James Cameron's Avatar

i am really not happy about James Cameron adapting anime for the screen , please james cameron more of your own stories

Am I the only one who thought the visuals were as patchy as the story? The environments were all amazing but the Navi designs are TERRIBLE, and the CG on them just didn't look real in the slightest... They just looked like silly videogame characters.

The 3D was incredible though.

I'm looking forward to Battle Angel actually finally being made. I don't think he's ever gonna pull off something as awesome as Aliens or T2 ever again, so I don't mind that he's adapting something instead of coming up with something new.

  On 12/22/2009 at 10:49 PM, Springymajig said:

, and the CG on them just didn't look real in the slightest... They just looked like silly videogame characters.

 

well let me ask you then, have you seen any CGI of humans or humanoid people that has ever impressed you or looked real to you?

id like to see examples of what you consider realistic looking cg humans/humanoids

the only part that looked bad was when the female navi picked up jake sully. they didnt seem connected at all.

  On 12/22/2009 at 11:05 PM, Benedict Cumberbatch said:

the only part that looked bad was when the female navi picked up jake sully. they didnt seem connected at all.

i was rather moved by this. it was all motherly and shit.

  On 12/22/2009 at 10:56 PM, Awepittance said:

  On 12/22/2009 at 10:49 PM, Springymajig said:

, and the CG on them just didn't look real in the slightest... They just looked like silly videogame characters.

 

 

well let me ask you then, have you seen any CGI of humans or humanoid people that has ever impressed you or looked real to you?

id like to see examples of what you consider realistic looking cg humans/humanoids

I bet you said the same thing about Gollum back then lol.

i dont remember what i said back then but i definitely wasn't as impressed with Gollum as i was with everything in the movie Avatar. Im asking the question to see where the standards reside at, if this person has absolutely never been impressed by any CGI rendition of a human or humanoid, then at least i know where they are coming from.

  On 12/23/2009 at 12:20 AM, Fred McGriff said:

  On 12/22/2009 at 11:05 PM, Benedict Cumberbatch said:

the only part that looked bad was when the female navi picked up jake sully. they didnt seem connected at all.

 

i was rather moved by this. it was all motherly and shit.

me too ...

it was all emotional and shit yeah but visually when she picked him up he moved in an unexpected way. didnt mesh to my tired eyes

the whole little guy inside a giant metal suit is hopefully done now. please no more. aliens, district 9, iron man, avatar, etc etc. leave it out.

but saying that when the bad guy was on fire and he climbed in i wish wish wish he wouldnt have put it out. would have been great to see him on fire and fighting.

  Quote

Avatar

Directed by James Cameron

Runtime: 162 min.

 

James Cameron’s love of technology is enough to sell Avatar to fans awaiting his first techno-feat since 1997’s Titanic. But will they understand the awful thing he’s done with it? Avatar’s highly-touted special effects depict an army from Earth traveling to Pandora, a moon in the Alpha Centuri-A star system, to mine rare ore from under its inhabitants, tall, blue-skinned creatures with tails called the Na’vi. These F/X show Cameron’s ex-Marine hero, Jake Sully (the great everyman Sam Worthington), taking part in a quasi-military program where he enters the alien society via a hybrid body (an avatar) made from human and Na’vi DNA. Cameron’s “fully immersive” 3-D technology is irritating to watch for nearly three hours. And then there’s his underlying purpose: Avatar is the corniest movie ever made about the white man’s need to lose his identity and assuage racial, political, sexual and historical guilt.

 

Only children—including adult-children—will see Avatar as simply an adventure film; their own love of technology has co-opted their ability to comprehend narrative detail. Cameron offers sci-fi dazzle, yet bungles the good part: the meaning. His undeniably pretty Pandora—a phosphorescent Maxfield Parrish paradise with bird-like lizards, moving plant life and floating mountains—distracts from the inherent contradiction of a reported $300-$500 million Hollywood enterprise that casually berates America’s industrial complex.

