SF author Greg Egan reviews Avatar

http://www.gregegan.net/ESSAYS/AVATAR/Avatar.html

by arundelo • 17 years ago

118 104 17 years ago

seldo• 17 years ago

Many of the reviews of Avatar have focused on the (over-)simplicity of the plot. I don't understand these people. Avatar is packed with so much visual confection that I could barely process half of what I was seeing; I wouldn't have had any brain left over to _understand_ a plot.

Who cares about the plot? It's beautiful. Amazingly, wonderfully, brilliantly beautiful.

emmett2• 17 years ago

Egan gets your point entirely, and laments that it hasn't been put in service of something better. The best technology in the world deserves to be joined with a great script, not a severely impaired one.

akkartik• 17 years ago

An awesome example of script+effects: Who Framed Roger Rabbit

mwerty• 17 years ago

and non-cringeworthy dialogues.

ars2• 17 years ago

All new technologies are first paired with non-risky material.

So they use a non-risky script, with nothing objectionable in it.

Once the technology matures you can use a better script. The price of better is that sometimes it's worse, that's why it's a risk. If it was a sure thing everyone would do it, but it's not easy to create something great. You can try, and sometimes you'll make it, and other times you'll flop.

Which is too much of a risk for a new technology - better to have something good enough, with little risk.

Remember: Everyone thinks what they are doing is great. But if you are wrong, and it's a flagship product you are doomed. For example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavens_Gate_(film)

michael_nielsen• 17 years ago

Complaining about the plot does seem like complaining about the font in a copy of War and Peace. Avatar is a combination of world-building and world-rendering on a scale never before seen.

winthrowe• 17 years ago

I plan to see the film tomorrow, but the video game does give credit to the world-building aspect. I was quite ambivalent about the key materiel being called unobtainium at first, but after reading a backstory article, it seems quite appropriate. Perhaps the movie itself is just part of it, but overall he seems to have brought forth a detailed universe, even if it is only glossed over in the movie.

lsd5you2• 17 years ago

I would argue it is to do with the medium. The feature length film needs a plot to sustain interest, for me and apparently at least a few other people. If it's just a technology demo then it can be over and done with in 10 minutes - in Avatar they could have just started with the final battle. If Avatar were such a tech demo, then your comment would be unassailable, but as it is as a film is a bit lack-lustre.

jacoblyles• 17 years ago

If you're reviewing a movie then the weakness of the plot is something valid to comment on. Plot is usually considered an important part of a movie. I was enthralled by the movie from beginning to end; my friend was squirming in his seat and commenting on how long it was. Different people like different things about movies.

plinkplonk3• 17 years ago

"Who cares about the plot?"

I do. (Sorry for being ...uh .... different).

yes it looks cool. Some of us expectt more in a movie. Sorry about that.

I personally found the warmed over "Stupid White Man penetrates exotic closed society and rises to be leader of it, seducing the native woman" plot tiresome, repetitive and tedious, especially with the clunkiest dialogue I've heard in a decade, and insufficiently compensated for by the technology/visuals. I found the "noble savages" idea and infantile hippy politics and preaching tiresome too.

For some of us lesser mortals good graphics/special effects is just one element of a good Scifi/fantasy movie, and then not the most important aspect.

(from the review) " what it really felt like to me was a fourth movie in the Shrek franchise, pipping the yet-to-be-released Shrek Forever After to extrapolate that series' twin curves of rising technical achievement and plumetting wit to their logical endpoint: a near-immaculate feat of visualisation, accompanied by a staggeringly awful plot in which clunky genre conventions triumph completely over plausibility and originality. Avatar even boasts its very own love story where societal expectations and superficial barriers of size and pastelicity are overcome by generous helpings of pixie dust."

This expresses my feelings perfectly, but I wouldn't be so polite. I think Avatar is a terrible movie with gorgeous visuals and nothing else.

Aliens != Red Indians in fancy dress. The movie insults my intelligence on multiple levels. Yes I know, Caveat Emptor and all that, but I guess it must be because I am one of "these people"?

elblanco7• 17 years ago

Netflix also rents our pedantic art house flicks so you never have to be troubled by what the rest of us mortals watch for escapism.

I'm sure you can find some overwrought deconstruction of modern human sexuality retold as 4 movements of the lives of people in positions of authority but no power, politicians of the modern era in a mock nuclear stand-down, a 30 minute continuous scene of a single flower, in water, as people pass by blurred in the bokeh of an extreme depth of field and the audio recorded so poorly you can't actually hear what anybody is saying, and a clinically shot orgy with a clown stepping in at minute 11 to juggle, seemingly unaware of his own environs -- driven by the effort to juggle so many balls.

