Abaddon
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Its still a beautiful spectacle to enjoy... worth the entry fee imo.
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Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
I had no problem escaping reality while watching Avvie. But am I reading you right Basket, that you haven't seen the movie?
edit: I really don't give a crap about any links to reality James Cameron wanted to stick in his movie, since I happily ignore them when I am enjoying a visual spectacle.
edit 2: I also saw the Southpark, Dances with Smurfs, Cartman = Glenn Beck episode just a few days ago for the second time. Only this time I had seen avatar. I
'ed
edit: I really don't give a crap about any links to reality James Cameron wanted to stick in his movie, since I happily ignore them when I am enjoying a visual spectacle.
edit 2: I also saw the Southpark, Dances with Smurfs, Cartman = Glenn Beck episode just a few days ago for the second time. Only this time I had seen avatar. I
'ed
Bast
Protector of Cats
LOL there are plenty of films that address social issues. Some of them hit it heads on, others are more subtle and some use fantasy/sci-fi. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Patroklos
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I finally saw it. Only now, six weeks after the movie came out, was I able to get a ticket into my city's 3D IMAX theatre. I refused to see it any other way due to this thread.
THE GOOD
The CG was impressive. I noticed a lot of blending of physical props and CG at times and unlike most movies the transitions are not blatantly obvious. I only saw them because I was looking for them and once I stopped I never noticed them again.
The 3D was amazing. While I did notice a few cheap blurring tricks as was mentioned earlier in the thread, all in all I was extremely impressed. Sometimes I felt they pushed it too far and when the images got popped really far off the screen they got blurry and disorientating, but that probably has more to do with my viewing angle in the theater.
What really didn't get any accolades is the physical props. Just like in Aliens, Cameron understands how to make future machinery and environments that consist or more than just illuminated panels and polished surfaces. Thinks like the gunship and those smaller helicopter things looked real and functional just like the landing craft and APC from Aliens.
THE BAD
The story sucked, at every level.
1.) First of all the Navi are probably one of the greatest Mary Sues of all time. It is quite obvious that they were set up as some utopian society that humans could only hope to emulate. However, what exactly is supposed to be so great about a hereditary theocratic monarchy dominated by a warrior culture? This is the problem with idealized native societies, namely that in real life their functioning societies and mores are absolutely repulsive to any liberal thinking modern first world citizen. Despite them trying ti import the personalities of mid 90s Manhattan yuppies so that we can relate to the main Navi characters, there are no redeeming qualities about Navi society.
2.) The Navi are nothing but a big racial stereotype. The nobal savage warrior in love with the environment who never does anything that is motivated by the same base goals of their technologically superior rivals
Its the same thing people do to the Native Americans and it is just as stupid.
3.) There is no evolutionary mechanism that could create that whole biological link thing they do. I had suspended my disbelief until that whole Navi smurf porn thing. They took it too far.
4.) Apparently the Navi have warriors, warriors, warriors, and a priestess. No body makes baskets or pottery, nobody is growing or preparing food, no teachers, no functioning economy of any sort. So why are we supposed to believe the Navi are anything other than a brutal warrior culture dominated by blood lust? Their whole society, as seen on screen, is nothing but warrior
and the simple fact of the matter is that you do not have a society composed entirely of effective warriors unless you have lots of practice at it.
5.) They are quite clear that in order to attain manhood you have to become a warrior, so apparently there are no other respected male professions. It must really suck to not finish training, but then apparently that’s not a problem because if you don't you are simply killed by the dragon creatures. What an awesome enlightened culture they have there. Notice there were no women involved in this test, so apparently it is a patriarchal society too.
6.) I suspended my disbelief on the whole "everything is interconnected" thing, until apparently the trees can sense, select, follow, and then communicate remotely with seeds to sense, select, and follow CONCIOUSLY an new alien dude. Notice there was never any explanation as to why this is, so we are left with the conclusion that god did it, or that Pandora is a giant CONCIOUS collective mind, or that Pandora is a giant CONCIOUS mind that can just manipulate any of its denizens at will.
7.) What’s with the whole body switch thing? Are there so many other humanoid sentient creatures of another species on Pandora that they have been able to developed a codified practice of doing this and apparently it is so common that it isn't considered anything that out of the ordinary?
And more disturbingly, do the Navi normally have random bodies without at dedicated consciousness to use for this purpose anyway? Or do they just let the hereditary elite steal the body from poor proles? Either way the implications of this are horrendous and disgusting, and if I has inclined to feel any empathy for the Navi before it wouldn't have survived ths.
8.) So according to the back story these spaceships transporting everything between Earth and Pandora are the greatest achievement of mankind. Yet despite the obvious implication of this being that it would require the collective efforts of planet wide industry and intelligence supposedly there was no government involvement whatsoever. And despite it being a first contact event with the significance being obvious, not ONE government official of any sort is present whatsoever. In Alien and Aliens this was sort of excusable because space travel was not a new and novel thing and there was a coverup, but no such plot mechanism exists in this movie.
9.) So the Navi are on top of the biggest deposit within 200km eh? Thats nice, but that also means there are OTHER deposits within 200km. But hey, why worry about those, lets just go ahead and slaughter the first INTELLIGENT ALIEN LIFE FORM HUMANITY HAS EVER ENCOUNTERED INSTEAD even thought there is apparently no need. The Navi are a preindustrialized primitive society, what is there planet wide population, 100 million? The point is, are you telling me that there are no deposits on the entire planet that don't have a Navi city built on top of it? I can drive 200km in an hour and half, these guys have orbital travel capability.
10.) In conjunction with #9, once the motivations of your antagonists become comical in constuction and simply illogical to boot, the movie loses all pretense of seriousness in its themes which was obvioulsy a concern of the director. Eventually the villians of this movie end up with the debth of Captain Hook or Dr. Evil and at that point the viewer stops careing about them. Once I don't care about them, I don't care if they are defeated and consequently I don't care if the hero win. A good villian has a logical motive for his actions that the audience can empathize with even if they don't agree with it, which it turn makes them that much more dangerous because you can in fact see the logic in their actions. This was not present in this film.
11.) The little chopper things were copied straight out of HALO3.
12.) The weaponry makes no sense, and my criticisms from earlier in the thread still stand. There is no high rise structure on earth that we can't easily blow over with a minimum of munitions right now, why is this tree so special. It is made of wood, period, its structure is irrelevant. As we see in the movie the human weapons have no trouble bowing wood into splinters as one would expect, so the whole "find me the structural flaws" thing was a LAME plot device. Hell, don't blow up the tree, just burn the damn thing to a cider. This is obviously possible, as the movie shows.
13.) More villain retardedness. So, the reason for not just forcibly moving the natives or simply nuking them from orbit in the first place is the bad press. Yet, they decide to do just that by the most messy means possible
14.) Why did they use an orbital transport, EASILY the most valuable piece of equipment they have with no defensive armament or armor, as a bomber? The gunship was more than capable of fulfilling the same function. ANSWER: "We have this really cool model that we only got to use once, lets get some more mileage out of it." As always, making illogical decisions with no connection to plot necessity yields stupid story telling.
15.) While we are on the topic of orbital transports, THEY ARE ORBITAL, or in other words they can FLY REALLY HIGH. Perhaps the other vehicles being rotary have low cielings by design, but the orbital transport could have tropped tha payload from tens of thousands of feet. And before you say it...
16.) You are right, it would be hard to hit a single spot with an unguided mass of mining charges from a dozen angels, but why would you do that anyway? The weapons we see on the gunship are more than capable of performing the task, so just laser guide a dozen of those in from a dozen angels. And spare me the whole "they probably don't have that weaponry!," BS, they are obviously not wanting for access to weapons.
17) The Mechs make no sense. This is not surprising, because the NEVER make sense the way Hollywood depicts them. For one, they have a giant freaking window. Not a vision slot, not even a porthole, A GIANT FREAKING WINDOW. What the hell is the point of an armored armed to the teeth mech if I have a widow the size of my car windshield exposing almost my entire body? You could literally defeat the whole contraption with a well aimed rock thrown to the head not to mention arrows or the weaponry of Earth!
18.) Speaking of windows, apparently they are selectively permeable to arrows, sometimes they bounce off harmlessly, sometimes the sail right through. It must depend on the humidity, or more likely on whether Cameron can be bothered to actually come up with a logical sequence or not.
19.) Back to the mechs, what exactly was the purpose of the ground sequence of the final battle. We are given no objective, their existance has no connection to the stated strategy of the Colonel, they are literally there for no reason.
20.) I get it, Navi animals are really strong, and some have really thick armor. I get that, and I am willing to accept that the 7.62mm ammunition of Jack's M240 won't hurt those hammerhead buffalo looking things as implausible as that sound. I am not willing to accept, however, that what looks to be a 30mm cannon would not only fail to penetrate the creature’s skin, but als fail to totally splatter the damn thing around the jungle. A .50 call using armor piercing ammo can shoot through 1 inch of steal armor plate, a 30mm round is almost twice the diameter and several times the weight. There is simply no possibility of any creature of any sort withstanding the fire power of those power suits.
21.) So, we have these giant power suits, suits that we crush metal structures with their bare hands and knock down trees, but when engaging in a firefight with a worn out and wounded Navi named Jake, that Navi can parry the blows in a LAME swordfight with ease, not once being particularly overpowered by the suits supposedly overwhelming mechanical advantage. LAME LAME LAME.
22.) Now to Cameron's credit, despite all the hand wringing and lame plot devices the humans win. The Navi armies are crushed and retreating, and the makeshift bomb is about to be dropped. So what happens? Well, we are introduced to the most lame plot device in the history of plot devices. The planet itself decides to attack the humans. No mechanism for this is given, we are never told that the planet has the ability to make conscious decisions, let alone that it has to ability to communicate intimately and COMMAND all the creatures on the planet, including those dragon things who have no way of being connected to that network thing. LAME LAME LAME. I repeat, LAME LAME LAME.
And I have run out of time, more later maybe.
THE GOOD
The CG was impressive. I noticed a lot of blending of physical props and CG at times and unlike most movies the transitions are not blatantly obvious. I only saw them because I was looking for them and once I stopped I never noticed them again.
The 3D was amazing. While I did notice a few cheap blurring tricks as was mentioned earlier in the thread, all in all I was extremely impressed. Sometimes I felt they pushed it too far and when the images got popped really far off the screen they got blurry and disorientating, but that probably has more to do with my viewing angle in the theater.
What really didn't get any accolades is the physical props. Just like in Aliens, Cameron understands how to make future machinery and environments that consist or more than just illuminated panels and polished surfaces. Thinks like the gunship and those smaller helicopter things looked real and functional just like the landing craft and APC from Aliens.
THE BAD
The story sucked, at every level.
1.) First of all the Navi are probably one of the greatest Mary Sues of all time. It is quite obvious that they were set up as some utopian society that humans could only hope to emulate. However, what exactly is supposed to be so great about a hereditary theocratic monarchy dominated by a warrior culture? This is the problem with idealized native societies, namely that in real life their functioning societies and mores are absolutely repulsive to any liberal thinking modern first world citizen. Despite them trying ti import the personalities of mid 90s Manhattan yuppies so that we can relate to the main Navi characters, there are no redeeming qualities about Navi society.
2.) The Navi are nothing but a big racial stereotype. The nobal savage warrior in love with the environment who never does anything that is motivated by the same base goals of their technologically superior rivals
Its the same thing people do to the Native Americans and it is just as stupid.3.) There is no evolutionary mechanism that could create that whole biological link thing they do. I had suspended my disbelief until that whole Navi smurf porn thing. They took it too far.
4.) Apparently the Navi have warriors, warriors, warriors, and a priestess. No body makes baskets or pottery, nobody is growing or preparing food, no teachers, no functioning economy of any sort. So why are we supposed to believe the Navi are anything other than a brutal warrior culture dominated by blood lust? Their whole society, as seen on screen, is nothing but warrior
and the simple fact of the matter is that you do not have a society composed entirely of effective warriors unless you have lots of practice at it. 5.) They are quite clear that in order to attain manhood you have to become a warrior, so apparently there are no other respected male professions. It must really suck to not finish training, but then apparently that’s not a problem because if you don't you are simply killed by the dragon creatures. What an awesome enlightened culture they have there. Notice there were no women involved in this test, so apparently it is a patriarchal society too.
6.) I suspended my disbelief on the whole "everything is interconnected" thing, until apparently the trees can sense, select, follow, and then communicate remotely with seeds to sense, select, and follow CONCIOUSLY an new alien dude. Notice there was never any explanation as to why this is, so we are left with the conclusion that god did it, or that Pandora is a giant CONCIOUS collective mind, or that Pandora is a giant CONCIOUS mind that can just manipulate any of its denizens at will.
7.) What’s with the whole body switch thing? Are there so many other humanoid sentient creatures of another species on Pandora that they have been able to developed a codified practice of doing this and apparently it is so common that it isn't considered anything that out of the ordinary?
And more disturbingly, do the Navi normally have random bodies without at dedicated consciousness to use for this purpose anyway? Or do they just let the hereditary elite steal the body from poor proles? Either way the implications of this are horrendous and disgusting, and if I has inclined to feel any empathy for the Navi before it wouldn't have survived ths.
8.) So according to the back story these spaceships transporting everything between Earth and Pandora are the greatest achievement of mankind. Yet despite the obvious implication of this being that it would require the collective efforts of planet wide industry and intelligence supposedly there was no government involvement whatsoever. And despite it being a first contact event with the significance being obvious, not ONE government official of any sort is present whatsoever. In Alien and Aliens this was sort of excusable because space travel was not a new and novel thing and there was a coverup, but no such plot mechanism exists in this movie.
9.) So the Navi are on top of the biggest deposit within 200km eh? Thats nice, but that also means there are OTHER deposits within 200km. But hey, why worry about those, lets just go ahead and slaughter the first INTELLIGENT ALIEN LIFE FORM HUMANITY HAS EVER ENCOUNTERED INSTEAD even thought there is apparently no need. The Navi are a preindustrialized primitive society, what is there planet wide population, 100 million? The point is, are you telling me that there are no deposits on the entire planet that don't have a Navi city built on top of it? I can drive 200km in an hour and half, these guys have orbital travel capability.
10.) In conjunction with #9, once the motivations of your antagonists become comical in constuction and simply illogical to boot, the movie loses all pretense of seriousness in its themes which was obvioulsy a concern of the director. Eventually the villians of this movie end up with the debth of Captain Hook or Dr. Evil and at that point the viewer stops careing about them. Once I don't care about them, I don't care if they are defeated and consequently I don't care if the hero win. A good villian has a logical motive for his actions that the audience can empathize with even if they don't agree with it, which it turn makes them that much more dangerous because you can in fact see the logic in their actions. This was not present in this film.
11.) The little chopper things were copied straight out of HALO3.
12.) The weaponry makes no sense, and my criticisms from earlier in the thread still stand. There is no high rise structure on earth that we can't easily blow over with a minimum of munitions right now, why is this tree so special. It is made of wood, period, its structure is irrelevant. As we see in the movie the human weapons have no trouble bowing wood into splinters as one would expect, so the whole "find me the structural flaws" thing was a LAME plot device. Hell, don't blow up the tree, just burn the damn thing to a cider. This is obviously possible, as the movie shows.
13.) More villain retardedness. So, the reason for not just forcibly moving the natives or simply nuking them from orbit in the first place is the bad press. Yet, they decide to do just that by the most messy means possible
14.) Why did they use an orbital transport, EASILY the most valuable piece of equipment they have with no defensive armament or armor, as a bomber? The gunship was more than capable of fulfilling the same function. ANSWER: "We have this really cool model that we only got to use once, lets get some more mileage out of it." As always, making illogical decisions with no connection to plot necessity yields stupid story telling.
15.) While we are on the topic of orbital transports, THEY ARE ORBITAL, or in other words they can FLY REALLY HIGH. Perhaps the other vehicles being rotary have low cielings by design, but the orbital transport could have tropped tha payload from tens of thousands of feet. And before you say it...
16.) You are right, it would be hard to hit a single spot with an unguided mass of mining charges from a dozen angels, but why would you do that anyway? The weapons we see on the gunship are more than capable of performing the task, so just laser guide a dozen of those in from a dozen angels. And spare me the whole "they probably don't have that weaponry!," BS, they are obviously not wanting for access to weapons.
17) The Mechs make no sense. This is not surprising, because the NEVER make sense the way Hollywood depicts them. For one, they have a giant freaking window. Not a vision slot, not even a porthole, A GIANT FREAKING WINDOW. What the hell is the point of an armored armed to the teeth mech if I have a widow the size of my car windshield exposing almost my entire body? You could literally defeat the whole contraption with a well aimed rock thrown to the head not to mention arrows or the weaponry of Earth!
18.) Speaking of windows, apparently they are selectively permeable to arrows, sometimes they bounce off harmlessly, sometimes the sail right through. It must depend on the humidity, or more likely on whether Cameron can be bothered to actually come up with a logical sequence or not.
19.) Back to the mechs, what exactly was the purpose of the ground sequence of the final battle. We are given no objective, their existance has no connection to the stated strategy of the Colonel, they are literally there for no reason.
20.) I get it, Navi animals are really strong, and some have really thick armor. I get that, and I am willing to accept that the 7.62mm ammunition of Jack's M240 won't hurt those hammerhead buffalo looking things as implausible as that sound. I am not willing to accept, however, that what looks to be a 30mm cannon would not only fail to penetrate the creature’s skin, but als fail to totally splatter the damn thing around the jungle. A .50 call using armor piercing ammo can shoot through 1 inch of steal armor plate, a 30mm round is almost twice the diameter and several times the weight. There is simply no possibility of any creature of any sort withstanding the fire power of those power suits.
21.) So, we have these giant power suits, suits that we crush metal structures with their bare hands and knock down trees, but when engaging in a firefight with a worn out and wounded Navi named Jake, that Navi can parry the blows in a LAME swordfight with ease, not once being particularly overpowered by the suits supposedly overwhelming mechanical advantage. LAME LAME LAME.
