It seems unlikely that we’re going to backslide from modern values - civilization has been much less cavalier about wasting life and generally being assholes. It strikes me as unlikely that anyone but the free and open western democracies would be sending anyone to another solar system. It’s improbable that we’ve turned back to barbarism. Especially since this is all in the movie - the corporation is given a limited mandate with specific restrictions on what they can do, and required to run operations to study and communicate with the Na’vi. Clearly they’re from a culture that won’t just indiscriminately wipe out the first inhabited world they come across.
The corporate guy only makes reference to the value of the stuff. If he wanted to play the high ground he could’ve talked about how many lives this stuff was saving back home or some such, but didn’t. There’s no indication in the movie that the stuff has any sort of properties that would reverse human extinction.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen it so I may be incorrect but I seem to recall that they went rogue to do so. They didn’t have approval from the corporation back on earth to do what they did, and most likely when earth gets the news, the corporation is going to flip out about the liability, the government will remove their license to operate on pandora, there will be massive public outcry, etc.
Again, it’s not the call of the corporation, any more than haliburton could hire a private army to massacre Iraqi civilians. Their attack with the shuttle and the bomb was an ad hoc tactic exactly because they weren’t allowed to have offensively-oriented equipment on the planet.
The whole “humans have killed each other over resources all the time, so they’d just destroy the entire population, no problem, duh” attitude is pretty stupid. We don’t even do that today, and there’s no reason to think that civilization is going to back slide. And we certainly don’t treat other tribes of humans with the reverence we’d treat a newly discovered inhabited planet.
I bring up this point because it’s one of the main things that people point out when they bash Avatar and it’s obnoxious because it’s so stupid. The story is actually pretty tight and solid - a relative lack of plot holes, certainly less than the average blockbuster. It’s just popular to bash.
Yes, and as I addressed in the other post, this wasn’t a move sanctioned by the Earth government. They acted impetuously and even if they weren’t driven off the planet they’d be in for some severe reprecussions once Earth heard about what happened.
I look forward to reading your reasoning on the issue.
Oy.
Even if all the above is true… I don’t see the relevance. At the very least, the premise of Avatar is such that the demand for the critical resource is far far more desperate than the current American need for Iraqi oil. It’s being presented as a matter of human survival, isn’t it? Besides, the Americans have not (yet) set up their own oil wells and pipeline system in Iraq to just take the critical resource. I’m not sure if there was a plan even during the Bush years to make Iraq into a permanent economic colony. A better analogy, if one insists, would be to various European powers engaging in full-out conquest and colonization of resource-rich places in the Americas, Africa and Asia, where the goal was indeed to form global empires.
What you’re overlooking is that the base and the avatar program (and the mining operation) are well-established even as the movie starts. If there was an “enrapturement”, it happened decades before the events in the film, which is evidently long enough for it to wear off. In fact, that Weaver’s character has to fight to keep the avatar program running suggests that it most definitely has worn off. If Earth is truly facing environmental and economic catastrophe, I can certainly see the concerns of the Na’vi (who don’t offer solutions, but the rocks under their feet might) taking secondary importance.
I feel I have presented sufficient argument to prove you wrong.
What do you suggest should’ve happened? Should Sully have said “well, I could ride this badass creature using the technique I learned, taking advantage of the mythos of the people I’m trying to rally to call them to action. But then again… I’d be cheating on that other creature, so I guess I should just let everyone die”?
There’s no indication that Sully is incapable of bonding with other life forms - and it’s shown otherwise, obviously he can use the horses as well as his flying creature. Maybe the movie goes so far as to suggest that the flying creature (I can’t remember what they’re calld) is bound to him, but there’s no indication that he’s similarly bound. Or it could simply be a cultural ritual that the Na’vi practice in which binding to more than one flying creature was considered taboo.
The movie doesn’t actually violate anything it established with this turn of event, and the scenes of him doing the bonding still serve the purpose of allowing him to learn how to take control of an animal to set up his eventual riding of last shadow.
Disagree - people are not necesarily reliable at assessing the reason for their preferences. I disagree that there is some quantifiable, objective reason that people like something. Or if there were, we’d need magic mind reading technology to get past the biases to learn them.
I didn’t say they only liked it for that reason. Such a generalization is logically difficult in the first place. I would have to be saying that no one could possibly like it for any other reason, which is obviously not true.
Your experience is anecdotal, as is mine. I don’t know why you think yours has more evidentiary value. We’re not debating whether e=mc^2 here, it’s a value judgement based on our own experiences.