In the end, the clown drops the balls and close to credits.

The credits of course will flow up and will be in a mix of Italian and French. Each scene of course representing impotence, sexual drive, narcissism as a sexual trait, and lust and the struggle to balance a polygamous relationship with three waitress and a gay hairdresser at the same time (as the director was experiencing while he shot this film). The credits of course flow up in Italian and French as a both symbols of ejaculation and of salad dressing.

Enjoy the search! http://www.netflix.com/

defen3• 17 years ago

There's an interesting discussion going on at Matthew Yglesias's site - http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/12/the-racia... While his short summary of Avatar is pretty far off the mark, I thought the comparison to Dune was pretty on-point. The comments are also worth reading.

blhack• 17 years ago

Who cares about the plot? It's beautiful. Amazingly, wonderfully, brilliantly beautiful.

There is a wonderfully realistic, fully immersive, 3D environment right outside my office window right now, but I don't care.

Want to know why?

Because the plot is boring. I get out of my chair, walk to my car, go to the gas-station, and then go home to play with my dog and go to bed.

The end.

People go to movies because it is better than reality. Perhaps those who never leave their couch are wowed by images that look exactly like reality, but Avatar's visual effects wowed me only in a "well, it looks like they finally did it properly!" sense. No offense to anyone who worked on this film, it is a staggering technical achievement, but it doesn't really do anything that reality doesn't.

/this might be due to my being a bit bitter that I can't see the 3D version due to my non-stereoscopic vision :(.

elblanco7• 17 years ago

> but it doesn't really do anything that reality doesn't.

Apparently you live on Pandora,

where you can look at the office window right now and see the alien planet with floating mountains, giant six legged carnivores, pack hunters, bio-luminescent forests, two kinds (count them 2) of flying dragons and 12 foot tall blue skinned people with tails and braids with autonomous nerve endings at the end that can mentally bond with all of the above (sans the flying mountains).

sever• 17 years ago

The point is that the movie could have been so much more. The visuals are incredible, I think the best ever done so far, that's what makes it all the more unfortunate that the story was weak. With a strong plot, and the visuals this movie could have been over the top, goosebumps incredible. Instead I went out of the movie theater sad that all this incredible artistry was wasted and what a shame that was.

I think Cameron lost it. The story was a nothing, and there were a few lines in there so bad, you don't even often see their equal on terrible sitcom TV. They were cheesy video game cut scene bad, only the godhead visual prevented me from wincing.

I'd still recommend for folks to see this movie, it is incredible, but what a shame...

anigbrowl5• 17 years ago

Upvoted not just for the insightful and non-snarky review, but because Greg Egan is a) the best science-fiction writer most people have never heard of - it's practically impossible to find his work in a US bookstore - and b) an interesting writer on both science and code.

Science: http://www.gregegan.net/FOUNDATIONS/index.html Java Applets: http://www.gregegan.net/APPLETS/Applets.html

emmett2• 17 years ago

Greg Egan is my favorite sci-fi writer. Read http://www.amazon.com/Axiomatic-Greg-Egan/dp/0061052655 and have your mind blown.

Estragon3• 17 years ago

There's also a bunch of free online stuff (some of included in that anthology) here:

http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/BIBLIOGRAPHY/Online...

matasar• 17 years ago

Are his books as overwritten as this review? Honest question, as I found the review pretty leaden, but I'm always looking for interesting sci-fi.

Estragon3• 17 years ago

He's actually my favorite author, but yeah, when it comes to the actual wordsmithing, he's no Gene Wolfe. The ideas are always great, though, and stories usually are.

idlewords• 17 years ago

Yeah, unfortunately this is pretty representative.

ionfish• 17 years ago

Egan is one of those SF writers who lend unfortunate credibility to the notion that the genre is about ideas, not people. The depth of his characters leaves much to be desired, as does his ability to tell a compelling story. However, he's to be admired for turning out original work in a field so drenched in clichéd, repetitive bullshit.

anigbrowl5• 17 years ago

It varies. He can be a bit plodding sometimes, especially when exploring politics - his characters tend to be introspective rather than bold actors. So I found Teranesia (SE Asian ecopolitics) rather a struggle, but on the other hand I flew through Diaspora, where most of the characters don't even have physical bodies and there were a lot of very abstract concepts.

