Cowboy Pete Goes Biblical on “Avatar”

In the beginning, “Avatar” was unformed and void.

And James Cameron looked upon “A Princess of Mars” and “Dances with Wolves” and “Ferngully” (but not anything by Harlan Ellison, because he knew better than that) and found them good.  And he wrote a 114-page treatment, and he found it good.

And then he looked upon Gollum and realized that special effects had finally caught up with his vision, and that “Avatar” could actually be made for less than the budget of one week of fighting in Iraq, and 20th Century Fox looked upon it and said, “This could be our next ‘Star Wars’ except let’s make sure not to give away the merchandising rights,” and they made the movie and found it good.

Cowboy Pete, on the other hand, had some problems.What I’ve liked about Cameron’s films in the past is his tendency to try and avoid cliche.  For instance, we’ve become so accustomed to kick-ášš movie heroines that we forget that Sarah Conner was pretty groundbreaking.  Or there was “Aliens” which was tight and well thought out, as opposed to its plot-hole-riddled predecessor.  By contrast, in “Avatar” Cameron not only makes no effort to avoid the cliches, he embraces them.  With the sole exceptions of Sigourney Weaver’s “Grace” and Michelle Rodriguez’s “Trudy,” everyone else is wafer thin, with no effort made to elevate them above a caricature sufficient to move along the plot, itself a cliche-ridden mishmash of the aforementioned films, not to mention “Return of the Jedi” (the final battle with the Ewoks?  Really?) and “Pocahantas” (the daughter of the tribal chief?  Really?)  The Cameron that I remember would have zeroed in on every plot point that was evocative of other films and tried to find a new angle, a new way of approaching it.  But instead his focus seemed to be so squarely on honing the technological aspects that apparently he didn’t have the brain power left over to devote to coming up with something new insofar as story was concerned.  Frankly I’d have preferred if he’d just done “A Princess of Mars” so that, if it was going to be devoid of original story notions, at least it would actually be the original story.

But that wasn’t what bothered me the most.

What bothered me was the fundamental concept:  That a marine had his mind implanted into the titular “Avatar” so that he could interact with the Na’Vi, the indigenous life form of the planet Pandora so that he could convince them to relocate, thus allowing the corporation (which, as in “Aliens,” equals bad guys, right down to having a corporate exec cut from the same cloth as Paul Reiser’s “Burke”) to obtain the McGuffin mineral they need for no reason delineated in the film.  One should always be leery of any concept that requires your lead hero to fall sleep or enter a trance in order to go into action, and “Avatar” is no exception.  Basically we’re watching our paraplegic protagonist, Sully, play an extremely advanced video game as he hangs out with the blue-skinned natives by proxy:  World of Warsmurfs.  The problem is that, since he’s physically removed from the action, we become emotionally removed as well.  Yes, if something happens to his host body, it’s an inconvenience.  But all that happens then is that his mission is a bust…as opposed to his life being in real jeopardy which, aside from very briefly at the end, it never is.   So basically we’re sitting in a theater watching someone who’s watching someone else.  Wow:  That’s involving.  Perhaps that’s why I found Sully’s romance with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana, who manages to look radiant even as a special effect) so unconvincing.  There was no one moment in which I felt as if the characters had that spark, that moment of connection, that makes a film romance convincing.  Sully’s there, but he’s not really there, and so I wasn’t really there.

“Avatar” endeavors to overcome its flat characterization, its cliches, its banal dialogue, with staggeringly groundbreaking visualizations and knock out special effects, which is pretty much exactly what “Star Wars” did back in 1977 (because let’s face it, there was only one well-written “Star Wars” film out of the six, and it sure wasn’t the first one.)  In that respect, the film is resoundingly successful.  I had only seen 3-D films as ninety-minute cartoons and wondered if my eyes could handle a three hour opus.  the answer is yes, although at one early point when Sully was coming out of hypersleep and they had these infinity shots of the ship’s interior, I felt as if my retinas were being sucked out of my skull.  A few more visuals like that and I would have been hemorrhaging out my eyeballs.  Between the seamlessness of the visuals and the wizardry of the 3-D, “Avatar” is a wholly immersive exprience.

I just wish I could have been immersed in a movie that I hadn’t seen before and that the lead character wasn’t sleeping through.