People hold Star Wars in higher regard than movies that have a similar strength of story or other likable things about it. And it really was a legitimate huge cultural phoenomina. I think the idea that the cultural event that it was doesn’t play a role in coloring people’s evaluation of it, and rather they only accept it purely on its merits, is implausible.
Well, perhaps so - but why, given that the corp. was willing to make this “impetuous” move in the movie we are in fact watching, is it so absurd and impossible to state that having made that decision the corp would have done better to (say) bombard them with asteroids, then go in and fight them mano-a-mano?
Now admittedly there may be reasons why they couldn’t do that, but none were actually stated in the movie itself.
Actually, on reflection, I note with amusement that SenorBeef accuses people who were enraptured with Star Wars of letting that cloud their judgement of that movie, while his evident enrapturement of Avatar is doing the same. Just as we supposedly assume everyone should like Star Wars because we were awed by it, he assumes everyone on 22nd-century Earth should be awed by Pandora because he is.
Or something like that - it’s not a well-formed observation, I cheerfully admit. I’ll see if I can refine it.
Sure, it’s a conglomeration of a bunch of different factors.
But then we have people in this very thread, your first post included, implying or outright stating that nostalgia is the primary or only reason. That’s offensive, because it’s saying that those of us who like Star Wars (which is a big goddamn demographic) suspend our critical faculties or do not possess them in the first place.
Perhaps nostalgia or the cultural phenomenon helps us gloss over the bad parts, but that doesn’t mean the good or even great parts of it don’t actually exist.
My point is that 500 years ago, we’d have just rode in and killed most of the Iraqis, and blatantly set them up for brutal colonization. But such a thing would be repugnant to a modern western democracy. Things have only gone in the direction of being less dick-like, and there’s no indication that we’re going to backslide from that.
It’s been over a year since I’ve seen it, so I may misremember the details, but while they did imply that Earth was a shitty place, and that the mining operations here were extremely valuable, I don’t recall that they connected the two in an “it’s either us or them, Earth needs these resources to survive” sort of way. When the corporate guy is doing his unubtainium exposition, he makes reference to how valuable it is in money terms, not in terms of how many lives it it could save.
Except that we’re obviously not as barbaric as the European powers were, and this is critical to my point. It is far more likely that the civilization running interstellar travel in Avatar is much closer to our modern day values on the value of life than those of the colonial powers. It assumes that we’ll revert into savagery despite the historical trend saying otherwise.
It’s really hard to address this without watching the movie again. Do you recall the reason that the communication/research program was being shut down, or a specific case that Earth was going to be saved by the mining operation?
No, you’d have to prove that my case was not only possibly wrong, but implausible.
The person who says “they would’ve just nuked them from orbit, duh, plot hole! stupid movie!” is the one saying that that is the only obvious result, and therefore, since that didn’t happen, the movie is stupid.
In order to prove me wrong, you’d need to prove the case that a human government would approve of genocide of the only other known life in the galaxy, and that no other behavior from them is plausible. The people dismissing this movie by pointing this out as a plot hole not only need to state their case, but they’d need to state why any other possibility is implausible, otherwise they couldn’t simply dismiss the movie.
It’s an absolutely juevenile attempt to manufacture hypocrisy.
The idea that humanity wouldn’t be particularly impressed with the discovery of another planet just teeming with life utterly different from our own, including an intelligent species with their own culture, and the ability to communicate with us - “Oh, we discovered another planet teeming with life? Cool I guess. Is American Idol on tonight?” goes beyond cynical into proposterous.
I last saw Avatar in the movie theaters. You assume I’m a huge fan, and I’m not. I liked the movie, and I thought it was an apt comparison to Star Wars because they basically set out to be the same type of movie.
But the movie goes out of its way to present this as a hugely significant bonding experience (indeed one that a Na’vi must risk their lives for, what with climbing all those Wile E. Coyote cliffs) of spiritual connection and such, as part of a larger package of presenting the Na’vi as a hyper-idealized “in tune with nature” aboriginal culture. If instead it was “yeah, if you want to ride an animal, just plug in, get where you gotta go and unplug”, where the animals are a casually interchangeable resource like a Bixi bike, that would be another matter.
I just picture Sully’s banshee sobbing in a bar, crushed by the casualness of Sully’s abandonment.
I don’t know that, and neither do you, but I decline to make up stuff to cover plot holes that are created when the movie presents something as super-duper-heavy-duty in one scene just to shrug it off later. It would be like Star Wars having a scene where a character says “Oh no! The Death Star’s coming to destroy … oh, well, looks like they ran out of gas, we’re cool.”