None of his output is light reading, but (IMHO) it's extremely substantive, as opposed to the physically substantial 1,000 page doorstops and franchise vehicles...I doubt I'd enjoy a novelization of Avatar, for example. I'm into that movie for the magic carpet ride rather than the dialog or character development.

abecedarius2• 17 years ago

I recommend three of them: Permutation City, Diaspora, and Axiomatic. Here's the opening chapter of Diaspora:

http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/01/Orphano...

drtse4• 17 years ago

Permutation city. After-death scenarios, AIs, a world were computing resources are acquired by trading (even better than the futures on amazon spot instance price than someone was suggesting a few days ago :)) ,etc...

bitwize• 17 years ago

Despite it being a rehash of Great Nature vs. Technological Fucking Civilization, Avatar has going for it a much better plot than Titanic, a completely hokey, treacly, implausible film that won eleven Oscars and is still uncontested in terms of box-office revenues.

pyre2• 17 years ago

You're forgetting that Titanic was like the Twilight of its time. Tween/teen girls flocked to watch the movie multiple times to watch Leonardo DiCaprio in his love story. IIRC, I remember a claim that one girl saw the movie 13 times. Without the 'teenage heart-throb' factor, I wonder if it can match up to Titanic in terms of numbers.

hugh_3• 17 years ago

I knew a girl who had seen it twenty-something times. She had issues.

Personally, though, I still think it's quite a good film. Some aspects of the love story grate a little (in particular Leonardo DiCaprio's always-perfect character) as does the characterization of all first class passengers as snooty jerks and all third class passengers as idealized salt of the Earth (come to think of it, that's pretty much the same problem as Avatar) but as soon as the ship starts sinking it becomes a fairly gripping story. Hardly the greatest film in history, but perfectly watchable and rewatchable even if you're not a 17-year-old girl.

msg• 17 years ago

This is better: All time box-office adjusted for inflation.

http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm

Gone with the Wind #1, Star Wars #2, The Sound of Music #3. Titanic #6.

fgimenez• 17 years ago

I had to upvote simply because of how brilliant the text width resizing mechanism is. Hint: click the radio inputs at the top of the text.

diN0bot• 17 years ago

yeah pretty neat. but then i thought, why not two scrollbars?

numbchuckskills• 17 years ago

then I thought, why implement something so useless in the first place?

Splines• 17 years ago

Neat effect, but those little radio buttons are hard to click accurately. A nicely styled table running across the top of the article might do better (IANAD).

RyanMcGreal• 17 years ago

Clever concept, but it took me a little while to figure out that the left and right margins were independently controlled by the radio buttons to the left of centre and the radio buttons to the right of centre, respectively.

I think a single group of radio buttons to control both sides would have made more sense.

travisp• 17 years ago

I love it. As newspapers discovered long ago, it's often much easier to read text that isn't a foot wide (less necessary eye movement).

dylanz• 17 years ago

He recommends Princess Mononoke.

It's that fact alone that makes me take his review into consideration. If you haven't seen Princess Mononoke, I'd highly recommend it. Actually, I'd recommend all the Studio Ghibli films. My wife and I have the entire collection, and are in the middle of watching the last one we haven't watched yet, Porco Rosso (which is so far, fantastic). "These" are the kinds of animations I, personally, want to watch.

- Visually stunning, without the need for CG.

- Not overwhelming, ie: Not too spastic or overwhelming, commercial-esque, scene switching.

- No overly annoying characters.

- Original content.

You can find the entire Studio Ghibli series online at your favorite Bay of Pirates, but, I'd recommend you actually buy them all, as they are simply amazing. (My Neighbor Totoro is the kid friendliest, and the others aren't necessarily). My apologies if this wasn't specific to Avatar, but I'm just about to finish all of Studio Ghibli's works, and am simply amazed at these films. Fantastic.

ardit33• 17 years ago

Thanks.

Gonna watch it tonight: http://www.veoh.com/collection/phanviet/watch/v6364398zH9eBN...

lionhearted2• 17 years ago

Yeah, Princess Mononoke is really a lovely film. I thought when Spirited Away came out and became popular that people would naturally go back and check out Mononoke, but it didn't happen that much. Definitely worth a watch.

