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Avatar Soars Into $1-Billion Territory
Suki I writes " Avatar soars into $1-billion territory. 'Strong foreign ticket sales help make the science-fiction movie the fifth in history to pass the watermark. ... One of the riskiest movies of all times is now officially one of the most successful at the box office. When Avatar opened, its solid but far from stellar results left 20th Century Fox uncertain about whether the $430 million that it and two financing partners had invested to produce and market the 3-D film would pay off.'" Given that the big alternatives were Sherlock Holmes or Alvin & the Chipmunks, I think the winner was clear.
And yet Sherlock Holmes and the Chipmunks are both more original than Avatar. Its just a very old story with a few pretty visuals.
Instead of spending $430million making one bloated FX crap-test they could have made 10 regular films. Even if only one of those was
really good it would beat a poor film that has been hidden by obscene overspending on visuals.
See it before you cant see it in 3D at the theatre.
I'd be interested to see what proportion of this film's takings were from repeat viewings, and how this figure compares with other blockbusters. Avatar is one of very few films that I have paid to see more than once at the cinema, and it's the first time that I'm doing this simply because I wanted to see the film again (as opposed to being asked to go with someone else who wanted to see it). In 3D IMAX, it really is an impressive spectacle.
Saw it in 3D at the Imax. I think that this movie is visually appealing, and that's what it was made for. You're not supposed to actually pay attention to the story; it's a mix of Dances with Wolves and Fern Gully (and potentially about 30 other movies in which this concept of gung-ho-soldier-meets-and-loves-the-natives has been done to death), although it does strike chords with a few present day "situations". The main appeal is the graphics, the atmosphere, surroundings and facial expressions of the macrosmurfs.
Part of the hype was that Cameron spent 8 bazillion years working on this movie and that's another thing that spoils it, you expect something great and wonderful and almost Star Wars like, but you get another popcorn movie, albeit an expensive one. With blue people.
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
Sherlock Holmes is a solid movie with good acting and an interesting take on the Holmes story line. It'll probably evolve into an interesting series of movies. Alvin and the Chipmunks is well made mindless children's fare. For the 4-8 age group love it and it is doing extremely well in the box office. Avatar on the other hand is a visually stunning movie, but the noble savage storyline is strait from the 70's. It is not a bad movie by any stretch, but without the special effect advancement, would this movie garner any attention? Will Avatar's real legacy be laying the groundwork for better integrated CGI rather than the story told?
It's the same story all over again and yet it succeds.
Well. It'd be worse if the story that succeded and most people enjoyed was about evil prevailing, wouldn't it?
More like champagne. Large quantities of valium don't cause people to babble incoherently about how wonderful it is.
Another nail in the "Piracy kills our industry!" coffin. But honestly, even the file-sharers were telling everyone to go see it in the theaters first.
The 3D aspect and the CG effects were worth every penny that I spent on a ticket.
The plot is just a barely acceptable excuse for the effects, but since it was so well executed I don't really mind.
Watch this film in 3D Imax or not at all IMHO.
The "plot." Pretty much the same: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104254/
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I feel as though I am the only one not drinking from the cool-aid on this one. The story line, apart from the apparently necessary political message, is nothing more than a rehash of a million other stories. From the noble savage to the walking armor suit so reminiscent of the suit that worn in the Aliens finale by Sigourney Weaver, this story was a soup of elements found in many other stories and movies. Were this story presented as a book, without James Cameron's name, it would have been rejected outright.
The only creative elements that exist in this movie were the special effects and associated artistry, which made the movie worth watching. They were outstanding.
Finally, why do entertainers continue to feel that they have to present their beliefs within a movie. If I want to be preached at or listen to political messages, I will go to church or read a newspaper/book. I do not want to see it in movies or hear it at concerts.
A more analogous slam would have been The Blind Side. I can't for the life of me figure out why people consistently pay to see Sandra Bullock movies. Sure, she's hot. But her movies are also consistently crap. Look at her list of movies here. There's not even one worth watching. But yet they always make money.
Well Demolition Man is on that list, and I love that movie. It's just about the only Stallone movie I enjoy, heck the only one I can even sit through. The cheese, fights, one-liners; it's a decent flick. And her role in it was decent.
Beyond that, some of her chick flicks are alright. They're the kind of chick flicks I can sit through and enjoy, instead of struggling to appear interested.
Out of the wiki list, I can find a handful of films that I enjoy (or enjoy well enough).
And that was to just not go to the movies. This was the option I chose.
Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.