 

Cameron’s superficial B-movie tropes pretend philosophical significance. His story’s rampant imperialism and manifest destiny (Giovanni Ribisi plays the heartless industrialist) recalls Vietnam-era revisionist westerns like Soldier Blue, but it’s essentially a sentimental cartoon with a pacifist, naturalist message. Avatar condemns mankind’s plundering and ruin of a metaphorical planet’s ecology and the aboriginals’ way of life. Cameron fashionably denounces the same economic and military system that make his technological extravaganza possible. It’s like condemning NASA—yet joyriding on the Mars Exploration Rover.

 

While technically impressive, Avatar’s basically a daft version of the Transformer movies’ sci-fi, techno fantasy. Michael Bay’s extraordinary gift for flashy spectacle found perfect expression in the gargantuan slapstick comedy of technology run amok; his teenage characters’ rapport with cars and machines showed an ambivalent relationship with the things that expedite human activities yet threaten our peace and our history. Avatar, however, invents an alternate world to make the airy-fairy pronouncement: “There’s a network of energy that flows through all living things.” Alien-girl Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) teaches Sully how to bond with a tie-dyed, eagle-like creature by docking his wriggly tail into it. “Feel her!” Neytiri urges, and Cameron emulates the boy-plus-car symbiosis of Transformers—but with pulsing loins, veins and orifices. Better than Titanic’s kitschy romanticism, it is Cameron’s most sensual incident since the husband-wife airlift of True Lies yet, strangely, this sexualized conquest suggests latent fascism in his style.

 

Bay’s exultant technological thrills climaxed with Transformers 2’s war metaphor, where mankind’s historical continuity was at stake. But Cameron gets sappy and hypocritical. Set in the near future, Avatar is a throwback to the hippie naiveté of Kevin Costner’s production Rapa Nui (directed by Kevin Reynolds). While prattling about man’s threat to environmental harmony, Cameron’s really into the powie-zowie factor: destructive combat and the deployment of technological force. At first, Sully, a “warrior and dreamwalker” like The Matrix’s Neo, is shown as a fierce, sculpted meathead with a wounded look in his wide eyes. Cameron lights Worthington superbly in tremendous, empathetic close-ups, yet when Sully’s involvement with the avatar project increases—as hair and beard grow in—his humanity becomes nondescript and he identifies with the Na’vi. (It’s disappointing that the great Worthington only appears in a quarter of the film; most of the time Sully is a Smurf.) Going native allows Cameron to move on to the violent technology he really loves—though never scrutinizing Sully’s new bond with an angry red dragon or how Sully’s temperament becomes dangerously enflamed.

 

Here’s the hypocrisy: As Sully helps the beleaguered, virtuous aliens fight back and conquer the human invaders, Avatar puts forth a simple-minded anti-industrial critique. Despite Avatar’s 12-year gestation, Cameron’s obviously commenting on the Iraq War—though not like his hawkish Aliens. Appealing to Iraq War disenchantment, he evokes 9/11 when the military topples the Na’vi’s sacred, towering Tree of Souls. The imagery implies that the World Trade Center was also an altar (of U.S. capitalism), yet this berserk analogy exposes Cameron’s contradictory thinking. It triggers the offensive battle scenes where American soldiers get vengefully decimated—scored to the rousing clichés of Carmina Burana.

 

The fantasy of Sully giving up the impediment of his (American) humanity is a guilt-ridden 9/11 death wish. References to “fight terror with terror” and “shock-and-awe campaign” don’t belong in this 3-D Rapa Nui with its blather about the Na’vi’s “direct line to their ancestors.” Once again, villainous Americans exhibit no direct communication with ancestors. That’s Cameron’s fanboy zeal turned into fatuous politics. He misrepresents the facts of militarism, capitalism, imperialism—and their comforts.

