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James Cameron Announces Four Sequels to 'Avatar' (egyptindependent.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In a surprise appearance at CinemaCon, James Cameron announced plans for "a truly massive cinematic process" -- four new sequels to his 2009 blockbuster Avatar, plus a Disney theme park. "It's going to be a true epic saga," Cameron told the audience, promising that Avatar 2 would be released in Christmas of 2018, followed by three additional sequels, for a total of five Avatar-themed movies. Cameron's original sci-fi blockbuster earned $2.8 billion, though at least one Slashdot user argued that its overall message was that technology is bad, "strange because the movie is among most technically sophisticated ever."
Well he engages in a kind-of noble savage fallacy + the obviously retarded "greed (business) is evil". Of course it's OK for James Cameron to hold these views since he has a private jet, 4 houses, a couple of yachts and his own helicopter. The rest of us, no, we're not allowed to cut down trees. My own personal opinion on this is we shouldn't, but that's not the point here. Anyway it's OK if James Cameron wants to build a 5th holiday home. It's just the usual tedious hypocrisy we get from people in the movies.
Never bet against Cameron on a 2nd film:
* Aliens
* Terminator 2
He's one of the few directors that has managed to follow up initial successes with gigantic second films that expand the universe & storyline and don't just milk the first film for extra dollars.
Avatar was a proof of concept.
I'm frankly excited to see what he does when he slows it down and goes deep for another three films.
This could indeed be epic.
Avatar has been rather unfairly maligned, IMHO. Yes, they did some copouts - most notably:
* Making the na'vi more humanlike than the earlier concepts so that audiences would emphasize with them more
* The "white man comes in and saves the natives" plot aspect
But the depth that Cameron went into for the backstory - most of which never showed up in the movie - was impressive. Including something that viewers made fun of about the movie - the term "unobtanium". In the Avatar universe, science had continually been frustrated by all of the potential technologies that could be achieved with a good room-temperature superconductor; long before it was discovered on Pandora, they had jokingly taken to calling the concept unobtanium. When it was actually discovered, the name stuck, reinforced by the difficulty of actually getting it back.
For the biology, Cameron brought a botanist who developed evolutionary trees, developed the mechanism for plant communication, and advised the crew on how botanists would go about studying the environment. For the Na'vi language they brought in a linguist from USC. The Venture Star was based on the Valkyrie interstellar spacecraft concept. And on and on. The level of detail that they went into was impressive, such as how being on a moon orbiting a gas giant would cause unusual color changes over the course of a day, and the effects that this would have on the indigenous populations' culture.
In the backstory to the Avatar universe, the moon quickly gathered scientists' attention because of its abnormally intense magnetic field. Unobtanium is a room-temperature superconductor. Superconductors become flux-pinned in magnetic fields, so floating islands are actually a natural repercussion of such an environment. With plants growing in an environment where they can readily incorporate a superconductor into their biology, extensive usage of electrical messaging between cells would be a very natural evolutionary adaptation. Here on Earth, plants communicate between each other with far lower bandwidth messaging mechanisms available to them, such as pheromones (for example, acacia trees signal to others when they're being eaten so that they can produce more bitter/toxic compounds). The concept that an emergent inter-plant neural network could occur would be not at all unrealistic in such an environment. And if plants have evolved such a network, then it would be to animals' advantages to evolve to tap into it as well - to manipulate it, to gather information, to call for mates over long distances, etc.
I think they did some excellent worldbuilding, but it was poorly served by a lot of poor decisions in the scriptwriting. Even the general plot could have been fine if they had handled it better. Examples:
* Why should a bond between animals be one-way, with the animal becoming basically just a servant of the Na'vi? It would have been interesting if the na'vi riding it became more like the animal as well, taking on the animal's interests as well. If the bonds tend to be characterized by one dominating the other, then why should the Na'vi inherently be at the top of the chain? Surely there would be manipulative parasites, for example. Perhaps the toruk is so dangerous to bond with because it convinces its rider to give up and be eaten.