Meh, it’s another cliché the movie resorts to. The natives have a legend and it’s the outsider/white-guy-hero who will fulfill it and save the day, demonstrating that he’s a better native than any native could be. Why couldn’t Sully just ride his own specially-bonded banshee into battle? Was it not sufficiently cool? Not sufficiently heroic? Not sufficiently special?
Actually, that could have made for a better movie - rather than just his predictable romantic “bonding” with the female native to gradually turns him to teh Na’vi’s side, maybe he loves his banshee, who gets shot by a nervous human, and then all hell breaks loose.
Avatar could have been an excellent movie (as opposed to just a pretty one) with a handful of tweaks.
I think you’re grossly overestimating the stability of our social values. Lots of other cultures have reached one plateau of social progress or another, only to backslide into barbarity and xenophobia. Again, look at Nazi Germany.
But the realistic odds of it happening aside, it is a very common sci-fi trope, to the extent that people have commented on the scarcity of democratic governments in science fiction. And the film at least partially invokes this trope: it clearly casts Earth as a dystopia, and human civilization as a destructive force. It’s not a stretch to assume, from this set up, a vastly more indifferent, if not actively hostile, attitude towards the Na’vi among the general populace back home. I’ll take you at your word that there was some bit of exposition in the film setting up some sort of legal restrictions on how badly the company could mistreat the natives, but I don’t remember it myself.
Alright, so it’s a rogue operation. There’s still much more reliable and convenient methods of murdering a shit-ton of aboriginals on the down-low than were employed by the company. The point is, once the company has decided, “Fuck it, lets just kill them,” then arguments about how they couldn’t get away with it become moot. They certainly thought they could get away with it, so why didn’t they just drop rocks on them from orbit until they were all dead?
Is that actually from the movie, or is it your assumption?
Well, as I said, it need refinement, but in any case you’re making a vast assumption about an unspoken detail in the movie Avatar to support your claims.
Well, now you’re just clearly misstating my point. I’ve no objection to the idea that humans may or may not have been wildly enraptured with the discovery of the Na’vi, but I’ve pointed out several times that the discovery (and the human reaction thereto) must have taken place decades before the events in the film. Seriously, the movie is set in 2154. How long prior to that do you think humans discovered Pandora and started construction on that large base? It takes six years just to get to Pandora, so… figure…
2100 - a robot probe using a near-light-speed drive departs for Alpha Centauri.
2106 - the probe arrives, begins a detailed survey of the planets
2112 - humans receive the probe’s reports (either it returns or it transmits its findings - either way, can’t go faster than light). Humans enraptured by the discovery of extraterrestrial life and intelligence, begin a major push at establishing contact, send out first manned vessels.
2118 - the first humans arrive at Pandora, with necessary survival gear and whatnot, as the first probe indicated they’d need.
2124 - Earth learns (remember, there’s a six-year lag) that establishing contact with the Na’vi is difficult, given the hostile fauna and terrain and whatnot, but there’s also unobtanium here! Cha-CHING! The data sent back to Earth includes detailed genetic information on the Na’vi.
2124-2134 - preliminary research into “Avatar” program, allowing human anthropologists to mingle with the Na’vi. Ten years’ research into a problem of this magnitude seem like a reasonable minimum, combining as it does advanced genetic engineering, computer programming and virtually-reality interfacing.
2130 - mining ships arrive on Pandora with military escort, start to establish base perimeter and collect easy-to-reach deposits.
2140 - first avatar systems begin arriving on Na’vi. Exobiologists like Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) establish contact with the Na’vi, teach some of them English, learn about their culture and whatnot. Meantime, the base expands with each arrival of military and mining personnel.
2148 - major economic and environmental collapse on Earth
2154 - Jake Sully arrives on Pandora.
I don’t know if there are any official timelines for the Avatar universe, but I daresay my suggested version is reasonable. I can easily imagine a 20 year period (2112-2132?) where humans might have been fixated and fascinated by Pandorans, which starts to wear off decades before the events of the film. Heck, people like Jake Sully would have come of age after the Na’vi were discovered. They’d accept it as just another fact of life, the way children coming of age today will accept instant internet information as a fact of life.
Your definition of “type” is sufficiently broad as to be useless. But if you say you’re not a huge fan, I believe you. You’re still describing Avatar more generously than it deserves, and Star Wars less so.
Huh. Just checked for “Avatar timelines” and after weeding out the Airbender ones, I see claims that put the discovery of Pandora at 2129, which strikes me as wildly optimistic if not completely unsupportable.
This is interesting, because you start with a declarative statement, and then follow it up with an explanation about how it’s impossible to know the truth of your opening statement: If we cannot know the “real” reason someone likes a work of art with out a magical mind reading device, on what basis have you come to the conclusion that people are not reliable at assessing their own preferences?