PAD

53 comments on “Cowboy Pete Goes Biblical on “Avatar”

  1. Couldn’t agree more. Was like the movie was trying to compensate for lacking something in other areas by throing more and more effects at the screen. I was watching the movie going…great I get it…you have a nice CGI…have you thought about buying a writer or three?

  2. A very pretty, very cliched film. My mother asked me if I thought the film would make a profit, given how unattached you are from the characters, and I suspect that it’ll do gangbusters on blu-ray, since the film is aesthetically amazing, but man. When your film could accurately be described as “Ferngully II: In Space!” you have problems.

  3. I had the same concern with Avatar as the plot unfolded (I managed to avoid spoilers for ten years… I knew nothing.) however, the film did ATTEMPT to say that Sully could die if his avatar was destroyed. Sully suggests that if his avatar dies, he’ll be okay. A character replies, “That’s the idea.” But they don’t take that very far and later people are being turned on and off as they hit those emergency red buttons. The Matrix did a good job of showing how if you die or are otherwise unplugged you die.

    At the same time, as the film progressed, I understood that even if Sully wasn’t there, his feelings towards Neytiri were real and a disconnect would create an emotional wound. It’s an interesting choice. Consider that Sully’s initial moments of passion and defense of the world and Neytiri’s people aren’t born out of being threatened by the same foe. It’s an entierly internal and independant choice.

    Obviously Cameron was aware that the physical stakes weren’t high enough for a proper climax as he had Sully’s true body be the subject of the Evil Miltary General’s attack.

    I enjoyed the movie but the main issue I had was the use of allegory over metaphor. C.S. Lewis and Tolkien are probably getting into it over Avatar right now in the afterlife.

  4. Agreed, although I’m not sure what Trudy did or said to make you single her out as an exception… to me, she was the thinnest of all the wafers. I actually think you were too kind in your summation. I thought the movie failed on pretty much every level. Yeah, it was “pretty,” but so is your average screen saver (which this movie kind of resembled, come to think of it). I felt like I was watching someone playing a video game adaptation of Dances With Wolves. It was utterly predictable and completely devoid of moral or intellectual complexity. And I kind of hated Neytiri. I knew I would hate her the instant she appeared on screen, because I just knew she was going to be one of those condescending Pocahontas-type characters. And I was right.

    1. Supposedly Trudy was to have a romance with the geeky scientist (forgot the character’s name). This would have gone a long way to explain her out-of-the-blue conversion to help Josh and the Na’Vi.

  5. I agree with your review Peter. This is competing with Dr Who to see which one is a bigger waste of my time. Avatar wins because actually had high hopes for it. Dr Who on the other hand always struck me as cheap and poorly acted with laughable villians. It’s only saving grace is that it will never be as awful as LEXX

  6. My biggest question was what happens after the end of the film? What’s to keep the Company from coming back with more tanks and guns? But since the big tree that they lived in is blown up now, maybe they’ll just let the company dig for the uranium they want, and then build some casinos.

    1. What’s to keep the Company from coming back with more tanks and guns?
      .
      Or, to quote another, better Cameron film, nuking it from orbit since it’s the only way to be sure? After all, the mineral they want is unliving, so any extreme measures they take from on high to annihilate every life form on the planet–carpet bombing with gas bombs or acid or a fast acting virus–could be done without harming the object they seek. Defoliation doesn’t matter if you don’t care about the foliage.
      .
      It reminds me of the “Robot Chicken” send up of “Star Wars” in which, after the end of Chapter VI, an Imperial commander wants to bring in reinforcements to annihilate the rebels while they’re all busy celebrating. And a subordinate says, “We can’t. They won.” “What do you mean they won? We have all these ships, all these men!” “Yes, but they blew up the second Death Star AND the Emperor. That means they won.” “And there’s nothing we can do?” “Not a thing.”
      .
      PAD

      1. First, this assumes that a non-government institution has access to planet-killing Weapons of Mass Destruction in the future.

        Second, even if the Company has access to WMDs, it takes six years to travel between Earth and Pandora. That’s a lot of time for anti-nuke sentiment to build up on Earth and for company executives to get tossed. The whole reason for the Avatar project was because company shareholders objected to killing the natives.

        Third, let’s say the Company has WMDs, the shareholders greenlight genocide and the Company will patiently wait for six years to carry out this operation. That’s fantastic — it sets everything up for the next two AVATAR sequels.

  7. I found myself saying “Nuke it from orbit” fairly early on in the movie.

    If this was Starship Troopers, do any of us doubt that the Navi would be more Smores than Smurfs at this point?