While not shoved in your face, there were a lot of subtle touches of science- like did you notice that the cave to the tree of souls appeared to form along magnetic field lines? See: http://www.flickr.com/photos/officialavatarmovie/4054882634/sizes/l/
That's not really fair, nor accurate. Big budget movies, aimed to appeal to as many people as possible (and most often in the cases of blockbusters, that means 14 year olds) do have a very predictable plot.
Smaller budget movies tend to have better stories and unpredictable plot. There's plenty of US made movies that have excellent stories, writing, acting and directing. Indeed probably the best movies made currently are US independent ones.
European movies almost never have enough budget to have large focus groups and test audiences ruin the plot with something predictable. The few movies that do have large budgets tend to have very predictable plots. There's plenty of well-funded EU movies that are utter crap.
It's also worth remembering too that many, if not most US big budget studio movies are actually funded by Germans, or consortiums that include plenty of Europeans. To describe them as US isn't entirely accurate. Avatar's production company is Fox, which is owned by an Australian.
The story was very generic.. I think it was aimed at the American market (possibly still guilty at killing all the indians or something) but it didn't engage me and like you the plot was obvious after about the first 10 minutes.
I liked the graphics.. I saw it in 3D but wasn't impressed with the 3d (creating depth by making the background blurry doesn't impress me it just gives me a headache). 2D would probably have been a better option.
Speak for yourself.
If they'd just been pre-technological sentients, it would have been a replay of the Spanish colonization of the Americas, and hey, you can't stand in the way of progress. Screw the smurfs, there's unobtanium in them thar hills!
But as it was, I'd played a 10th-year anniversary round of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri earlier in the year, and won't give away any spoilers other than to say I really enjoyed it. It's SF - the only thing you need to suspend your disbelief for is the question "What if evolution came up with something that fulfilled the requirements of Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis?" It might be really difficult to make contact such a thing, might even require hundreds of minds working in concert around concentrations of mindworms, fungal blooms, fungal towers :)
If it's humans with interstellar spaceflight versus pretechnological spiritualists, the humans are going to win, unless the our hero helps Na'vi can upload a virus to the mothership, sorta like Jeff Goldblum did to the aliens that kicked our ass in ID4. (ID4 was Science Fantasy - both the entire alien civilization putting all its eggs in one basket, and a human reverse-engineering and compromosing the aliens' computer system within 24 hours...) For Earth vs. Smurfs, even the win in the movie is a stopgap. Just like they sent more bulldozers, they'll just just come back in a few years with another spaceship, except this time it'll be full of nukes.
But if it's humans versus a planet-sized hive mind, on a planet full of naturally-occurring room-temperature superconductors, the smurfs (and the rest of the planet) have a fighting chance. Even against spaceships with nukes.
I just saw it last weekend, and I gotta say.. Science Fiction? Not much. Science Fantasy is more like it. Just a few things threw me off. I loved most of the movie. And for a while I believed the blue people were spiritual in the same way humans were.. in ritual and what not... But instead it turned out to be a magical spiritual world, and a collective thought borg of trees and animals.. and those that .. died?
A fantastic adventure, but really just lost me as a caring viewer. I prefer things to be more rational.
Hard Sci-Fi is rare and rarely marketable.
I saw it in 3D too, and while I totally agree that the effects were amazing, I just found the entire experience quite dull (and by about halfway in I'd even become blasé about the effects). Like watching a 2.5 hour long advertisement for the latest graphics card, or some video game cut-scene you just can't skip. It felt like half a billion dollars and the best they could manage was Fern Gully with space cats.
Why are adults so critical of kids movies? Of course they're simple and stupid
Because they don't have to be. Up was an amazing movie. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was very good. That's proof enough that you can make a kids movie that's not a pile of crap. So it's plenty fair to criticize a kids movie that is a pile of crap.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It's a stereotyped cowboy and indian flick; even with "hostiles." The bad guys are all white males, and the worst have southern accents. The only people with intelligence or perception are female. The male hero only learns when mentored by a female.
It's a combination of Dances with Wolves, and Mononoke, but without the charm of either. Fabulous animation does not make up for appalling imagery and story.
I think you're being a bit short on your thinking. Where you saw some kind of magical ritual and spirit living on, I saw a high-speed universal neural interface that allowed a user to take control of local resources as necessary, and also was capable of downloading memories from an organic platform into something a little more permanent/distributed when that organic platform wasn't viable.
