Avatar review thread

[Gramzamber]

Hey I'd buy all of that if the big bad corporate and military dicks in the movie weren't in fact dicks.
And good luck getting your exclusive footage of the big bad corporation bombing the natives without FTL comms.

[PeZook]

Hey I'd buy all of that if the big bad corporate and military dicks in the movie weren't in fact dicks.

The government typically has a bigger dick than any corporation. Why shouldn't the RDA be worried about said dick being used to ravage their asshole without lube? Of course, it depends on the political climate back home, but the space-government was opposed to happy colonialism enough to tie down the RDA with regulations about their conduct on Pandora.

And good luck getting your exclusive footage of the big bad corporation bombing the natives without FTL comms.

What are they going to do, wipe the memories of everyone involved? The government placed some strict regulations on the RDA, all it would take would be someone credible informing them about the atrocities to spark a troublesome investigation.

[Darwin]

When did the glass impact shatter, anyway? During the combat scenes, none of the Na'vi got close enough to fire at them, they were too busy dying to break any cockpits. What shattered the Main Marine Bad Guy's cockpit canopy, again?

Jake ramming the same walker's hardened metal rifle bayonet through it with big leap and two-handed overhead smash?

Quite likely any wood/stone implement created by the na'vi would simply have shattered/skipped off.

[Nephtys]

Hey I'd buy all of that if the big bad corporate and military dicks in the movie weren't in fact dicks.
And good luck getting your exclusive footage of the big bad corporation bombing the natives without FTL comms.

So using WMDs is okay if it takes a while for the news to get around? Or could it be that you know, even the Corporate Guy was feeling bad after the bombing, based on his (and everyone in the control center's) expressions when the hometree was falling? Or how about when the next ship goes home, and half the passengers mention that they did something horrible?

[Broomstick]

When did the glass impact shatter, anyway? During the combat scenes, none of the Na'vi got close enough to fire at them, they were too busy dying to break any cockpits. What shattered the Main Marine Bad Guy's cockpit canopy, again?

Jake ramming the same walker's hardened metal rifle bayonet through it with big leap and two-handed overhead smash?

Quite likely any wood/stone implement created by the na'vi would simply have shattered/skipped off.

Remember, too, that the final strike that broke the windshield was not the first hit on that windshield, which was already showing some damage/wear by that time. Beat on anything hard enough and long enough it will break, that doesn't make the material delicate and fragile.

[Gramzamber]

Okay horrible as opposed to what, engaging in a ground war with mechs vs. natives? Either way you kill them and look like colonial imperialist assholes, at least bombing them wholesale lessens the casualties on the human side.
Yes I know that's what the whole Avatar thing is supposed to avoid but I find it an unlikely prospect at best that the natives will just be convinced to move.

[Nephtys]

Okay horrible as opposed to what, engaging in a ground war with mechs vs. natives? Either way you kill them and look like colonial imperialist assholes, at least bombing them wholesale lessens the casualties on the human side.
Yes I know that's what the whole Avatar thing is supposed to avoid but I find it an unlikely prospect at best that the natives will just be convinced to move.

You know, PR went to shit the instant military force was applied, because you're going to look like (and be) militant colonial assholes either way.

The point is: By deciding that you're going to that site anyway, you've already gone over the edge of 'militant colonial asshole'. RDA could have worked other sites. From that point on, it's damage control on how bad you're going to look. Bombing the hometree was bad, but MOABing the refugees and a holy site can only make it look worse.

[The Grim Squeaker]

Finally saw it last night.

Thoughts:
Effects wise, the landscapes were spectacular. The mechs and creatures less so in some sequences, especially in the beginning of the movie, they were too bright and a bit cartooney. The animals were spectacularly done though, and the Nav'i looked good, if a bit too "bright"/luminescent. (Glowy, you know what I mean?).

Plot wise:
The Nav'i were sickeningly ecofriendly, I mean we get it, they're the native americans and the good guys, but did he really have to make them like the goddamn
Ferngully forest fairies? Even Pocahontas had less super nice one with nature aboriginals!
Humans in the movie were borderline Weyland-Yutani dicks, I was expecting the Colonel to start eating puppies by the third act. Spoiler

The Colonel was one stupendously hard to kill badass .

The movie deserved a better class of video game, it has "Level up your mount!" ("horse"-Banshee[SPOILERS!]Spoiler

-Tamakta, Banshee-Cat-lion thing, etc'), and lots of multi stage boss fights (The Colonel).