    One last thing. The internet called this movie “Dances with Thundersmurfs” from very early on. And in this instance, the net was wiser than it knew, because that’s EXACTLY what it was.

  8. Peter,

    Nobody will ever accuse Cameron of being original. You can give someone dough, cheese and tomato sauce and they can make the 99 cent Totino pizza in your frozen food section and another guy will make the best Chicago deep dish you ever had. You can cherry pick sci-fi’s greatest elements and throw them into a movie like a “best of” album and one guy will give you Independence Day and the other will give you The Matrix. When it comes to presentation and execution, Cameron is a master.

    People say it’s a cliched story and the reason ideas become cliched is because they’re good ideas. It’s a good story whether it’s John Carter, Dances With Wolves, The Last Samurai or Enemy Mine. Star Wars literally has a character dressed in black kidnapping women… he might as well be tying them to train tracks. The characters in Avatar are like the characters in Star Wars or Lord of the Rings… they’re archetypes.

    You make a legitimate argument about Jake Sully not being in danger but he falls in love with a woman. I know if my options were to be with my wife as an avatar or a legless vet on a wasteland Earth I would do everything in my power to keep that avatar alive. It’s really the only life I have worth living. If you think there is nothing to lose there then you need to watch Somewhere In Time again.

    A good friend of mine came out of the film disappointed and when I questioned her about it, it wasn’t that it was a bad movie… she felt it was beneath James Cameron. Fine. But people who like to kick it (and I don’t think anyone here is) I ask you what action/sci-fi movies have you seen lately that were better? Armored? Ninja Assassin? 2012? The Stepfather? Law Abiding Citizen? Pandorum? The Surrogates? Jennifer’s Body? Gamer? Final Destination? GI Joe?

    Is Avatar bad or is it just when you stack it against things like Terminator, T2, True Lies, Aliens, The Abyss or Titanic you putting it against some of the best movies of their kind ever made it just looks that way.

    When Gladitor won Best Picture the next day I told someone how disappointed I was and they told me they liked it. I told them I did too. But every year they vote for Playmate of the Year and one of those girls is the ugly one. It doesn’t mean she’s ugly… it just means she the ugly girl in that room.

    In James Cameron’s room it may be Avatar.

    1. People say it’s a cliched story and the reason ideas become cliched is because they’re good ideas.
      .
      No, they’re saying it because they’re cliches. You’re confusing cliches with tropes. No one’s denying that certain films can have common elements. What renders something cliche is when not only is there nothing new in terms of what one is seeing from a story point of view, but the reliance on cliches makes all of the story beats predictable. Anyone who has seen “Dances With Wolves” or “Ferngully” or “Return of the Jedi” knows every major storybeat before it happens. There was literally no moment in the film that caught me off guard. Nothing that made me say, “Whoa, didn’t see that coming.” Cliches can actually be your friend if you set the audience up to expect one outcome and then go in a different direction.
      .
      Take “Aliens.” There was nothing particularly original about any of the marines. They were standard issue grunts that had been seen in many similar films. But their reactions to what they encountered, ranging from Hudson’s “We’re screwed, man!” to the commons sense of Hicks concurring that they should nuke the place from orbit rather than engage in a hopeless ground battle that would only get them all killed, deftly played against expectations. There was none of that here. Even Trudy’s turning her back on the mission, which I liked–mostly because I like the actress–was cliched in its execution (“I didn’t sign up for this,” a line we’ve heard any number of times.)
      .
      There are no new ideas. What elevates an idea above cliche is when you put a new spin on it. What was new here was entirely visual, and on that basis, I can’t fault it, and I said as much. But being a writer, I tend to analyze things from the story point of view first, and story wise, Cameron gives us nothing on part with the innovation that we see in the rest of the film.
      .
      That’s my issue with it.
      .
      PAD

    1. The mineral isn’t unobtainium. Unobtainium is a generic term in science for something very difficult to get (like widgets are in economics). The same term in used in The Core for the material Delroy Lindo uses to power the drill vehicle.

