James Cameron's Avatar

I just watched "Wallace in Gromit - A Matter of Loaf and Death" and was delighted to see that it references the Ripley/mech vs queen alien scene from Aliens in several ways.

edit: holy crap, "A Close Shave" was made 15 years ago, I thought it was much more recent.

  On 1/2/2010 at 8:50 PM, JW Modestburns said:

-An advanced alien race like this would obviously have discovered the awesomeness of sideburns, these guys were completely burnless... which is probably why they lost their tree.

Yes, the aliens inexcusable lack of sideburns was one of the major drawbacks of the film for me too

  On 1/2/2010 at 9:19 PM, Plum said:

brother alcofribas' ferngully corpairason has openned my eyes.

Cameron actually pitched the original screenplay to Fox saying the story is similar to "Ferngully"...

yeah "similar".

the story seems to resemble Dune / john carter of mars more than fern gully or dances with wolves. in fact i think it's not even accurate to say that avatar is derivative of either one of those given the fact that both of those movies are extremely derivative in and of themselves

So OK, I've been away from this topic for a couple of weeks. Is the film fuck or shit ? (feel free to interpret which adjective is good and which is bad)

  On 1/3/2010 at 4:11 AM, mcbpete said:

So OK, I've been away from this topic for a couple of weeks. Is the film fuck or shit ? (feel free to interpret which adjective is good and which is bad)

Some people really like it, some people really dont like it. Most people agree that the visuals are amazing.

Going to see it with 'blockbuster movie' expectations seems to help

Here's something I wrote earlier:

  On 12/23/2009 at 1:49 AM, zazen said:

If you're thinking of seeing this movie but are undecided, I'd say that if you enjoyed Cameron's other Sci-fi work you'll definitely enjoy it, although you also need to be able to handle a love story and a bit of enviromentalism and tribalism without giving yourself intellectual indigestion. That is, you don't need to agree with the sentiments exactly, but you need to at least be able to tolerate them as part of the story. If a film with that sort of message is going to just straight out piss you off, then you're not going to like Avatar.

 

Definitely see it in 3D - go for RealD rather than IMax 3D if you're worried about your eyes, its more gentle. But don't be a wuss and go for 2D - for anyone interested in cinema, the experience of the 3D version is worth the very small risk of getting a bit of a headache. The worst case is that you have to walk out and you've wasted a few bucks. But the much more likely outcome is that the visuals will blow your fricking minds, dudes.

I still haven't seen avatar but perhaps its most enduring influence will be raising the visibility of Ferngully, a film I hadn't even heard of before the Avatar hype.

I agree with most of what karmakramer said about it being the landmark visual effects film of today's generation, like Star Wars and Jurassic Park were way back when. Saw it once in 2D, again in 3D, and I will say that 3D is the only appropriate format for this film (that or Blu-Ray at home). It'll be interesting to see how this works out with the major television companies shopping out 3D/HDTVs this year.

i'm too much of a fuck to know how to post a youtube, even though qhaosmachine gave me instructions:

3d, it was worth the 15 dollars. Hated the seat I was in though. Massive wedgy the whole time. Legs falling asleep. 3 hours. Some theaters are really uncomfortable

  On 1/2/2010 at 7:23 PM, Plum said:

  On 1/2/2010 at 7:20 PM, Hoodie said:

the 3d gave me a headache and i puked when i got home.

 

me too, minus the puking.

.

Yeah , I took Dramamine before the movie. It helped a lot

  On 1/4/2010 at 3:22 AM, Alcofribas said:

i'm too much of a fuck to know how to post a youtube, even though qhaosmachine gave me instructions:

 

hahaha, thats awesome

I watched District 9 again last night and it made me remember just how LAME Avatar is... in particular, compare the mech suite thing from Avatar and District 9... the one from Avatar looks like a joke in comparrison... if it was the 90's it MIGHT have looked cool but we've moved on since then. And the CG on those things in Avatar looks like the Starship Troopers cartoon series, the CG on the District 9 robot is FLAWLESS. It just looks REAL, and by todays standards, you shouldn't have to walk out of a cinema thinking "the CG was pretty good" because good examples of CG go by un-noticed.

