anecdotes are compelling in this case, as if I were proven wrong.
Argumentum ad populum. Lots of bad stuff is wildly popular.
The idea that anyone who likes a movie is lying about it is far more preposterous than the idea that people latched onto a movie that was a big cultural event from their childhood and can’t critically evaluate its merits. He excludes the possibility that anyone actually likes the movie - instead, he feels that it is impossible to like it, and there’s a massive conspiracy of people lying about liking it. I’m merely saying that people are generally nostalgiac about the movie in a way that colors their judgement.
Well, to grab one example off the top of my head - the “Force” is presented as something mystical in Star Wars, but as the banal effect of “midichlorines” in Phantom Menace, which I’d consider a premise-betrayal, though it’s softened somewhat by the 22-year gap.
In Avatar, much is made of the Na’vi spiritual connection to the other lifeforms of Pandora and there is a lengthy scene were Sully engages in an important rite-of-passage when a Na’vi bonds with a “mountain banshee”, the flying creature, in something that is described as permanent and deeply significant. Barely an hour later in the movie, if that, Sully abandons his banshee to hop aboard the much larger and way cooler “last shadow”, which he rides for much of the final battle with the humans. So having shown us this big emotional bonding moment with the banshee, the movie casually abandons it when something more eye-candelicious comes along. What happened to Sully’s banshee? Does anybody know? Does anybody care? Is there any comparable moment within Star Wars where a concept is introduced with such weight and then casually dropped? Maybe Leia’s quick emotional recovery after the destruction of Alderaan (I seem to recall a Robot Chicken segment that spoofed this, showing Luke sad after Kenobi’s death and Leia sneering at him since his loss was trivial compared to hers), but overall, Star Wars shows much more internal consistency than Avatar, which I guess is important to those of us who like internal consistency, regardless of how old we are.
Sounds about right for human males.
No, of course not.
Look. “Is Star Wars a good movie?” does not have an objective answer. But “Why do people like Star Wars?” does have an objective answer. It’s going to be different for each individual, of course, because each individual is explaining a subjective experience. But the nature of that subjective experience is, itself, objective. You and I might have different ideas about what constitutes “fun,” but we both know when we’ve had it.
So, when you say, “People only like Star Wars because of nostalgia,” that’s something that has a definite truth value to it. In my experience as someone who likes Star Wars, who moves in social circles heavily saturated by people who like Star Wars, and who actively seeks out other people’s opinions about Star Wars, the truth value of that statement is very near to zero.
What particular evidence or experience do you have that indicates the contrary, other than the fact that you, personally, didn’t think the movie was very good?
Eh, I was being facetious anyway. I did think Avatar was lame, though.
I would be fascinated, but that’s not gonna pay my rent. Nor would it fix unemployment, eliminate hunger, or stop my dog from pooping on the carpet. My daily grind would go on. Except now their would be Na’vi plush dolls and lunch boxes to spend my money on, and documentaries on The Learning Channel to watch.
Ok, well, that’s actually a decent point. 
On the other hand, Nazi Germany. So, bit of a coin flip, really, what you’ll get. Depends on the prevailing social and political culture of the time.
That’s certainly the optimistic view. If it happened today, I think that would be largely the reaction. But we really don’t know what things are like back on Earth in this movie. There is, as I understand it, a reference to humans going back to “their dying planet” at the end of the film. If you take that literally enough - if humans are staring down the barrel of their own extinction - then yeah, I think they’d be more than okay with nuking a bunch of Smurfs to save their own asses.
But isn’t that pretty much what happened in the movie? They don’t use nukes, but they do decide to just go in and kill natives until they get what they want. If humans are that invested in alien cultures, wouldn’t that present almost as much of a problem as bombing them from orbit?
I don’t follow Avatar fandom, so I may be missing the context here, but that seems like a fair observation. Once the corporation has decided that it’ll be easier just to kill them, it’s pretty dumb to send in atmospheric craft when you control the entire star system. Just park something in orbit and drop rocks on them until they’re all dead, and there’s nothing they could possibly do to stop you.
It’s not a major flaw, in that it’s entirely plausible that the humans were just too arrogant to think they needed that big of a hammer, but it doesn’t seem like a stupid observation to me.
Isn’t this really a criticism of the actual plot of the movie? Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I seem to recall that the corporation in the movie made the decision to essentially move in and kill these people, by destroying their home tree & tree of souls.