  9. Of course, the best take on this was from this season’s SOUTH PARK episode “Dances with Smurfs.” But anyway…

    I thought AVATAR was absolutely stunning visually, but absolutely predictable. There’s not a single story part or character arc that you can’t see coming from a mile away: the antagonistic-then-romance relationship, the gung-ho military man, the reconnaissance-turned-switching sides, the good scientists and evil company, etc. (My full review is at http://thearmchaircritic.blogspot.com/ )

    As for why the company doesn’t just nuke them from orbit… why not indeed? The company man said early on they wanted to avoid bad press, but with the planet six years away (by lightspeed, I believe) and no Earth-to-Pandora communication, the company could do whatever they want and just tell Earth that everything is fine. Maybe nuking the planet would ruin the MacGuffinite (we couldn’t get oil by nuking the oil fields and then drilling) but if the mineral is *that* valuable there’s no reason to just send in 10 times the number of troops and ships and start shooting.

    And (spoiler follows) in a bizarre thought moment, towards the end when Neytiri sees Sully’s real body I just imagined her saying, “Wow, so you humans are only half our size? Is that the case… everywhere? ‘Cuz I can see some problems if you’re half as big as you used to be.”

    1. The ending DIDn’t really guarantee an ending, fo sho…but guys, it’s NOT that different than when STAR WARS came out and people went to see it 17 times at the drive-in. I know the experienced movie goer wants a radical story to twist their brains, worthy of the SFX. Consider for a moment what it is to be a young person who hasn’t seen all those previous films, and, however simplified, the psychological value of the story’s theme as the economy continues to globalize. This might be your STAR WARS.
      That said, of course the message will still evade many…but think about his choice of a Marine as the P.o.V. character.

  10. I was moved neither one way or the other, but the audience I saw it with certainly was — they applauded at the end.

    Go ahead and make your own jokes there.

    1. I saw it in Toledo, Ohio, and nobody applauded. No school this week, so a lot of families were there. A big part of the audience DID make a mad dash for the bathrooms.

  11. What struck me is that Cameron said this was the movie he wanted to see when he was 14. I think he’s probably thinking more like 10 or 11. As I was watching it, it reminded me of the days where I took a box of toys out and separated them into: GI Joe and Transformers vs. Star Wars and Dragons. Then, they’d all fight — though the Star Wars figures did have lasers (and thus a fighting chance) in my scenario.

    I assumed that nuking from orbit would obliterate the “valuable” property that made the mineral valuable. (Was it that mineral that made it so the big landmasses could float? — maybe? it was floating? but if so, why not mine it from the floating landmasses?) Still, drop a big asteroid on the tree; that would work just as well, and no fallout. It would take very little imagination to get rid of the Na’vi and not ever have to fight the flight of dragons.

    World of Warsmurf, indeed. Clever, and spot on.

    As to the technology, I saw it in a regular theater with just 3-D, and it was okay, but the glasses really reduced the film for me. It framed them in a way that made the screen look smaller than my TV. I hear the IMAX version is better (better glasses, maybe?), but I’m perhaps strange in that I think a “new movie technology” should work well (enough) on existing screens (and I’ll even grant the need for 3-D glasses, which I can’t say I’m thrilled with). Critics should be required to see a screening like 90% of the rest of us, rather than rarified, top-notch or private screening rooms. It certainly affects the viewing experience.

    AD

    1. Yeah, I’ve noticed that, too. 3D makes a movie screen look like a TV screen, and it makes an IMAX screen look like a regular movie screen. As soon as the movie started I silently cursed myself for not seeing it in IMAX (or not getting a seat closer to the screen).
      .
      Actually, I wish I had seen it in 2D. The 3D really pulled me out of the movie and was more of an annoying distraction than anything else. Ironically, I think it would have been more of an immersive experience without it. I probably won’t be seeing any more 3D movies. It’s still just a lame novelty act (that’s lost its novelty).

  12. If I’m remembering correctly, Avatar started its life as an almost completely different script, from which Cameron only took the “project-consciousness-into-a-virtual-alien-body” idea.

    But I may be wrong. I read the book I’m taking this from (The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made) well over a year ago.

    1. David Hughes’ book? I’ve got it right here… Hmmm… Doesn’t seem to mention whether Cameron first developed the virtual alien body for another film or not. Could you have read it elsewhere?

      1. Perhaps you’re thinking of Poul Anderson’s short story, “Call Me Joe” (which, for my money, had a much more interesting take on the wheelchair-bound-dude-in-the-avatar concept)?