As for Avatar -

My two biggest complaints:

1. It paints it as black and white, good vs. evil. This is such a common source of human misery and brainwashing that I thought we'd started to move past in cinema. Every leader worth anything tries to play the underdog card. Ask yourself about every cause you sincerely respect and believe in - do any of your leaders not paint it as you vs. the world? The New York Yankees are the only organization I can think of that don't try to play the underdog external evil enemies card. All the world religions do, all political parties do, all nations do, and so on.

2. My housemate had a great quote - he said, "They completed de-humanized the humans before doing all the violence to them." It's quite right - the evil military industrial capitalist marines have no family members, loved ones, passions, or good about them. They exist to be eaten by dinosaurs, shot by arrows, crushed, beaten, and shredded. There's no marine who signed on for a security job, got a little freaked out what's happening, and died due to the complex violent decisions of the leaders. Nope, all the marines are not even human or worth sympathizing with at all - destroy the expoiters, make violence on them, and they deserve all the hells we can visit upon them.

When you take "we're completely good and they're completely evil" and mix it with "our enemies aren't even human", you get a recipe for horrible atrocities. I watched a documentary of what the Imperial Japanese Army soldiers was thinking at Nanking. They regarded their cause as God's work, and their Chinese enemies as not human.

Never mind the specific politics. Do we really want our epic, landmark art to assert that there is in fact pure good, pure evil, and the people with different views than us are pure evil and aren't even human? I kept trying to think of if I had a kid, how I'd talk to him or her after watching that to understand that the "clear good and evil" thinking leads to very bad places.

patio11• 17 years ago

Yeah. An alternate reading of Avatar (supported by the text) is the story of a stolid marine colonel's tragic death in support of a mission to establish humanity's last hope for escaping the dying Earth. Sending humanity back at the end of the movie, with the exception of two collaborators, is genocide of the entire human race.

I know, that isn't quite the Wars For Oil Suck, Love Your Purple Bambi Earth Goddesses Or You Will Be Brutally Slain thing he was going for, but still.

(Edited to add: Am I a bad person if I sympathized with the marine colonel most out of any character? "Oh blimey, traitors have just stolen a top-of-the-line helicopter gunship armed with missiles that could blow us all apart. Men, masks on! I'm about to blow the door, step unprotected into an environment filled with poisonous gas, and engage them singlehandedly. With a sidearm.")

defen3• 17 years ago

Glad to see I wasn't the only one who felt like he was watching a Nazi propaganda movie - with the Na'vi as the pure, beautiful, harmonious Aryans, and the humans as the evil rapacious mongrel race.

hristov• 17 years ago

And let's add some things:

-no popular culture references delivered by a wise cracking animal.

-somehow they end up being both more emotional and less melodramatic than the usual us cartoons; and

-they often have very serious themes even though they are for children. They often talk about war, death, love, etc. and manage to be perfectly fine children's movies.

nearestneighbor• 17 years ago

What puzzles me is why, with their $237e6 budget, they couldn't afford a decent script.

randallsquared2• 17 years ago

So many expensive movies reportedly have terrible dialogue and scripts that there must be a reason other than the obvious. Maybe it's really, really hard to tell if a script is good before it's filmed? I dunno.

Dove• 17 years ago

Maybe that it's hard for the audience to tell if the script is good before they see the movie?

ars2• 17 years ago

See my reply here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1009207

gnaritas2• 17 years ago

It's pretty simple really, most people can't follow a complex plot. For a big blockbuster movie to make money it has to attract the widest audience possible, and that requires dumbing it down so the average person can follow along and not get confused.

This technology however, once it becomes more widespread and cheaper, will enable future movies to be made so cheaply that it'll become profitable to chase the more targeted audience. You can't make a smart movie for 300 million dollars, you'll lose your ass; there just aren't that many smart people out there that would appreciate it.

But when you can eliminate the actors, and their salaries, and just CG everything and hire a bunch of voice actors, and get that 300 million movie down to 1-10 million, then you can target highly selective audiences with something aimed directly at them profitably.

Take for example Man From Earth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Earth shot for 200k, exactly the opposite of Avatar, virtually no budget and a fantastic plot. A movie I loved but couldn't get most people to sit through if I tried, they just wouldn't appreciate the plot and would complain about how cheap it looked.

I loved Avatar by the way, but not for the plot, it was exactly as weak as I expect all blockbuster plots to be, but it was fucking beautiful visually and technically stunning.

anigbrowl5• 17 years ago

In a nutshell, the audience for nuanced, elaborately plotted scripts is not as big as that for epic hammy ones. The movie industry (qua theaters) is not really about movies so much as it is a marketing operation for comfy chairs, sugary drinks, and popcorn. Hence the big-budget movie emphasis on the 'wow' factor, best appreciated via a 75-foot screen.