* They could have had Sully at least *try* to use the Na'vi language more. Maybe this "slow student" won't be giving speeches, but after all this time, he hardly seems to put forth the effort, just an occasional word here and there - yet that doesn't seem to bother anyone much. I know, I get it, it's easier for the audience to hear English than read subtitles....
* Part of the problem with the "white man saves the day" plot is that it's insulting to indiginous peoples, that they can't save themselves and need some white savior who simultaneously assauges "white guilt". But they didn't have to go this way. They could have merely taken an easy copout and not cast
"Well, then fire it up and show me what this..." (sigh)
I look forward to Avatar 2, where the natives discover they can sell Unobtanium for huge prices, and strip mine the planet themselves as they grow more and more addicted to the income.
Then in Avatar 3 they discover the internet, and being literally naturally designed to jack into things every one of them is an epic hacker fighting for control over a wire transfer a reseller is withholding.
Avatar 4 is not quite as good, being a police procedural set under the now armored and smoke-filled limbs of the World Tree with lots of nods to replicants in Blade Runner, but Avatar 5 looks to be awesome - the long awaited Alien Vs. Predator Vs. Avatar.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Avatar was enjoyable enough as optical stimuli but its simplistic moral landscape limited it to not much more than that.
I would have been more compelling if there had been more moral complexity than white Earth men come and abuse gentle and innocent indigenous people in order to extract their minerals.
It reduced both sides to a ridiculous caricature of good versus evil and drained it of any interest.
More compelling would have been some kind of desperate reason for Earth men to be there (some kind of end-of-civilization crisis on Earth) and if the indigenous people had been more complex than they are.
I'm not sure any population ever has been all good, shiny and happy like those blue people. How about internal factions with their own vicious conflict?
As someone else pointed out the msg of Avatar isn't anti technology but more opposed to the kind of neofeudal corporatism that we're all headed into, where the nation state operates at the behest and at the interests of the major multi-nationals. It's interesting seeing a similar msg coming through in such as Mr. Robot and Continuum.
Part of the problem with the "white man saves the day" plot is that it's insulting to indiginous peoples, that they can't save themselves and need some white savior who simultaneously assauges "white guilt". But they didn't have to go this way. They could have merely taken an easy copout and not cast some G.I. Joe clone for the lead role, maybe someone asian or hispanic. Or they could just have fixed the plot and made it realistic: that it's not due to Sully's great skill and bravery that he becomes Toruk Makto and "saves the day" (the natives are surely far better at doing "native stuff" than him); that it's the will of Eywa.
I think you're not giving the white guy enough credit. Any time you're fighting an enemy, especially if that enemy is very different from you, any intelligence (inside information) you can get on that enemy is extremely valuable. The Na'vi aren't stupid, but they're also not a technological species (and arguably because they didn't need to be; they have a great lifestyle as they are as they haven't overpopulated and outgrown their food supply as we humans did before we invented agriculture; basically they live in paradise). They don't have the kind of experience with warfare and combat that we do, and they sure as hell don't have the weaponry we do. But they do have real skills and talents, and then got themselves the most valuable asset of all: a defector from their enemy. There's a big reason the US encouraged defection from the USSR during the cold war: there's no better source of information. And not only did the white guy defect and join their cause, he became like them so he could understand them and communicate with them, so he knew about both sides and was able to use that to the Na'vi's advantage.
The same applies to where the natives seem to care most about what happens to all of the white people rather than their own. Such as after the battle when large numbers are dead or wounded and clustered around the Tree of Souls, but the whole tribe stops everything to hold a big ceremony to try to save Dr. Augustine.
Here again, it's a pretty powerful thing when someone from your enemy's side crosses over to your side, and then sacrifices their life for your cause in battling their own people. Any intelligent tribal species would understand just how significant this is, and accord such a person great respect.