        For myself, I’m thinking of this movie primarily as proof-of-concept. Now maybe we can see a movie made from [i]Ringworld[/i], or [i]The Mote In God’s Eye[/i], or some other sound SF property where the main stumbling block has been that many of the protagonists aren’t even kind of humanoid…

  13. I haven’t seen it yet, but I have heard what everyone has basically said. But I will waste at least 3 hours of my life on this because it is pretty.
    .
    But I have a question and I’ve been pondering this for a while. Given the human condition, is there a limit on original stories out there to tell? That after a while we’re bound to repeat ourselves, particularly now that we’ve invented things that can save our stories, be it books, tv, or the movies?
    .
    By no means does this give him a pass (particularly with characters, I find that making characters is like giving birth to a fully fledged human and that’s what makes it difficult), I suspect he could have tried harder. But what else could have been done with this plot when I suspect everything has been done before?

  14. I just wish I could have been immersed in a movie that I hadn’t seen before and that the lead character wasn’t sleeping through.
    .
    I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be brought up as much if people simply thought the story of the film was better. I haven’t seen it yet, but this – that it’s an unoriginal story – has been a common complaint in reviews I’ve read.
    .
    Most stories are rather unoriginal these days, but we still end up with a lot of new books, movies, and games that are still very entertaining, even if we’ve read/seen/played the basics somewhere else before.

  15. The crowd in my local theater cheered and applauded too. I think it’s safe to infer that the majority of “Avatar”‘s audience is too old to have seen “Ferngully”, too young to remember “Dances with Wolves”, and has never heard of “A Princess of Mars”.

  16. Let’s face it, most movies made for a mass audience slip when Hollywood’s politics start to make themselves known. It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but it is a good rule-of-thumb.

    (BTW, anyone else find it ironic that the Marxist fable that was Titanic reduced the proletariat to a jig-dancing chorus line backing up Rose and Jack?)

  17. I’m in the minority here but I gotta say that I loved everything about Avatar and never had issues with any of the plot points or the nature of sully’s character and here’s why.

    -In regard to Sully sleeping through his Avatar Experience. I always felt that when he was in a “dream” world when he was in the wheelchair, but that he was alive when he was in the Avatar. So that when he switches sides its a real choice with consequences. Ostensibly if his avatar was to die during the final battle he’d be stuck in a wheelchair living in a trailer just waiting for the corporation to come and kill him. He would also loose the life and companionship that he’s dreamed of, but never had. So in that way it worked for me.

    -In regard to plot points being used from other movies or preexisting stories that doesn’t bother me at all as long as the story is told well. Look at disney 99.9% of their stories are retreads of existing plots or whole stories and as long as they tell them with the passion that they deserve then it works for me. Cameron’s Titanic wasn’t anything new in terms of story. It was Romeo and Juliet on a boat. He’s actually quoted as saying that. So this is dances with wolves in space. Works for me.

    And all the way around it worked quite well. I also hear that this is the beginning of a trilogy depending on if the 1st movie pans out. If it does we may see an all together new plot line emerge from these tried and true tropes.

    1. Cameron’s Titanic wasn’t anything new in terms of story. It was Romeo and Juliet on a boat. He’s actually quoted as saying that. So this is dances with wolves in space.
      .
      Yes, and “West Side Story” was Romeo and Juliet with gangs and singing. But what made “Titanic” work was Cameron’s driving home for us the hideous human cost of a disaster that most of us simply knew only in the abstract as a boat sinking decades before we were born. It was the growing dread we felt, knowing that these people thought they had their lives ahead of them when we knew otherwise. It was the tragedy of seeing young love blooming, knowing that it was going to be cut short. And it was the fact that, although we knew that Rose obviously survived, there were any number of plot elements we didn’t know, ranging from the fate of the various characters to what happened to the gem that everyone was seeking. There were things to be learned and messages to be taken away that were presented in a unique view.
      .
      “Avatar,” on the other hand, gave us no new insights or story elements that we haven’t already seen, whether it was super wise natives in touch with nature and providing instruction to “civilized” outsiders (“Dances with Wolves,” “Pocahontas’) to mystic, magical beings and their amazing sentient trees (“Ferngully,” “Pocahontas” again) What it comes down to, again, is anticipation. If you’re on the edge of your seat waiting to see what happens next, then the story works for you. If you’re able to anticipate every single story beat because of previous tales, not to mention the fact that your hero isn’t actually in any physical danger for 99% of the film (plus they telegraph how he’ll eventually wind up permanently transplanted into his Avatar body at the end) then that’s a problem.
      .
      PAD

  18. Yep, pretty movie, but chock full of popular fiction cliches. I make no bones about the fact that I’m not exactly the sharpest crayon in the box, and I have a rule of thumb–if *I* can see a plot point coming a mile away, the creators aren’t trying hard enough.
    .
    But man, it sure looked good, didn’t it? All the shots from high up in the trees or off the edges of floating islands in the doubletalk magnetic vortex looked real enough that they were triggering my fear of heights! One minor detail that really impressed me about the 3-D was the reflections on glass. When you looked at characters through windows or vehicle canopies, the highlights or reflections on the glass appeared on a separate visual plane, closer to the viewer than what was behind the glass. It’s a mundane thing, but it shows progress from years of 3-D being, “Ohh, the monster jumped out at me! Wow!”.
    .
    I would argue, though, that Giovanni Ribisi’s corporate drone wasn’t quite cut from the same cloth as Burke. Ribisi’s character had enough humanity to be indicisive about wiping out the home tree, and at least appeared to feel bad when he saw the end results of its destruction. The only time Burke ever expressed genuine emotion was two seconds before he became an Alien munchie.
    .
    .
    Chuck

  19. I found the 3-D to be convincing enough that I swatted flotsam away from my face a couple times. Then I felt real silly.
    .
    I think the 3-D really enhanced the movie.
    .
    Had I written the movie, I would’ve changed the plot a little, and some of the dialog quite a bit.

  20. I would love to see “Princess of Mars”, done right of course now that the tech to do it is there!

  21. Just saw it. Definitely has to be seen in 3-D. Visually, it’s stunning. The blue aliens move with enough weight that I’m nearly convinced that convincing CGI humans could be accomplished. Not quite convinced, but nearly. The richness and detail of this created world was so amazing that I suspect Cameron feared not enough people would experience it if the story offered any challenge whatsoever. The only surprise in the entire movie was that Sully ended up in the avatar permanently as a free and conscious choice without any extenuating circumstances. I knew he would end up in the avatar body permanently, I just expected that it would be either a “heroic” choice in order to save someone or something or as an option to dying in his human body.

    I was pleased by that choice. The rest of the story? Tripe.

  22. It was an extremely pretty movie… but I completely agree that the story was beyond boring and lame and cliche… How many times do we have to sit through the “Mighty Whitey” trope?

    If I get talked into going again this weekend while visiting the family, I think i’m going to bring my ipod filled with some Zepplin, Floyd and other select music.

    1. Interesting idea….I can picture, say, “Immigrant Song” going very well with several sequences in Avatar.

  23. Glad to see that someone else thought of Anderson’s “Call Me Joe” – which was the first thing that popped into my mind Way Back When when i first heard a synopsis of the story. (Kelly Freas’ cover for the 1957 issue of Astounding where that appeared is here,BTW.

  24. I actually read the original treatment for AVATAR years ago, and I’ve been waiting to see it for about as long.

    I knew there would be a number of differences from the treatment based on the trailers, and after seeing it, I gotta say that I rather wish that Cameron had kept in much of what he took out.

    Still nifty though.

  25. I’m going to take the silver lining approach. The story was so simple and predictable that I could focus on the lush animation. I very quickly reached a point where I was so lost in the visual orgy that the movie moved smoothly and I was entertained the entire time.

  26. (animated) Charles Manson said it best in an episode of Family Guy.
    “If I haven’t seen it then it’s new to me.”
    So yes, there are the familiar cliches and littered all over the landscape of this movie.
    But what about for movie-goers who never saw Ferngully? Or Dances with Wolves? Or have no familiarity with Princess of Mars?
    Maybe the story isn’t quite so played out for them.
    I guess that is sort of the Jim Shooter mentality (for somebody in the audience, it is their first comic).
    And when you look at the movie-going audience … realize that Dances with Wolves is almost 20 years old (1990). There is a huge chunk of the movie-watching public (I’m talking about the people who actually venture out to theaters to see a movie — that is a younger skewed demographic) who have never seen Dances with Wolves [or Ferngully (1992) for that matter]. That isn’t to say they won’t recognize many cliches … they just won’t necessarily draw the parallels to those movies.
    Something to keep in mind.

