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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.
Am I the only one?
I'd like to see a director's cut when this goes to DVD. I know Cameron had an extremely rich back story, and most of it didn't make the cut to get into the movie, since it weighed in at 2 hours 40 minutes long. I also think it would help flesh out a story that was somewhat bland. Ah, who am I kidding? I wanna see more bad-ass CGI explosions. Screw the plot, bring on the blue alien sex.
I bring nothing to the table.
I just came home from seeing Avatar in 3D and I must say it rivals Watchmen in sheer visual splendor. The story is a bit predictable, but I didnt really think about that until afterwards because I was so immersed in this beautiful world Cameron has created. It could have used a better soundtrack but then it would have been a completely different movie. Definetly worth the money, and well worth seeing again on the big screen.
I disagree with the "not science fiction" thing, the fact that they didnt combobulate the parallell deflectors and set phasers to stun but instead treated technology as an everyday occurence makes it more believable. The idea of the planet as a network is neat as well, one can imagine the whole thing as a Post-Singularity society, with a sentient network of biological entities as the collective conciousness of the planet.
Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infra-red, How I hate the night.
I watched it twice.
The "science" part of the science fiction was actually a subplot running throughout the movie. The biologists were studying electrochemical links between trees from the beginning of the movie. I picked up more on that the second time through.
It's a direct rip off from Asimov's Foundation series. The Gaia concept presented in the latter part of that series shares an enormous similarities with this movie.
But I wouldn't consider it fantasy in any sense. They try to root it in the scientifically plausible, yet unlikely, ideas.
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I don't go see movies very often but this is one film that I was very happy to see in theaters. I realized about 20 minutes into the alien world that it was well worth the money to see it now - I don't think even the nicest BluRay player and HDTV can faithfully reproduce all of the computer generated detail they packed into this film.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
My wife called it "dances with wolves" meets "fern gully" in 200 years. I thought some of the plant & animal life was really clever. I was also really glad they didn't try to make all the novel things logical - they never attempted an explanation of the flying rocks, which I think is good. The planetary neural network idea has been done an awful lot, but I think it worked just fine. The word unobtainium is still utterly ridiculous (seriously guys?), but it wasn't featured too prominently.
The aliens are still too stiff, their faces are too uniform, their movements are too smooth - they need pores, facial hair, creases, loose skin, etc - but it is still the best I've seen. Some of the new humaniod features were imaginative, like the neural connection in the pony tail, but overall the alients were pretty standard - "good" aliens must look human for us to identify with them, they must have the same mannerisms (e.g. identical emotions), and other real differences must be superficial. For example, the aliens were more like humans than the Indians in "Dances with Wolves" were like Costner, a movie which shares a number of connections with Avatar. I suppose if I want imaginative, I should just go watch La planète sauvage.
Overall though, I think this movie marks the latest in the "spectacle over plot" shift in filmmaking. Cameron has always been at the forefront of this change, right there with Michael Bay, so I should've expected it, but so it goes. Avatar did have a lot more plot than Transformers, GI Joe, and some other recently popular films, but it was still simpler than the Cat in the Hat - subtle & not-so-subtle political statements notwithstanding. Between visual effect and good writing, I'll take the latter, but why can't we have both?
The scenery was cool, but not all that impressive. If you've ever played the Myst series of games, you'll know that striking visuals and landscapes like that have been done before. In fact, my first reaction on seeing Pandora was that it looked just like something I'd expect to see in Riven, and that's nearly a decade old.
The graphics were...ok. Sorry, but I really expected better. The cgi rendered reflections in the soldiers' face masks was a nice detail touch, but it made them look artificial. No stray strands of hair, 'flat' skin (just texture, not topographically modeled), and odd lighting effects looked unnatural.
The physics weren't all that great either. Turn your hand around quickly and you'll notice it 'jiggles' for a moment after you stop it. Not in the movie.. flesh didn't behave as I expected. Watch closely in the background when they are climbing up to choose their flying mounts, you'll notice their movements look like insects. We're introduced to scarface while he's lifting weights so he can keep in shape in the 'low gravity', and yet I saw no low gravity effects.
The sounds were the killer though. Whoever did the sound effects needs to be fired (upon). All of the flying craft used ducted fans for propulsion, and yet they all made the sounds of a helicopter. That, to me was the most distracting element, especially because there were so many scenes with flying craft.
It was good, yes. But not great. It was't realistic enough for me to believe... I kept getting jarred back to reality by the incongruities. You notice something isn't quite right, and maybe you can't put you finger on it, but it still nags at the back of your mind to remind you it's fake. And all of that could be forgiven if the story were compelling enough, but I've read too many similar 'persecuted aliens' stories to be impressed. It was, at least, worth the price of admission, which is something I find is all too rare these days.