Just because the basis for their technology wasn't the same as ours is not a reason to dismiss it as fantasy - I don't think there was anything in that movie (except, perhaps, ironically, for the near light-speed travel the humans used) that wasn't feasible, or, even, on the near edge of coming to exist, through bio technology.
Right now we have people getting electrodes implanted into their brains that are allowing them to take control of various external devices (robotic limbs, keyboards, etc.) - why is it so hard for you to imagine something a bit more robust and universal, on the organic side? Right now we have researchers working on understanding how human memories and cognition work, and some basic ideas around how to read or store memories - why does it seem unreasonable to you that there might be a way to read out and store memories when an elder dies, so that they might continue to be available (in a limited way) for their people to continue to learn from? Right now we have a massive distributed network that spans the planet and contains pretty much everything that humans know - why does it seem unreasonable to you that an "intelligent" version of this might not be used by a sociaty to help guide them in difficult times, drawing on more information than any one individual could have?
Some pretty bright guy once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic... And if you don't think that was technology, or advanced, just ask yourself who won the war in the movie...
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Please read Heinlein and MOPI and then come back to try to define what Science Fiction is. It can even be argued that Avatar is Hard Science Fiction.
Now, about the movie, to me the problem was that it was so full of clichés, so predictable, that only the beautiful images and the 3D-ness of them were appealing.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
I've been hearing a lot of people making comments that the story in Avatar is not a new story
Any literature teacher will tell you there are no new stories and haven't been for centuries.
A great work is a great great work by virtue of how well the story is told.
( Good writing, good acting, good script, etc )
Shakespeare is often given as an example. None of his plots were original but his works are still valued centuries later.
That being said Avatar is not Shakespeare. It is showcase for next generation special effects like Star Wars or Jurassic Park. Movies like that are rarely enjoyable once you are no longer impressed by the effects......they don't have anything else.
I don't see the message of the film as a problem. You can't have a story without a message. People don't like political messages in their entertainment if they disagree with the politics. Doesn't matter if you are a conservative or a liberal. Everybody reacts like that, few are honest about it.
I think the message in Avatar is a good message to be repeated. Too much of the world operates on the ideas of justice being the will of the stronger and history being written by the victor. I believe that embedding messages like Avatar's in entertainment will encourage respect for all people, whether or not they can bomb the hell out of you.
That can only lead to good things.
Don't forget that Alfred Hitchcock was a North American citizen (since 1956), and made Hollywood movies.
Also: I dare you to predict the end of Primer.
You could have said: modern blockbuster Hollywood movies are predictable, compared with everything else past or present.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Finally, why do entertainers continue to feel that they have to present their beliefs within a movie.
Because movies are a valid and welcomed medium for getting these messages across. I think you're letting Avatar influence your blanket statement above. I've seen this go horribly wrong two ways. You can belabor a belief or political idea in a movie to a point where nobody will be able to stomach it and you can also use such a tired message that most people are sick of hearing it. I haven't seen Avatar mostly because I feared the Fern Gully message so many other posters have mentioned. While the political message is valid, I'm sick of hearing it. Not because I don't care but because I read enough of it in the news.
... okay, I don't have to watch this movie. A shame that Cameron didn't take a more original story and risk it like Star Wars. Or even to tell a similar message about mankind's follies with a more complicated story like District 9 did. But he's James Cameron and the monetary risk was huge so of course we got some Grade F gruel that has been slammed into our gullets fifty times or more. This plot was sure to be labeled 'acceptable' by the public committee on what people will swallow.
This isn't true of all people, some people are going to love Avatar. And for a younger viewer it might be new to them. Fine. In Hollywood, the price for unoriginality is very very small. Too small in my opinion but
If I want to be preached at or listen to political messages, I will go to church or read a newspaper/book. I do not want to see it in movies or hear it at concerts.
Please, I implore you, watch Brazil or Dr. Strangelove. Listen to Bob Dylan or Pete Seeger. Now tell me that those movies and songs wouldn't be the same without those messages. There's an example of people using an artistic medium to get a message across that -- while not always original -- was not tired and was done tastefully. That message actually comprised much of what made them who they are. There's an appropriate way to do it but the artist always risks losing people by baking in a message that is contrary to what some people believe. James Cameron lost very few viewers with his message because it was a safe one. But if it had been more original it would have been brilliant and more timeless.
My work here is dung.