The movie was surprisingly brutal (not just in the way that [SPOILERS!] Spoiler

so many characters were killed, but in terms of nameless Nav'i casualties), especially considering the early emphasis on trying to get the natives to leave peacefully going into "We'll nuke them and their culture" with exponential speed.

The movie flew by, and didn't drag on at all.

I have to agree with Stas Bush, if you didn't know that the Unobtanium was needed for interstellar flight, then you have the corporation going out [SPOILERS!] Spoiler

to slaughter the Nav'i and only holding back due to looking for an easier solution.

And to the idiots wanking about orbital bombardment - Did you miss the part where the bulldozers were extremely close to the tree? Or that even the whole main human base was less than 200 kilometers from it? Just how accurate do you think guiding an asteroid from orbit is .
And that's ignoring the fact that we didn't even see if they have any spaceships capable of that -
We saw the Earth-Pandora ship (which certainly didn't look capable of it, and wasn't even necessarily in the Pandora star system/Alpha Centauri) and the shuttles inside the planets atmosphere - We have shuttles on Earth today which can ferry people from orbit to the ground, that doesn't mean we can get asteroids from the other end of the solar system to rain down on a deposit full of valuable minerals we want to be able to mine. (and that's ignoring the fact that the [SPOILERS!] Spoiler

rockets worked perfectly fine for that, and for wiping out the Nav'i).

Overall a very good movie, and I regret not being able to see it in 3d.

* - Was I the only one disturbed by the whole Spoiler

"Stick your tentacle into any animal and it'll obey your every command"

thing?

[adam_grif]

Was I the only one disturbed by the whole

It's like a slashfic writer's wet dream.

[Darwin]

* - Was I the only one disturbed by the whole Spoiler

"Stick your tentacle into any animal and it'll obey your every command"

thing?

To me, it's just more evidence that Pandora is an engineered system for.. something. An ecosystem that interconnected just doesn't come about on its own.

[The Grim Squeaker]

Was I the only one disturbed by the whole

It's like a slashfic writer's wet dream.

More like a wet dream.
It was especially hilarious when Neytiri was yelling at him to stick it Spoiler

into his Banshee so that it'd become one with him

. Connotations much?

[adam_grif]

More like a wet dream.

That's exactly what I said.

[Nyrath]

More like a wet dream.
It was especially hilarious when Neytiri was yelling at him to stick it Spoiler

into his Banshee so that it'd become one with him

. Connotations much?

Worse than that, there was an example of lamp shade hanging in the scene where Spoiler

Jake Sully is fresh in his avatar body, sitting on his bunk while examining his plug-in. Dr. Augustine tells him "don't play with that, you'll go blind...." Har, har, it is to laugh.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

I watched the movie, and I could have sworn someone was busy reading Frank Herbert's Dune. The similarities are too close to ignore. From the Messiah complex, to the way Sully was "accepted into the tribe" to just about a lot of plot points, sheesh... you could say this was Dune set in a slightly different setting, only this time in a huge jungle.

[Highlord Laan]

So if there's anything at all like a similarity between one story and another, then the author must have been cribbing from one of them?

Wow. Star Wars was such a Trek rip-off. I mean, both have space capital ships, just SW's are bigger and shinier. One could easily say it's just a more militant take on Trek set in a different part of space.

[Ghost Rider]

So if there's anything at all like a similarity between one story and another, then the author must have been cribbing from one of them?

Wow. Star Wars was such a Trek rip-off. I mean, both have space capital ships, just SW's are bigger and shinier. One could easily say it's just a more militant take on Trek set in a different part of space.

Wow, look at the strawman.

If you want to actually construct a retort, a better way is to demonstrate the differences of Fingolfin_Noldor's thoughts on Messiah Figure, how the main protagonists were accepted into the tribe, and other plot points.

But if you can't then, you are proving his point better then anything he has to say otherwise.

[Shroom Man 777]

Geeze, I really don't think it had anything to do with Dune. Come on, there are binillions of movies where the white man foreigner gaijin protagonist got accepted by a strange and mystical noble culture of simpler but more spiritual folk. TOMO-KURUZU (Tom Cruise) did this in The Last Samurai, and so did Julie Roberts in The Last Inuit. This happens a whole lot in movies about Indians, Noble Savages, and stuff like that. Hell, if you want White Mangs being accepted as Messiahs, you can see that in films like The Road to El Dorado. What other plot points are there? Riding monsters, and Sandworms? That's not really too Dune-ish seeing as instead of dancing without rhythm or whatever, Avatar dealt with it via neural nets and we see more Native American in the taming of horses and pterodactyls.

It's not only on the desert world of Akkaris, known as Dune, where the spice melange flows and where the White Man is accepted by the mystical natives.

[Knife]

I watched the movie, and I could have sworn someone was busy reading Frank Herbert's Dune. The similarities are too close to ignore. From the Messiah complex, to the way Sully was "accepted into the tribe" to just about a lot of plot points, sheesh... you could say this was Dune set in a slightly different setting, only this time in a huge jungle.

I agree with Shroom here; yeah they share some themes, but so do a lot of books/movies/stories in a setting where the author/story teller is regressing some 'modern' person into a simpler, older culture. Lots of movies, and god knows how many books, use these themes.

[Sarevok]

Great movie other than the fact that the corporates were being dicks for the sake of emulating captain planet villains. Their crappy little army was clearly full of improvised weapons. Their laughable mechs looked like futuristic forklifts modified to mount guns. Their strategic bomber was a cargo shuttle with people pushing crates of mining explosives out of the open ramp. They either did not have or were not allowed to own any tanks, artillery, jet aircraft, nukes etc weapons of war. They were attacking an entire sentient planet with this shit just to lose and prove that evil never pays.

[Nyrath]

I watched the movie, and I could have sworn someone was busy reading Frank Herbert's Dune. The similarities are too close to ignore. From the Messiah complex, to the way Sully was "accepted into the tribe" to just about a lot of plot points, sheesh... you could say this was Dune set in a slightly different setting, only this time in a huge jungle.

Ummmmm, I take it you never saw the movie "Laurence of Arabia?"

[Guardsman Bass]

I was slightly disturbed by the whole "taming the bird-thing" sequence where Sully first gets his flying mount. You know, the whole "jump on it, wrestle it down, then shove my head tentacle USB port into it until it gives up and submits to my will".

[Shroom Man 777]

Great movie other than the fact that the corporates were being dicks for the sake of emulating captain planet villains.

Hey, if corporate Captain Planet villains killed off natives to steal their resources and colonize their land, or hired warlords who enslave women and children in conflict zones to have them mine blood diamonds for them, or had mercenaries in places like Iraq shoot up civilians and kidnap people and put them in secret prisons to be tortured, or screw people over with lousy health insurance deals or real-estate bubbles or Wall Street bankers, then it's pretty much realistic. Not just realistic, but grim and gritty too!

Their crappy little army was clearly full of improvised weapons. Their laughable mechs looked like futuristic forklifts modified to mount guns. Their strategic bomber was a cargo shuttle with people pushing crates of mining explosives out of the open ramp. They either did not have or were not allowed to own any tanks, artillery, jet aircraft, nukes etc weapons of war. They were attacking an entire sentient planet with this shit just to lose and prove that evil never pays.

They didn't know that the entire planet was sentient, and they seemed to be doing fine slaughtering the Na'vi. Hey, don't be sore that they weren't allowed to own tanks, artillery, jete aircraft or nukes or fractional orbital bombardment tactico-strategic dynamic soaring cruise control systems, mang. It's not like Blackwater has any of those either and they're actually assigned to an actual-factual warzone.

I doubt Blackwater contractors would fare any better if their guys got stampeded by like a thousand wildebeest in Africa or something. It's not like modern fighters or bombers can withstand the unmatched fury of mother nature when their jet engines suck in a seagull either.

[Guardsman Bass]

You know, thinking about it - how did the Eywa/Planetmind connect to all the various animals running around and tell them to attack the humans? At least with the na'vi, it seemed like they needed to "plug in" to various creatures in order to connect with them and control them. I thought the trees were connected by their roots.

[Vympel]

Just saw the movie today.

I really liked it, the acting was great, the effects were spectacular (Spoony claimed that the film was outdone by 2012, which I find simply insane) and overall it was a great return for James Cameron to directing after an unfortunate absence.

He also certainly knows how to direct action - you always know exactly what's going on, with none of that jump-cutty bullshit that plagues other effects movies.

However, there were certain parts of the movie that bugged me.

* The plot wasn't anything special. It's like Pochahontas on an alien planet, with a tweeeest. It is elevated by just how technically excellent it is, but still, the plot didn't blow me away.
* Given the plot didn't blow me away, the running time was excessive given the story. It was pretty tightly written and there was an absence of really glaringly obvious plot holes, but I just couldn't help but think they could've easily trimmed 20-30 minutes from the running time and have come up with something a bit more efficient.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Does anyone know the super religious Movie review website? I would LOVE to read their review of Avatar concerning the movie clear has "tampering in Gods Domain" issues.