Your experience doesn’t even rise to the level of anecdotal. The question asked was, “Why do people like Star Wars?” Who do you think is more likely to have a useful insight into that question?
A) People who like Star Wars
B) People who hate Star Wars
At least the people in group A can draw on first hand experience to answer the question. All you can do is offer guesses, and by your own admission, you can’t possibly know how accurate they are.
No one has claimed that nostalgia doesn’t play a role in the regard they have for these films. What is in dispute is your claim that nostalgia is the primary reason for that.
There are a lot of works that effect me primarily because of nostalgia for how I first encountered them. And when I go back and watch Star Wars, that reaction is absolutely present. But it’s not very difficult to separate my nostalgia from the other emotional responses that the film is triggering in me. And while I like to think I’m better than most people at articulating those responses, and identifying the triggers that caused them, I’m not nearly so arrogant enough to presuppose that I’m better at feeling them, too.
First of all, the Na’vi bond with their banshees? If that’s anything like whoever wrote the Weyr books I don’t even want to see the movie now. And that’s just based on the mindset of those who have online Weyrs and roleplay the books (which I may or may not remember the real name of by the end of writing this).
Hopefully un-anecdotally: When I first saw the original trilogy I was a kid, 10 or so, and while I thought putting Luke in the tauntaun was probably the coolest thing I’d ever seen at the time (in the theater, when it first aired), it was the only thing I remembered about the movie. Later when it came on cable TV the best I remembered was Luke being trained by Yoda and cutting off Vader’s head and seeing his face inside. Those were what stuck with me.
I now roleplay on a Star Wars site. I was about 29 when this began. I made a point to watch all the OT again and it stood the test of time for me. Especially ESB but I will grant that Lucas did not write the screenplay and I credit the dialogue in that film to the people that did. When I saw ANH in the theater on one of its anniversaries, during this time (I think the 25th or 30th?), everybody mockingly said, “Awwwwww!” at the “Toshi Station” line from Luke, but in the end we all still applauded. And I will admit that the downfall began with the Ewoks in ROTJ, and Lucas didn’t quit while he was ahead.
Pre-Nazi Germany wasn’t a bloodshed-averse, modern, liberal society. This is pretty much a development of the post-ww2 western world. In WW1, all sides were willing to accept thousands of casualties PER MINUTE rates, but in Iraq a few thousand casualties over a decade is considered a bloodbath. Modern western societies are clearly not equivelant to bloodthirsty colonial powers. And there’s no indication to think we’ll backslide.
I also want to re-iterate a point. If you say “humans would’ve nuked them from orbit, therefore dumb movie”, you’re saying the only logical course would be for that to happen, and because it didn’t happen, it’s obviously a plot hole. If there’s a viable, logical alternative that fits within the context of that world, it’s no longer a plot hole. And “modern human society won’t advance to the point of interstellar space travel but culturally regress to barbarism at the same time” is a logical alternative that’s supported from within the movie itself.
The corporate guy in charge of the base is obviously constantly waffling between his desire to get shit done and how it will reflect on the operation if they’re too heavy handed. He’s bothered by the need for the peaceful relations, communications, and research getting in his way - but he’s clearly bound by needing to do it. The movie doesn’t cast earth as a barbaric dsytopia full of a bloodthirsty society - it only portrays them as enviornmentally fucked.
Because they never actually tried to engage in genocide. There was a mineral deposit under the main city/tree and they were trying to get the Na’vi to move, but they refused. When they actually came to destroy the tree, they gave the Na’vi time to flee from it without trying to strafe them on the ground or kill them all. They were only trying to destroy the tree to get them to move.
There’s also no indication that the orbital shuttles are capable of going out into the asteroid fields and moving rocks into orbit and launching them. The interstellar ship was a highly specialized vessel with a rigid mission - you can’t just go off charting courses willy nilly and burning up all your fuel, due to “cold equations” type factors.
The movie supports the idea that they were only allowed the sort of weapons necesary to defend themselves.
If we discovered huge diamond mines in costa rica, but the locals were unreceptive to commerce, how many people in the US do you think would support just going ahead and nuking Costa Rica and coming in to take the resources? You think people would just go ahead and accept this because hey, diamonds are valuable?
And there’s nothing special about Costa Rica or Costa Ricans. The world isn’t fascinated by the culture of the Costan Ricans. Discovering Costa Rica wasn’t the most mind blowing discovery in the history of mankind. I think you all massively underestimate the actual social effects of discovering another intelligent species out there. Religions would form around this new discovery. It would be the most mutually interesting subject of discussion of the whole human race. It’s not like discovering some lost tribe in the Amazon, but even then, I don’t think we’d support wiping out that tribe if it was convenient.