 

Cameron’s seditious hero cheapens Neveldine/Taylor’s timely concept in Gamer, where modern characters took responsibility even for their avatars’ misdeeds. Invested in his own techie legend, Cameron never risks Neveldine/Taylor’s honest critique of our technological dependency—which would be to examine national values. Cameron’s deep failing as a pop artist lies in the fact that, unlike the avant-garde Neveldine/Taylor team, he’s a techno-geek who conflates mindless sentimentality with meaning.

 

Avatar’s going-native F/X fantasy infantilizes Cameron’s technology-infatuated audience; they’ve never read Joseph Conrad on colonialism or feel any compunction about balancing politics and fantasy. There’s even a Busby Berkeley-style tribal dance to divert them. Also, Avatar’s techno-exoticism involves blue cartoon creatures, not brown, black, red, yellow real-world people. It’s the easiest, dumbest escapism imaginable.

http://www.nypress.com/article-20710-blue-in-the-face.html

  On 12/23/2009 at 12:54 AM, chax said:

  Quote

Avatar

Directed by James Cameron

Runtime: 162 min.

 

James Cameron’s love of technology is enough to sell Avatar to fans awaiting his first techno-feat since 1997’s Titanic. But will they understand the awful thing he’s done with it? Avatar’s highly-touted special effects depict an army from Earth traveling to Pandora, a moon in the Alpha Centuri-A star system, to mine rare ore from under its inhabitants, tall, blue-skinned creatures with tails called the Na’vi. These F/X show Cameron’s ex-Marine hero, Jake Sully (the great everyman Sam Worthington), taking part in a quasi-military program where he enters the alien society via a hybrid body (an avatar) made from human and Na’vi DNA. Cameron’s “fully immersive” 3-D technology is irritating to watch for nearly three hours. And then there’s his underlying purpose: Avatar is the corniest movie ever made about the white man’s need to lose his identity and assuage racial, political, sexual and historical guilt.

 

Only children—including adult-children—will see Avatar as simply an adventure film; their own love of technology has co-opted their ability to comprehend narrative detail. Cameron offers sci-fi dazzle, yet bungles the good part: the meaning. His undeniably pretty Pandora—a phosphorescent Maxfield Parrish paradise with bird-like lizards, moving plant life and floating mountains—distracts from the inherent contradiction of a reported $300-$500 million Hollywood enterprise that casually berates America’s industrial complex.

 

Cameron’s superficial B-movie tropes pretend philosophical significance. His story’s rampant imperialism and manifest destiny (Giovanni Ribisi plays the heartless industrialist) recalls Vietnam-era revisionist westerns like Soldier Blue, but it’s essentially a sentimental cartoon with a pacifist, naturalist message. Avatar condemns mankind’s plundering and ruin of a metaphorical planet’s ecology and the aboriginals’ way of life. Cameron fashionably denounces the same economic and military system that make his technological extravaganza possible. It’s like condemning NASA—yet joyriding on the Mars Exploration Rover.

 

While technically impressive, Avatar’s basically a daft version of the Transformer movies’ sci-fi, techno fantasy. Michael Bay’s extraordinary gift for flashy spectacle found perfect expression in the gargantuan slapstick comedy of technology run amok; his teenage characters’ rapport with cars and machines showed an ambivalent relationship with the things that expedite human activities yet threaten our peace and our history. Avatar, however, invents an alternate world to make the airy-fairy pronouncement: “There’s a network of energy that flows through all living things.” Alien-girl Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) teaches Sully how to bond with a tie-dyed, eagle-like creature by docking his wriggly tail into it. “Feel her!” Neytiri urges, and Cameron emulates the boy-plus-car symbiosis of Transformers—but with pulsing loins, veins and orifices. Better than Titanic’s kitschy romanticism, it is Cameron’s most sensual incident since the husband-wife airlift of True Lies yet, strangely, this sexualized conquest suggests latent fascism in his style.