While James Cameron isn't in my top list of directors by a long shot, having seen most (all?) of his movies and now Avatar I have to admit he is a good director. He does the movies he likes and he puts loads of personal effort and risk into them. And he knows how to get the plot, visuals *and* the screenplay right. I said *right* not original or superb. Given, the Avatar plot isn't anything new. Cameron boldfacidly admitted in an interview that it was 'Dances with Wolves' (..Pocahontas/Ferngully/etc. ...) in SF and I, as everyone else, was prepared to see a generic plotline unfold.
But:
I was suprised that the didn't flog a dead horse in terms of stale american cornyness in dialouge. There was a bit to much of that in Abyss and I was surprised that he'd improved on that in leaps and bounds. The play and dialog where simply textbook, no more and no less, but they avoided pressing any issue. It was as if Cameron almost expected one to know the story. And Avatars pacing is excellent, imho. No strange Abyss-like 'Submarine drama turned ET' plot-turns or mood-swings. Just the right amount of action, tension, poetry and subplot you can expect and not to much avantgarde experimenting as not to confuse the target audience, i.e. the masses. The FX are first class and lack the significant botches that disturbed the visual experience in 'Attack of the Clones'. I was prepared for something like that in the 95% CGI movie that Avatar is, and was glad they didn't screw up.
Bottom line: Camerons movies are certainly not top-of-the-line in terms of avantgarde and arthouse, but they are allways a sure bet for a few hours of popcorn-movie fun. Which, as I understand, is his intention. And thus makes him a good director, in my book.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Part of the hype was that Cameron spent 8 bazillion years working on this movie and that's another thing that spoils it, you expect something great and wonderful and almost Star Wars like, but you get another popcorn movie, albeit an expensive one.
Funny true story. StarWars is not original.
Lucas wanted to make a swashbuckling movie, he just put it in space. He hired as a consultant the man who wrote "the Hero with a Thousand Faces", about the commonality of archtypes in stories around the world and throughout history: and Star Wars follows this pattern very rigidly (and repeates it in Empire). Add some scene-for-scene WWII air combat scenes and you have a movie.
Don't get me wrong: I *love* Star Wars. But this complaint that Avatar is not original ignores that noting is original.
I just saw it last weekend, and I gotta say.. Science Fiction? Not much. Science Fantasy is more like it.
Compared to 2001 or 2010 perhaps. Otherwise, Avatar is the most realistic (from the standpoint of physics) SciFi movie I can think of.
They actually made a ship that was mostly fuel and heat radiator, actually had it radiating heat, actually put the crew compartment far from the reactor, and actually travelled slower than light.
They aknowledged a different gravity, and adjusted several scenes accordingly, had the first plant I can remember in a long time with air you can't breathe, and (though they seem to have forgotten the effect in daytime) made creatures that are well camoflogued at night (which is likely the majority of the time since you have both rotational night and "blocked by the parent planet" night).
(DKC was graphically impressive for the SNES but the game underneath all of that was meh. I don't think anybody would have cared for the game if it looked like say Super Mario World and played the same as DKC.
DKC was the best platformer evah. Really. DKL was great too and on the 8-bit Game Boy so graphics wasn't all that important. What made DKC so much better than SMW was that you can run through levels - on the first try - by simply being bold. SMW, Sonic and even the new SMB games puts more emphasis on memorization and figuring out the levels - if I try to play like I do with DKC/DKL I just die and die and die.
SMW did secrets better than DKC though. I remember feeling almost proud at getting that green star while with DKC I stopped playing at 60% I think.
(Not that I disagree that Avatar is more wizzbang than story.)
"Given that the big alternatives were Sherlock Holmes or Alvin & the Chipmunks, I think the winner was clear."
What the heck - Sherlock Holmes was infinitely better. Avatar was nice and all but nowhere near as entertaining, IMO. That comment is damned near trolling! *shakes fist* And get off my lawn!
I'm old, I think the movie was dumb, the last third was exceptionally dumb, and yet it was worth seeing in 3d, if you can see 3d (I know some folks can't).
Your old... truly "new" experiences come along infrequently. This movie is something new visually and the experience can't be duplicated outside of the theatre.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The story was pretty cliché. I'm not sure how Americans see this, but I can usually predict the end of American movies while European or Asian movies are much more unpredictable.
I don't mean to be facetious, but after having seen as many Asian and European movies as American ones, I can usually predict all the standard plots:
American movies -- Hero survives. Villain dies, but there's movement in the ruins in the closing shot.
Asian movies - Hero dies. Villain dies.
European movies - Hero and villain work it out. Or not. But there's usually something involving a mysterious past shared by both.