But you assume in this future that humanity is so indifferent and bloodthristy that not only is it plausible that everyone would support a corporation nuking the only other intelligent species we know, who pose no threat to us, who are the biggest discovery in human history, but also that it’s so obvious that humanity would react in that fashion that it’s a plot hole in the movie that they didn’t. The criticism is “no way would the humans be so hesistant to just kill all the Na’vi, so this movie’s plot is stupid”.
I think Avatar got caught up in the “bash anything popular” sort of cynical entertainment society we now live in. Which is ironic, because it’s the opposite of star wars, because what a huge thing it was is a reason for its continued popularity. Different time periods and culture I suppose.
Avatar is a well thought out, solid movie without any gaping plot holes. It’s not Inception obviously in terms of plot complexities, but does every movie have to be? That’s the ironic thing between Star Wars and Avatar I think - everyone loves Star Wars and is uncritical of the simple story, yet often the same people bash Avatar for the same thing.
The worst thing about Avatar was the heavy handedness of the message - the Na’vi are obvious standins for Native Americans and the whole thing works as a metaphor for manifest destiny and colonization. It would’ve been a better movie if the Na’vi had actually been more alien (but then you risk the audience not relating to them I guess) and the story more of a general story of the mistreatment of the weak by the strong over resources rather than such a specific paralell between one particular historical case of that.
Of course. This isn’t something that can be quantified. It’s my own judgement based on my experience I’ve had with fans of the movie.
If I said “Britney Spears only became a celebrity because of her appearance, and not the artistic merit of her music”, people could come in and say “no way man, I really love her music” - and in that case, it may actually be true, but as a generalization obviously her appearance is obviously one of the big reasons.
But how could I prove that? I can’t mind read everyone who listens to her music. I can only give my analysis of what I’ve concluded are the most likely generalized motivations.
You disagree, great. Who cares? We’re not arguing over a mathematical formula, there’s no objective way to resolve this. Since we’re talking about biases people have that change how they perceive the merit of something, self-reporting isn’t especially useful.
I think it (almost) does, and that it turns on the criteria of what a good movie is. Star Wars was wildly popular at the time and its appeal has only grown since then. And yet everyone knows it’s also space opera. Asking whether Star Wars is a good movie is potentially a great question.
Hoo-boy. Look. Phantom Menace was awful. I liked Star Wars: it’s the best western I’ve ever seen. And I was honestly impressed with the plot twist in Empire: I didn’t see it coming yet it made perfect sense. I may not be a fan of the series, but that scene was easily one of my personal top 10 movie moments.
You’re missing the point I think. IME, the people who saw the film, stripped of the special effects, had a perspective that the rest of us lack. And their professional opinions weren’t exactly unreasonable: the actors -Harrison Ford in particular- thought that the script sucked. And I’m guessing that he was right. What we have is a case of the whole amounting to more than the sum of the parts. Some parts -the score- were terrific. Some -that simple shot of the leap to hyperspace- were awesome (though it feels silly to say so). And in 1977 the bar scene generated a lot of buzz. But mostly the film just hung together well. But again, it’s Star Wars’ awful aspects which make the OP’s question so interesting-- it built a large and enthusiastic fan base and became the top 20th century movie franchise, despite its encyclopedic flaws. And unlike the prequels, the first two really weren’t bad films overall.
Incidentally, the best film of the series -Empire- wasn’t directed by Lucas. I suspect that isn’t a coincidence. Except that George L. happened to direct American Graffiti, which had some solid performances. What the hell happened later?
I have a theory that the prequel trilogy was intentionally made vague, with characters coming out of nowhere and motives being nonexistant. The movies where on one hand jam packed with extraneous crap, and on the other hand bare bones.
Its because George learned after ROTJ where the real money is, in expanded universe crap like novels, comics, TV shows, etc.
So he packs the prequels with all this crap irrelevent to the plot that he will come back to later in other media, AND makes sure characters motivations and such make no sense because he plans to come back and fill in the blanks later too.
They aren’t films so much as they are jumping off points for a whole new couple of decades of expanded universe crap(some of which is good I’ll admit) that he knows fans will gobble up.
How many times have you had a questions about something in the prequels that makes no sense and someone tells you oh just read the novel Filing Clerk Of Evil about how Palpatine first found out about the sith, the movies are bait to suck people into the EU media.
Just for example TPM mentions sith, and their wanting revenge and a bunch of stuff that the films never explain at all. To understand all that you need to go EU.:rolleyes:
