Thoughts on James Cameron’s Avatar

http://jseliger.com/2009/12/27/thoughts-on-james-camerons-avatar

by jseliger • 17 years ago

19 25 17 years ago

pgbovine4• 17 years ago

(feel free to downvote at will ...)

my trollish reply to everyone who has been analyzing the heck out of Avatar in the past week has been: "it's a friggin' ACTION movie, that's all! enjoy it as that, and don't expect more!"

james cameron was the guy who brought us the Terminator movies, True Lies, and a few other great heart-pounding action movies of the 80's and 90's (Titanic was an outlier for him ... it was far different than any other movie he had done). nobody was over-analyzing the geo-political realism or marital relations in True Lies.

the man is an action filmmaker. his movies should be compared to other big-budget Hollywood action films (e.g., transformers, bourne movies), not to deeply profound works of sci-fi/fantasy art like LOTR, Neal Stephenson novels, etc.

jseliger• 17 years ago

"my trollish reply to everyone who has been analyzing the heck out of Avatar in the past week has been: "it's a friggin' ACTION movie, that's all! enjoy it as that, and don't expect more!""

My generic answer tends to be, "If we expected more, we'd get better action movies."

My specific answer WRT Avatar is that the movie obviously aspires to be more: an eco-parable, opposing large organizations, whatever. Therefore it deserves at least some of the analysis it gets.

pgbovine4• 17 years ago

fair enough :) for me, the storyline simply served to provide the setting for the action scenes. the story was solid enough to make for beautiful action scenes where we actually sorta cared about what happened (rather than, say, Mortal Kombat style where random dudes just fought each other without motive or reason). but i definitely wasn't expecting anything profound in a movie taken up mostly by action and chase sequences.

roundsquare• 17 years ago

I agree with your reply if someone is giving James Cameron a hard time for something in his movie.

I disagree with you though if someone is pointing out how people might watch Avatar and get the wrong impression. Not that the movie shouldn't have been made or should not be watched, etc... but just that its interesting to note how people watching the movie might be thinking.

icefox2• 17 years ago

Downvoted at will :)

Sorry, but the last Bourne movie I saw had no plot, same goes for the second transformers movie. And LOTR wasn't exactly a cheap movie to make either... And the Terminator series has a nice deep story about AI.

It is an action movie that was fun to go see. It was visually rich. It had an actual plot (that wasn't half bad!). While Transformers2 was written over a few weeks, it produced a movie that was stupid and confusing. Avatar has been in the making for the past sixteen years. There are a ton of details that were created and even if they were not shown in the final film. A full language, foliage, planetary physics, not to mention questions like am I a murderer if I kill your avatar when you are in it? And then of course is the technical aspect of the movie from being in 3D (and cameron's history of that), to the amount of CGI in the movie. Sounds like a pretty good movie to geek out on to me.

pgbovine4• 17 years ago

totally agree with you --- i think it's one of the best action movies i've ever seen. when placed head-to-head against other movies of its genre, it truly shines.

cookiecaper• 17 years ago

I think any backlash probably has more to do with the hype surrounding the movie than the actual expectations set by the trailer or the production company.

My wife and I have lots of friends who rave about Avatar. We know some people who called it "the best movie [they'd] ever seen". We saw it and were thoroughly disappointed as such.

As an action movie, it's fine and cool. As "the best movie ever", not even close.

trevelyan• 17 years ago

I didn't find the linked article remotely critical or insightful. The author accuses Cameron of hypocrisy simply for having an environmental agenda. Why it is wrong for a successful entrepreneur to have an ecological agenda. I use money and care about the environment. Am I a hypocrite too?

The most interesting thing as far as I'm concerned is the evolution we can see in Cameron's approach to the military industrial complex. In Aliens it is the corporation that is the malevolent organization. It manipulates the military to do its will, and while the military is dehumanizing and anti-feminist, at least the individual soldiers are morally neutral and somewhat sympathetic characters.

In Avatar we see a much more coercive and malevolent military organization which is inseparable from the corporation itself. Cameron has become much more cynical in his view of politics. And that is interesting on its own, even without going into all of the strange parallels the script draws between the two sides which imo undermine the claims that this is an unthinking film.

icefox2• 17 years ago

For those who have seen the movie checkout out this article on 'Project 880' which goes through the original script discussing differences which very much sound like would make for a much richer story then what we got in the movie.

http://chud.com/articles/articles/21969/1/PROJECT-880-THE-AV...

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

Don't rule out the director's cut possibilities. People had similar problems with the Abyss, until they saw the extended version which turned out to make a lot more sense than the theatrical one did. I wouldn't be surprised if the version released on Blu-Ray ends up 3-4 hours long.

Great link, btw.

fuzzmeister• 17 years ago

I worry that any scenes that didn't make the final cut would have never even been fully rendered, given the CGI-centric nature of the film.

rms2• 17 years ago

Thanks for that link. I searched and found the actual scriptment on Docstoc. http://www.docstoc.com/docs/14294813/Avatar-Scriptment-by--J...

Seriously, I really found it, if I "found" it, it would be on Scribd.

10ren3• 17 years ago

Wow, that does seem to be it (e.g. it has the scalping bit). But what does your last line mean?

pgbovine4• 17 years ago

wow thanks so much for that link! it's great to see that cameron's original script (which really seems like a short novel) had much more depth and soul. however, i suspect that he was first and foremost aiming to make a dazzling action film, so unfortunately a lot of the back-story and slower scenes had to be cut. i can't imagine how he could've squeezed in more story without cutting much of the action.

blhack• 17 years ago

Yeah, go back and watch the previews for it...I think there was a lot of footage that got cut.

10ren3• 17 years ago

Thanks, I picked the unobtainium issue: the tree is supposed to be above the largest deposit, but it doesn't float.

The movie could have been longer: afterwards, I misread the time, and literally thought it was only 1:42 long (not 2:42). I'd see a longer version, that setup motivations properly.

A conflict for me was that destroying the tree was a terrible act, but looked really cool.

Maybe it's because I was reading Xenocide (3rd in the Ender trilogy), but many of the ideas in the film seem to be in that book.

zackattack2• 17 years ago

I'm in avatar right now. It's beautiful but too long , and it lacks depth and cohesion. If you want a sweet scifi movie with actual plot see district 9.

MikeCapone2• 17 years ago

Agreed about District 9, but please don't be "that guy" who's going online during a movie.

zackattack2• 17 years ago

Why do you care what I do during the movie? There were multiple people in my aisle who were discreetly tapping on their phones.

wglb• 17 years ago

Not to review a review, but this is not a very good review. Much more interesting is the linked wired article.

I have always been disappointed in the Star Trek films, being a fan of Dune. Yes, it does seem to me to be a rip-off of Dune, and a poor one at that. I think Avatar is a much better movie than any of the Star Trek series. I wouldn't say that it is the best movie ever, but it is certainly at the top of the list for special effects, by a large measure.

(Don't forget that James Cameron did Aliens, Titanic, Terminator one and two.)

Thoughts on James Cameron’s Avatar

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