  27. Great plot and great characters don’t always make $400 million. I think they sacrificed the story to make a ton of money. I think Avatar will be hugely successful and everyone will be waiting for Avatar II. So saying this movie is dumb isn’t really going to affect anything. After all, nobody is going to make “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” in 3D Imax.
    If I was writing the ending of Avatar, I’d have liked the humans to come up with something that the aliens could use in exchange for the mining rights, but that would have been boring. Odd that James Cameron thinks the happy ending is not drilling in ANWAR.
    When humans do eventually leave Earth will we be bullies or parasites?

  28. Peter,

    As you noted the plot was absolutely “by the numbers.” I sat there watching the thing and at certain point was thinking things like, “cue the giant hammerhead rhinos,” just before they made their appearance.

    But the biggest flaw was the happy ending of the movie was no such thing. So the evil corporation was driven off the planet so it couldn’t mind the unobtanium. Yeah, The People won.

    EXCEPT…

    Well, if the mineral were so valuable that the corporation would spend the billions already invested and shown in the movie to obtain it what would keep the corporation from returning to the planet. This time with nukes or naphalm which they could drop from space ships still up space. Basically carpet bomb the planet, thereby wiping all life off the face of the planet, but leaving the mineral unobtanium intact. Then the could go down to the dead planet and mine the mineral to their heart’s content without any pesky Na’Vi to fight.

    1. Truth!

      And this guy’s a lawyer, so he knows a thing or two about soulless corporations! 😀

      I left the theater just now thinking that I sure wish all that money and tech had been spent on something other than a Dances with Wolves remake.

      The Alice in Wonderland trailer sure looked good in 3-D though!

  29. “let’s face it, there was only one well-written “Star Wars” film out of the six, and it sure wasn’t the first one”

    “The Empire Strikes Back”, I presume?

  30. Two quibbles with Peter’s review:
    .
    One, “Aliens” had a huge plot hole, one that isn’t papered over so much as ignored. The alien life cycle is “queen lays egg/egg hatches into chestburster/chestburster lays new egg in stomach/egg hatches into warrior alien that explodes from chest.” So…logically, the number of aliens on the planet is limited to the number of initial colonists. But in the movie, it’s, um…not. 🙂 (Especially not in the Director’s Cut, where robotic turrets go through a thousand rounds of ammo without making a significant dent in the alien population.)
    .
    And two, they very clearly explain what unobtainium does. It sells for twenty million a kilo back on Earth. 🙂

  31. I’d just like to point out, that clichés are not a problem to those of us who hadn’t seen those earlier movies (Dance with Wolves, Pocahontas, Ferngully).
    I did feel the movie was unoriginal, but since I hadn’t seen those other movies, I didn’t realize it was so unoriginal.

    I agree that clichés can be your friend. I know some writers use them to create hilarious scenes.

  32. Just saw the film, and I agree with everything Peter said, except:
    .
    1) I wasn’t entirely sure that that they were completely safe as Avatars (I know they could “escape” back to their real bodies upon being mortally wounded, but what if the Avatar was killed instantaneously?)
    .
    And:
    .
    2) I thought the original Star Wars was a better written film because it embraced its cliches in the manner of a modern fairy tale (“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”), while Avatar simply seemed to be unaware of them.

  33. A friend and I decided we’d end being possibly the last two people in America who hadn’t seen “Avatar” and saw it last night. I absolutely loved it. It really was an EXPERIENCE and I can see why people are going to see it again and again because it is an experience that cannot be replicated at home. Leave it to Cameron to really make people believe again in “the magic of movies”, rather than waiting for it to come out on DVD or OnDemand.
    While I understand some of the criticism of it, I feel this is a result of many of us being jaded. It’s funny. When they were walking through the jungle and some of it was lighting up where they stepped, I instantly thought to myself, “Ðámņ! I can remember when the steps glowing in the video for ‘Billie Jean’ was considered innovative, awards-worthy and cool’. We have seen and heard so much it has become harder to impress us.
    Well, consider me impressed.
    Hey, “Pocahontas” is one of my favorite movies, ever. I thought it was a breathtaking piece of entertainment. But it never captured people the way “Avatar” has. In fact, you can hardly find any “Pocahontas” merchandise at all, as opposed to the “Disney Princess” machine, for example.
    I think it’s partly because it was considered a history lesson. By having the “savages” be “Smurfs” instead of Native Americans, the movie allowed science-fiction to do what it does best, allow us to observe actions and events and react to them without preconceived notions. It drives a point home that a morereality-based movie couldn’t.
    the result is something out of this world.

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