22.) Now to Cameron's credit, despite all the hand wringing and lame plot devices the humans win. The Navi armies are crushed and retreating, and the makeshift bomb is about to be dropped. So what happens? Well, we are introduced to the most lame plot device in the history of plot devices. The planet itself decides to attack the humans. No mechanism for this is given, we are never told that the planet has the ability to make conscious decisions, let alone that it has to ability to communicate intimately and COMMAND all the creatures on the planet, including those dragon things who have no way of being connected to that network thing. LAME LAME LAME. I repeat, LAME LAME LAME.
And I have run out of time, more later maybe.
Patroklos
Deity
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No, they can not make "decisions" or any sort. They react to stimulus, but there is no concious decison makeing going on whatsoever. Unless you can find me a stimulus that leads to the exact reaction of "attack human airship at altitude 3085 m, 12.23.45Nx34.45.32W,"
There is only one thing that can lead to what we saw, and that is a planetwide intelligent conciousness, and people really don't want to go there because it would make the whole enterprise ******** beyond belief.
Even I enjoyed the movie with all its faults, if I ever find out Cameron had a planetwide conciousness as a stated thematic goal I will dismiss the moive out of hand.
Oh yeah, it is a Fern Gully remake, there is very little that is original in this movie.
There is only one thing that can lead to what we saw, and that is a planetwide intelligent conciousness, and people really don't want to go there because it would make the whole enterprise ******** beyond belief.
Even I enjoyed the movie with all its faults, if I ever find out Cameron had a planetwide conciousness as a stated thematic goal I will dismiss the moive out of hand.
Oh yeah, it is a Fern Gully remake, there is very little that is original in this movie.
Patroklos
Deity
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Who said anything about plants. Did you miss the part where the ANIMALS of Pandora turn agains the humans en masse?
If you want to believe the oak trees around you are making a decision to drop their leaves in the fall so be it.
Patroklos
Deity
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If the idea of a planet god doesn't seem ridiculously out of place to you given the rest of the moive, fine.
I am glad you think your slinky is making a decision to go down the stairs. It must make it a far more entertaining experiance for you that it was for me.
Conciousness is the concept you are looking for:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
MobBoss
Off-Topic Overlord
Actually, the female lead was flying one, so it should be assumed she passed the test, yes?
Hehe.
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
You must be a fun guy to go to the movies. Did you also notice none of the animals/human/humanlike creatures ever took a dump? Or made a mistake while speaking. Everyone analysing the movie this way is just as bad as James Cameron trying to deliver a message. Of course it is a Fern Gully remake. It is supposed to be. The gentle art of sitting back and just enjoying a movie really is lost on most people.
How much fun would Aliens have been if they indeed had dropped a nuke from orbit about half an hour into the movie?
(Post reads a little different than I intended to deliver it. Should have been more tongue in cheek
)
Patroklos
Deity
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She is royalty, that would be like claiming the experiances of Queen Elizabeth should be extrapolated to the whole of England.
That does remind me though, the Navi practice forced betrothal. What an awsome idealic society...
Patroklos
Deity
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You must be a fun guy to go to the movies. Did you also notice none of the animals/human/humanlike creatures ever took a dump? Or made a mistake while speaking. Everyone analysing the movie this way is just as bad as James Cameron trying to deliver a message. Of course it is a Fern Gully remake. It is supposed to be. The gentle art of sitting back and just enjoying a movie really is lost on most people.
I said I enjoyed the movie. But most of the mistakes I said are not key to the plot. They could have removed most of them without changing the movie all that much, they just chose to cut corners or hand wave instead of putting the work in to actually create logical reasons for the events they depict of the decisions the characters make.
For instance, why couldn't the Navi have been on top of the ONLY unubtanium deposit on Pandora, or the only one left?
If you want your movies to improve in quality you have to point these things out. Every time you accept wholesale what is given to you the next time they make a movie they will cut even more corners. I think this trend is pretty obvious.
I think that would have been pretty cool. They of course had a real and logical reason for why that didn't happen in movie though.
(Post reads a little different than I intended to deliver it. Should have been more tongue in cheek
I know I am a nitpicky guy, I embrace it
MobBoss
Off-Topic Overlord
There were other female flyers though too. You didnt notice?
JtheJackal
Emperor
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Thank you! I can never understand how people can be nitpicky about "logic" and then go on to wonder why they don't bomb they from orbit as if the entire human race are a bunch of genocidal maniacs.
Monkeyfinger
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