 

Bay’s exultant technological thrills climaxed with Transformers 2’s war metaphor, where mankind’s historical continuity was at stake. But Cameron gets sappy and hypocritical. Set in the near future, Avatar is a throwback to the hippie naiveté of Kevin Costner’s production Rapa Nui (directed by Kevin Reynolds). While prattling about man’s threat to environmental harmony, Cameron’s really into the powie-zowie factor: destructive combat and the deployment of technological force. At first, Sully, a “warrior and dreamwalker” like The Matrix’s Neo, is shown as a fierce, sculpted meathead with a wounded look in his wide eyes. Cameron lights Worthington superbly in tremendous, empathetic close-ups, yet when Sully’s involvement with the avatar project increases—as hair and beard grow in—his humanity becomes nondescript and he identifies with the Na’vi. (It’s disappointing that the great Worthington only appears in a quarter of the film; most of the time Sully is a Smurf.) Going native allows Cameron to move on to the violent technology he really loves—though never scrutinizing Sully’s new bond with an angry red dragon or how Sully’s temperament becomes dangerously enflamed.

 

Here’s the hypocrisy: As Sully helps the beleaguered, virtuous aliens fight back and conquer the human invaders, Avatar puts forth a simple-minded anti-industrial critique. Despite Avatar’s 12-year gestation, Cameron’s obviously commenting on the Iraq War—though not like his hawkish Aliens. Appealing to Iraq War disenchantment, he evokes 9/11 when the military topples the Na’vi’s sacred, towering Tree of Souls. The imagery implies that the World Trade Center was also an altar (of U.S. capitalism), yet this berserk analogy exposes Cameron’s contradictory thinking. It triggers the offensive battle scenes where American soldiers get vengefully decimated—scored to the rousing clichés of Carmina Burana.

 

The fantasy of Sully giving up the impediment of his (American) humanity is a guilt-ridden 9/11 death wish. References to “fight terror with terror” and “shock-and-awe campaign” don’t belong in this 3-D Rapa Nui with its blather about the Na’vi’s “direct line to their ancestors.” Once again, villainous Americans exhibit no direct communication with ancestors. That’s Cameron’s fanboy zeal turned into fatuous politics. He misrepresents the facts of militarism, capitalism, imperialism—and their comforts.

 

Cameron’s seditious hero cheapens Neveldine/Taylor’s timely concept in Gamer, where modern characters took responsibility even for their avatars’ misdeeds. Invested in his own techie legend, Cameron never risks Neveldine/Taylor’s honest critique of our technological dependency—which would be to examine national values. Cameron’s deep failing as a pop artist lies in the fact that, unlike the avant-garde Neveldine/Taylor team, he’s a techno-geek who conflates mindless sentimentality with meaning.

 

Avatar’s going-native F/X fantasy infantilizes Cameron’s technology-infatuated audience; they’ve never read Joseph Conrad on colonialism or feel any compunction about balancing politics and fantasy. There’s even a Busby Berkeley-style tribal dance to divert them. Also, Avatar’s techno-exoticism involves blue cartoon creatures, not brown, black, red, yellow real-world people. It’s the easiest, dumbest escapism imaginable.

 

http://www.nypress.com/article-20710-blue-in-the-face.html

Nice read, now I'm even more reluctant to see this shit. Ah well...

this is film is by all accounts crud, I probably won't bother downloading it let alone waste time making the trip to the cinema and paying for it.

i'm probably not going to see this, but if i do see it, i won't go with 3d. i don't like all these accounts of eyes hurting. knowing me, that would easily turn into a massive headache and i'd end up walking out of the theater. but i dunno if it's worth seeing in 2d. thoughts?

  On 12/23/2009 at 12:54 AM, chax said:

  Quote

Avatar

Directed by James Cameron

Runtime: 162 min.