To some extent, it's always been this way. Look at Shakespeare: most of his plays are set in foreign countries which would have been terribly exotic to his audience, or are concerned with battles, magic, or murder - it's all pretty sensationalist stuff.

With this sort of big-budget production story complexity takes a back seat to putting the audience 'into' the experience. Gattaca is a fine sci-fi movie that turns on a clever script and strong acting performances, but it wasn't exactly a box-office sensation. But it was pretty cheap to make. with something like Avatar you want a story that everyone can follow easily rather than one that risks alienating any segment of the audience. Epic stories generally try to minimize ambiguity and complexity: the payoff is emotional rather than intellectual.

waterlesscloud• 17 years ago

It's also true that if you're spending $300,000,000 making the movie, it's got to play everywhere. EVERYwhere. It's going to be translated into 50 languages, usually badly. It's going to play in villages where no one reads and no one speaks English and the sound system loses half the words anyway.

Simple works. Complex doesn't.

As foreign box office has grown to a higher and higher percentage, this has become more and more true. Avatar did over 2/3rd of it's global box office opening weekend outside of the US and Canada (the "domestic" market).

Cameron did his job.

Tichy3• 17 years ago

It doesn't have to be complicated, but at least it should be realistic. For example it bothered me that the flora and fauna on Pandora was completely unrealistic. I don't think horses would have a very good time in the jungle, for example. If it was realistic (ie adhere to evolution theory), then one could still learn something from the movie, even if the plot was shallow.

Likewise in terms of evolution theory, I wonder how/why would loads of animals evolve with a common digital port. Not saying it is impossible, but then the history of that would be seriously interesting (I suppose the whole world would have to be an artificial creation by an ancient high tech race or something).

Instead, this movie dumbs down the common public by reinforcing naive stereotypes.

What amuses me in that context is that for example, the real native Americans did not even have horses before the settlers arrived. This just shows to me how extremely shallow the research for Avatar was. Of course natives have to ride horses and scream passionately and engage in stupid fights and rituals.

It bothers me because as it happens, I consider artificial life to be one of the most exciting things. There would have been so many opportunities here.

Ixiaus• 17 years ago

I thoroughly enjoyed Avatar. While its plot wasn't complex, deep, and enriching; it still had a plot. One that was blended well with other sub-plots. It also served well with the world building. The plot didn't distract from it and the eye candy didn't distract from the plot.

It was a perfect balance in my opinion for what it is. A beautiful film that is opening the doors for fresh and new science fiction (which has been lacking).

swernli• 17 years ago

I too enjoyed the movie quite a bit. I can agree that the plot was simplistic, but I for one did not find the dialog horrible. Like the review points out, it comes off like something mixing elements of Disney movies like "The Lion King" and "Pocahontas," which admittedly are movies I get a little choked up at. For me personally, that gave it a certain innocence and heartfelt quality. Is it predictable?Sure, but that doesn't neccessarily make it bad. I was emotionally engaded as well as visually stimulated, if not intellectually challenged by the film. For better or worse, that made it great for me.

lsd5you2• 17 years ago

I have a theory that artists do not have the same desires as the public. In cinema a bias towards cinematography and SFX could arise because the plot actually does not interest the artists as much as it perhaps should. Even a good plot will not remain interesting after many hours of work and so the artists lose sight of the prize and indulge themselves with technical aspects of their craft.

(This is not supposed to be a complete explanation of what led Avatar to lack in original plot and verisimilitude).

fnid• 17 years ago

The plot was the weakest part of Avatar, partly because Cameron has shown himself capable of creating good stories that engage the audience.

michaelneale• 17 years ago

If you can find any Egan books, read them. you will probably love them, I find myself day dreaming about them YEARS after I have read them, and then have to go back to read them again. He is a genius.

brown9-2• 17 years ago

Is it a waste to see this movie in 2D?

bjelkeman-again• 17 years ago

No. It is a fun romp and visually gorgeous in 2D.

ericd3• 17 years ago

It is mind blowing in 3D on an IMAX screen.

Occasionally bothersome plot aside, I found it to be the most immersive movie I've seen in years, and I think it's largely due to the excellent 3D.

archon• 17 years ago

I've seen it now in both 3D and 2D. You lose some of the wow factor of the visuals in 2D, but it's still beautifully rendered either way.