Check out tvtropes.org BTW.. :)
This was only an American movie in the sense that it was a mainstream "Hollywood" film. The director/writer was a Canadian, the main character and production company owner were both Australians and it was filmed mostly in New Zealand and LA. Seems pretty international to me.
Frankly I am sick and tired of this practice of demonstrating one's fake sophistication on Slashdot by criticizing everything under the sun as being "unoriginal". It is nothing but a circle-jerk of self-important dilettantism.
I don't know what your expectations were when you walked in to watch "Avatar", but mine were both pretty clear and pretty low. I was pleasantly surprised by both the plot, and its execution, including acting mind you.
I went to see it for the aesthetics... because unlike the super sophisticated crowd, I remember that film is a VISUAL art... and I found the world of "Avatar" with the high-tech humanity superimposed on the magical jungle to be absolutely beautiful. "Avatar" was a moving picture, a painting created by hundreds of true artists working for years... an achievement of visual art that the lot of you seem to dismiss in one sentence.
The plot was no more recycled than 99% of other plots. We're not nearly that original as a species, and given that we've already had a couple thousand years of written history, I'll bet you that there is nothing truly original left... only original interpretation of the same kinds of events happening to various people in various situations. It is the execution of the old formula that makes it original or not (see: "Batman Begins" for an example within the realm of cinema).
As a recycled plot, "Avatar" did pretty well. It was compelling on a brute emotional level, and if you bothered to consider that it was condemning everything that made it possible it was actually rather sarcastic.
So please stop. You're not fooling anyone.
Phineas and Ferb proves that you can make it clever enough for both kids and adults. It is brilliant and sometimes I watch it even without my 3 year old. I guess it is the perfect geek cartoon, with all the necessary references.
All in all, Disney/Pixar movies are usually clever enough that I won't get bored watching. And after having to see Cars about a 100 times, that says a lot. But it is so rich in details, that every time (well, maybe in the first 10 times) you will find something you haven't noticed before.
I had a helluva good time watching it -- isn't that all that really matters?
Avatar is getting a lot of criticism because it's so popular. Every movie has flaws that you can pick at; I don't know of a single movie that doesn't have flaws. But a good movie will make you not care about the flaws.
Agreed. I found the 3-d distracting more than additive to the movie. It was neat, but not relevent to the plot.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
So the way they make these movies 3d is putting in blurry backgrounds and forgrounds and the glasses make them clear - so you get a 3d image. The theatre screen is just a flat surface. Given that - what is preventing this movie from being released, in 3d, for your plasma/LCD screen? It would come with 2-4 glasses (the ones at the theatre were of nice construction) and you can get a 3d experience at home.
Anyone, with tech knowledge, can give a laymens answer?
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Seriously, there is not that much good SciFi coming from the studios, so every time there comes _something_ resembling a very good movie, it gets excellent ROI. Who would have guessed? Seriously, the interval for stuff you ought to watch in the genre is stretching to half a year by now (last was star trek - spring, now avatar, next is Iron Man 2 - spring again).. if competition would be like 10-7 years ago, this numbers would not be achievable.
It's actually a sign of very smart marketing, though I don't like that little detail about it: WE ARE ALL SCREWED!
(sorry, I get a little emotional at times when someone approaches me from behind)..
Almost all Pixar movies and most Dreamworks movies are additional proof. However, I think Up was the best movie Pixar has done to date. The beginning was damned emotional... need to get the DVD so I can watch it again.
Actually this isn't true. One of the strategic investments Rupert Murdoch made over the years, along with divesting his media structure to tax havens world-wide, was buying his American citizenship. He has kept the Australian accent though. His trophy wife is a real looker too! She's Chinese which also helps smooth business-relations over there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch#Acquiring_American_Citizenship
The sequel to Avatar,
The earth, royally pissed off at the evil, treacherous natives and especially at the traitorous humans who betrayed humanity, sends a follow up mission.
Three ships show up in orbit, undetected by the planet bound organic techology primitive society, set up and then shell the planet with high-velocity, non nuclear kinetic missiles killing 99% of all life on the planet.
They then take the damned unobtanium which is their birthright and leave an empty husk to the surviving tribes 115 years later. At that point, they allow themselves to feel guilty (a little) and set up a museum honoring the lost Navi culture.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You think Avatar is an adult movie?
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
There's more to that -- did you notice that *all* the animals have six limbs and only the Na'vi have four? Looks to me as if they didn't originate there at all. They came from elsewhere and if you want to have a nice plot, they probably destroyed their home planet, got to Pandora and, having learned their lesson all too well, engineered themselves and the life there to get along perfectly without any visible technology needed anymore.