That said... I haven't watched the special features of District 9 yet so if any of the shots of that robot turn out to be a real puppet/animatronic then that last part of the argument is redundant :P

  On 1/4/2010 at 11:39 AM, Springymajig said:

I watched District 9 again last night and it made me remember just how LAME Avatar is... in particular, compare the mech suite thing from Avatar and District 9... the one from Avatar looks like a joke in comparrison... if it was the 90's it MIGHT have looked cool but we've moved on since then. And the CG on those things in Avatar looks like the Starship Troopers cartoon series, the CG on the District 9 robot is FLAWLESS. It just looks REAL, and by todays standards, you shouldn't have to walk out of a cinema thinking "the CG was pretty good" because good examples of CG go by un-noticed.

 

That said... I haven't watched the special features of District 9 yet so if any of the shots of that robot turn out to be a real puppet/animatronic then that last part of the argument is redundant :P

I think the point of your post is: Weta is overrated, and in many areas I'd agree. They have a strong character team, but their lighting, rendering, compositing, and animation leave much to be desired.

  On 1/4/2010 at 11:39 AM, Springymajig said:

I watched District 9 again last night and it made me remember just how LAME Avatar is... in particular, compare the mech suite thing from Avatar and District 9... the one from Avatar looks like a joke in comparrison... if it was the 90's it MIGHT have looked cool but we've moved on since then. And the CG on those things in Avatar looks like the Starship Troopers cartoon series, the CG on the District 9 robot is FLAWLESS. It just looks REAL, and by todays standards, you shouldn't have to walk out of a cinema thinking "the CG was pretty good" because good examples of CG go by un-noticed.

 

That said... I haven't watched the special features of District 9 yet so if any of the shots of that robot turn out to be a real puppet/animatronic then that last part of the argument is redundant :P

that is an interesting observation. my experience is quite the contrary though. every single CGI from District 9 seemed much much worse than those in Avatar. god, how i hated that movie, District 9 i mean.

The animation in avatar is flawless. The robot design wasn't terribly inventive but it was plausible, if you look close you see all the little gears and sticks enabling its movement, I thought that was really cool.

I really, really enjoyed district 9 and in many ways it's a much more mature film than avatar, but I don't think it's a good comparison. District 9 is focused on gritty realism and a pretty grim and dark drama overall. I loved it for that, despite the cheesy mockumentary intro and the pyrrhic ending. I mean the film was good but it was so fucking grim. I don't need to watch a movie to feel bad about humanity.

Avatar is about good old fashioned film magic. It's much more difficult making a sparkling colorful environment look real. The matte painting and environmental design is close to flawless. All they did in District 9 was chuck a couple bug looking things into a shanty town. The gore added realism but i honestly thought it was exaggerated.

The musical score was miles better than in avatar, but you have to realize less than 1% of everyone that sees the film will recognize James Horner's laziness.

Also, I'm tired of these arguments that you have to be immature to enjoy Avatar. My 16 year old nephew, who's into all the new stupid star wars franchises like clone wars, he absolutely HATED avatar and LOVED district 9.

I think you need to have experienced the context of the last 20 years of film making, maybe even the entire history of films to recognize what a rarity Avatar is, in that it takes you back to the magic of old films while being ground breaking at the same time.

I haven't seen avatar so I'm talking out of my ass...but there was definitely a lot of highly questionable animation in the first trailer. Even in the thanator chase trailer there is one wonky "floaty" animation when it bites his backpack and shakes him around. But I suppose a lot of people wouldn't notice.

the mech in District 9 was waaay more bad ass and also looked more photo realistic to me

and to say the animations in avatar are "flawless" is pretty insane to me for a lot of reasons

I'd say its flawless in its own context. Which is still kinda cartoonish and unreal.

you could say the animations are good but flawless??? nooooooo, there were many moments that I could instantly tell where the animations could have been improved

animation is pretty much flawless

.....that's not even technically animation though right?? that supposedly motion capture from the head cam's? head cam's that apparently didn't like sigourney weavers face and should have been animated

  On 1/4/2010 at 2:08 PM, karmakramer said:

animation is pretty much flawless

that's mocap. They do a great job with mocap. There are only a few problems - when blending between mocap anims, when blending between mocap and keyframe anim, and when it's pure keyframe. For example take the sequence in the thanator chase where he gets grabbed by his backpack and has to unbuckle it. It's possible that parts of that were handled by mocap - for all I know they rigged a stuntman up to some metal bar and flung him around - but it can't have been perfect. And I don't think it was actually handled that way, it would just be too challenging to have a rig swinging some guy back and forth in a harness in a realistic manner, have him unbuckle himself at exactly the right moment to fly across the room and land on some pads. I think it's far more likely they just keyframed the whole sequence, and it shows. The guy is all "floaty" in the backpack straps; the weight of his body is not convincing.

lumpenprol is no dumby, listen up kids