I also found that the 2D seemed to have more color depth than the 3D, but that might just have been my eyes trying to adjust to the 3D glasses.

ericd3• 17 years ago

It might be because each eye only sees every other frame in the 3D version (assuming this is on a single projecter with an alternating polarizer and not two projectors with different film and different polarization).

albertcardona• 17 years ago

Spot on: perfect teeth, realistic actors to the point of looking like real actors with paint on their bodies, beautiful living landscape (particularly at night), and a horrendous script.

astine• 17 years ago

I don't know why people keep comparing this film to Pocahontas; It's really more like FernGully in space.

stcredzero• 17 years ago

A friend of mine once called Princess Mononoke "Pocahontas done Right"

brandnewlow• 17 years ago

Can't upvote this enough. All I could think about during the movie was Fern Gully.

radley2• 17 years ago

Greg Egan reviewing Avatar is like Jakob Nielsen reviewing the 2Advanced website.

Totally different levels and types of craft, as many seem to forget.

blehn• 17 years ago

There's a certain degree subjectivity in any review. That said, I'd have to say that beyond the obvious usability failures, 2Advanced is a rather dreadful website.

radley2• 17 years ago

Uhm... ok.

BTW, the current 2Advanced website was a fluke. Their previous site (which won tons of awards and business) had been around for 5+ years. Eric Jordan, their founder and lead designer was doing a series of matte paintings just for fun. Someone on the team said they'd make great artwork for the website and thus v4.

elblanco7• 17 years ago

Me thinks Egan is reading too much into things. This is the complexity and imagination of a 1960's 12 year old who grew up reading golden-age sci-fi and then grew up and built his imagination with modern tech.

Critically analyzing this is like critically analyzing a 12 year old's day dreams.

That's about it. It's a thrilling and wild ride, a great place to be for a bit north of 2 hours, and that's it. It's a spectacle with a plot no deeper than Star Wars. But also no less fun that Star Wars.

Sapient• 17 years ago

The minute I read about Avatars plot, I thought of Call me Joe by Poul Anderson. Glad I wasn't the only one.

I would highly recommend reading it.

DLWormwood• 17 years ago

> the only real flaw in the preposterously humanlike Na'vi is their preposterously perfect teeth.

This is an accurate, but unfair, criticism. Humans tend to be most comfortable reading and watching stories about other humans, or barring that, human like creatures. (Think talking animals or Star Trek "aliens.") I seriously doubt a Hollywood film could effectively draw a large enough audience to cover development costs if the aliens were too far abstract or alien for viewers to identify with or try and read body language from. (I think this partly is why hard sci-fi is so rare. People might mistakenly think the film's horror if the aliens were more like Pierson's Puppeteers or other non-humanoid creature.)

Tichy3• 17 years ago

Hm, I was thinking Star Wars still wins, because of the Ewoks - they have fur. Nothing on Pandora had fur, I guess the rendering engines still can't handle hair.

So it seems humans can at least identify with cuddly bears.

RiderOfGiraffes2• 17 years ago

Massive, massive spoiler alerts!!

If you haven't seen the film and want to see the film and don't want to know every detail before-hand, don't read this thread. It (the thread) has taught me to avoid HN when there's a new film around.

Most likely this comment will sink to the bottom and not serve its purpose of protecting the casual browser (person, not application), but for as long as it stays at or near the top, it may save a few people.

Shamiq• 17 years ago

You get my up-vote. Only a few more days before the SO and I can get out to the theater.

And I'll give you a few more lines so that it'll cover larger screens (i've got 1200 pixels to make up for).

RiderOfGiraffes2• 17 years ago

Thanks. Someone either disagrees or had a slip of the finger, because they down-voted it. Perhaps it was deliberate and they want the spoilers to be here. Who knows.

However, if people want to keep the spoiler protector in place, but not give me the karma for it, feel free to upmod the spoiler protector and downmod this comment to balance it.

viggity• 17 years ago

He has a problem with their "perfect teeth"? wtf. If I was looking for something believable, I wouldn't be watching a movie about 10 foot tall blue aliens.

Yes the plot was fairly simple, but more importantly I don't think it had any gigantic gaping holes. I'd rather have a straight forward plot that I can understand than one so full of twists I can't comprehend any of it.

I loved it. I'll be seeing it several more times in the theater.

SF author Greg Egan reviews Avatar

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