 

James Cameron’s love of technology is blah blah blah

 

http://www.nypress.com/article-20710-blue-in-the-face.html

There's some interesting thoughts in that review, but they do that literary criticism thing of saying 'this represents that' or 'this is about that' without really having to justify their reasoning. Clearly Avatar is about colonial exploitation of other nations/races/species, but there are hundreds of examples of that in human history that we could point to, we don't just have to look at the most recent ones. I'd say the Spanish conquest of the Incas is probably a much closer parallel than anything like the recent Iraq wars.

Also, my mind is slightly boggled as to how the review seems to suggest that Transformers 2 has more depth, and Avatar is "basically a daft version of the Transformer movies’ sci-fi, techno fantasy". A daft version of Transformers?

In conclusion, my reading of this review is that the environmental message in Avatar rubbed some wordsmith up the wrong way, and this is the tangled demolition job they come up with in response. I can understand that for some the environmental angle will not ring true politically, but this seems like a weird response to make to that.

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.

Just saw it a 4th time in RealD (different theater than before) and for some reason the more I watch this, the more emotionally attached I get to it. Definitely the best movie/theater experience of my entire life. The CG is photorealistic completely. Sure a few nitpicks here and there but my 24 year old cousin for example asked me about 2 hours into the movie, how they created the blue people... She wasn't even sure if it was digital... and she also asked "how they filmed this/where?" when talking about some of the environments in Pandora. That says something.

The story is brilliantly executed too, but I don't expect people who were calling this dancing with smurfs or whatever to understand why. Frankly if you think this movie isn't good, I really must conclude you are just extremely cynical. It's a mainstream blockbuster film aimed at all demographics... like Jake Sully, you negative cunts need to just escape into this beautifully created world. Stop giving your own ego a blowjob, and let your mind go blank for once. This movie is James Cameron's masterpiece

I still haven't seen it, but I'm enjoying the discussion. The review a page ago is pure and utter wankery. The guy prefers Transformers 2 for christsake. Transformers 2 was revolting.

  On 12/23/2009 at 4:06 AM, Eggs said:

a part that made me laugh was when we first see a jellyfish lookin spirit thing floating around and jake bitch slappin it.

haa. is that the part where heaps of those little white things came down, landed on his body and flew off. heard some dudes behind me whisper "just took his wallet". i kinda giggled, even though i felt awkward laughing at someone elses whispered joke.

i didn't really like it. it was just some nothing blockbuster action film, which was fine and all. first half i was kind of hating it, but it wasn't that bad. second half of the film i was just over. so incredibly over it. lame story, lame acting, 3d 3d 3d. visuals were nice, but i hated the film....

lol at the wallet joke. pretty good on-the-fly MST 3000 right there.

way to go zazen for giving a crap enough to present the pro-avatar perspective so eloquently.

as far as the professional slating up there goes, fucking transformers are you kidding me these movies are not comparable. i'd like to read the new yorker review, has that come out yet?

if you are a very visual person this will appeal to you. if you have dull senses then it wont. or if you treat moviegoing as academic labor then it wont get you off either.

i'm genuinely curious: of those of you who didnt like avatar, how many of you have done lsd before?

yo.

I like that McGriff likes this. I thought you were getting all crusty and Essinesy.

*curtseys*

I like how some of these negative reviews are trying to defend the American soldiers... I don't recall at any point in the movie people saying the word America... they are humans, with no distinction of nationality, yet people are getting up in arms about how the American soldiers get slaughtered.

It kind of speaks about their overall world view, no?

i think my glowing opinion benefits from having seen 2012 a few weeks prior to seeing avatar.

  On 12/23/2009 at 5:53 AM, Kcinsu said:

I like how some of these negative reviews are trying to defend the American soldiers... I don't recall at any point in the movie people saying the word America... they are humans, with no distinction of nationality, yet people are getting up in arms about how the American soldiers get slaughtered.

 

It kind of speaks about their overall world view, no?

all that's true.. but.... they're pretty american. like, the full on cliche american military colonel. the film kinda reminded me of starship troopers without the tongue in cheek humour.