In the sequel Sully will then discover the old Na'vi spacecraft hidden away somewhere and use it to fight back the returning Earthlings...
Anyway, I'm looking forward to the sequels. I went and saw Avatar a second time after I read up a bit about the background and found it to be an extremely well executed SF movie then. Best I've seen in a long time, really. The story is not really original, but most stories aren't.
The point GP was trying to make was that YOU didn't do anything to the Native Americans. GP did nothing to Native Americans. So what if your great great grandfather was a racist or whatever. The point is, no one alive today was part of that story, so no one alive today should feel guilty about it. Learn from it? Sure! But guilty? Hardly.
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
Why?
The unobtanium is the movie's MacGuffin -- the thing that makes the plot happen, but whose nature is ultimately irrelevant other than that people want it. "Unobtanium" is an engineer's humorous way of referring to a material with desirable properties that either simply doesn't exist, or is so expensive/difficult to obtain that it's infeasible to actually use for what you want.
So when the slimy corporate drone -- who I couldn't help but equate with Paul Riser's character Burke from Aliens, only with more power and the military on his side -- says they're trying to find the "unobtanium" with zero explanation of what it is, and knowing that there's no way they're going to succeed in getting it, well, I saw it as an obvious joke between the director and the audience. And I laughed. What better name for the unobtainable MacGuffin?
I don't understand why geeks are getting their panties in a bunch over a geek joke.
Though while on the one hand not describing its properties enhances its unobtanium-ness, on the other hand it would have been nice to have a throw-away line about it being a superconductor in the movie. It would have made various things in the movie, like the floating mountains, the "vortex" with its problematic "flux", the reference to the moon's powerful magnetic field, and the field-line like formations near the spirit tree come together. Instead it was only after seeing the movie and hearing someone mention that part of the back-story that it all clicked.
The enemies of Democracy are
A shame that Cameron didn't take a more original story and risk it like Star Wars.
I find it interesting that you should mention this, because I found the parallel between Avatar and Star Wars to be striking. Unlike you, I don't find the plot of the 1977 Star Wars movie to be original at all. It was simply that a farm-boy found a message from a princess who was captured by an evil knight and imprisoned in a dark fortress. With the help of a good knight and a pirate, he frees the princess and destroys the fortress before the dark knight can destroy the village.
That's about the most unoriginal story ever. It's been done over and over again since the middle ages. That's not why I loved Star Wars, however. I loved it because the visual spectacle at the time it was created was unlike anything that I had seen before. (I was only 9 years old in 1977, but still ...) Fighting with laser swords is cool! Fast moving spaceships with rapid fire lasers are cool! It had never been done before. The feeling was electric.
As I was watching Avatar at age 41, I got that same feeling. I felt like I was 9 years old again and seeing something absolutely amazing for the first time. The 3D effects were awkward for about the first 15 minutes of the movie, and then I stopped noticing them. The simply became the experience. The computer animation sequences were ridiculously good -- fantastically detailed. I think you can tell, I loved the movie.
Movies don't always have to be story-telling masterpieces. Sometimes they can just take you out of life for a while and put you on a visual roller-coaster ride. This movie did that more successfully than anything that I've seen in a long, long time.
It's Pocahontas / Dances with Wolves, but with really amazing special effects.
It was midichlorians. Happy now?
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
Don't forget the casinos.
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
Most of the people who now bash Avatar used to be Star Wars lunatics in their childhood. I loved Star Wars too, but I can't watch it now without thinking it's very, very silly. And I don't mean the 70's visual effects, but the script.
I watched Avatar a couple of weeks ago. Leaving the silly script fact aside, I felt like I was a kid again, watching Star Wars. So my conclusion is that it's a kids' (maybe teens') movie and should be judged like one.
If you want to see some good acting, go see a play in a theatre.
There will be some that will be put off by the underlying message regarding the western industrialized corporate mentality of dealing death and destruction to other cultures for profit. But, hey, the shoe fits ... we really DO suck in real life ..
If it was a criticism of us (modern U.S.), why did the plot seem like it a could have found a home a couple centuries ago? I think it was more a criticism of a certain universal type of human behavior, than any particular culture or event. Keep in mind, the story was written a decade ago.
If it seems like it's directed at us, it's just because we suffer from the SAME flaws that people have always suffered from. It's worth remembering that many of the characters exhibit the same virtues that people have always displayed, too.