It has an 84% on the tomatometer right now,
and 82% of Americans are concerned about anthropogenic global warming. Coincidence? 
Is it just me, or does the animation look worse than in Jurassic Park - which is now 16 years old? Those dinos looked real - partly because of the mixed use of animatronics. But Avatar no doubt just went for straight CGI, and it just reminds me of the cartoonish look of Star Wars Episode One.
Avatar looks better and seems more Oist friendly than the new Iron Man 2 movie that’s coming out. Check out this mess; http://link.brightcove.com/services/player…tid=57699172001
I have known a long while about this movie from interviews and reviews. It all boils down to it being a paean to the image of the Noble Savage. I plan on seeing this movie to critique it ideologically at Aristotle’s Lighthouse.
It really does sadden me because of the missed opportunity. And I agree that CGI just does not equal the visual cohesion that Henson’s Animatronics achieved, CGI always seems out of place
What exactly is in that preview that you find offensive? The scene where he addresses Congress seems pretty badass.
I notice that a lot of people seem to be claiming that CGI just isn’t totally realistic (yet?). Two movies off the top of my head that achieved that realism, in my opinion, are Minority Report, and the 4th Harry Potter movie (specifically, the dragon). It’s possible these days, as far as I’m concerned, it just doesn’t happen consistently. I assume it has to do with the quality of the animation studio hired.
I also wasn’t very impressed with the trailer, but, Hollywood conspiracy aside (which sounds implausible to me), the reviews are very positive for the special effects. Maybe there’s something the trailer didn’t show.
What exactly is in that preview that you find offensive? The scene where he addresses Congress seems pretty badass.
I’m replying frommy iPod so I don’t have the resources at hand to point you in the right direction, but research the director’s quotes concerning his concept for these aliens. When you do you will no longer doubt why I dubbed them with the pejorative term of “noble savages” , because Cameron has sought to impersonate that bankrupt philosophical notion through them and paint all industrialized civilization as evil and destructive.
I’m replying frommy iPod so I don’t have the resources at hand to point you in the right direction, but research the director’s quotes concerning his concept for these aliens. When you do you will no longer doubt why I dubbed them with the pejorative term of “noble savages” , because Cameron has sought to impersonate that bankrupt philosophical notion through them and paint all industrialized civilization as evil and destructive.
I think he was referring to the Iron Man 2 trailer.
Avatar looks better and seems more Oist friendly than the new Iron Man 2 movie that’s coming out. Check out this mess; http://link.brightcove.com/services/player…tid=57699172001
You’re either being sarcastic or you’re trolling.
But as far as the visuals of Avatar goes, it does look amazing and I’ll give props to the team and individuals behind all that. Also, on the discussion of real life versus CGI I think CGI can definitely enhance a film, but I think sometimes it’s too heavily relied on.
I’d also like to see more all CGI action films. I think a lot can be achieved with animation other then kids stuff. One thing I like about Avatar is that it takes that attitude. Although it presents something not very good plot wise. Hopefully we will see something in the future as visually advanced without a horrid plot and premise. Maybe I’ll make something.
I’ve always maintained that properly utilized animatronics/puppets like in JP or the creatures in Jim Henson movies look much more realistic than a lot of CG. I mean after all they… really exist. As good as computer animation looks it is still ANIMATED by someone. The motion, texture, and the way it looks within the scene just still don’t quite approach the level of believability. When you see a reptiles skin in reality, the color is a little dull, it has erratic scratches and folds, and it’s dirty. But most CG is so streamlined and given such unrealistic “flow” in it’s movement. It really takes me out of the illusion. Especially when the movie approaches the level of damn near everything being CG like is the case with Star Wars I-III, and apparently this thing.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be as boring and predictable as everyone is saying. Seems like all it has going for it is loads of superficial glitz and meaningless action. That’s enough for many people (Spiderman 2/3).
All of the aspects you point out can be achieved with CG. The “flow” you call unrealistic is actually alot more realistic than the motion of puppets/animatronics. The motion is quite often based on motion capture data(when it comes to humans whole scenes can be shot that way). Texturing and rendering can be made photorealistic, and that includes scratches and skin folds. It is, of course, difficult and challenging and it’s not like the end result is always perfect, but it’s not like it’s outside the reach of CG technology(I think it’s more a question of time, money and talent, really). If puppets were a better choice they would be used instead.
A huge issue though is actually knowing that it’s not real. Everyone knows that an alien monster with funny colored skin is CG-animated, which somewhat destroys the illusion right there. Making it a little more dull and gritty could perhaps help sell the illusion, but people are still going to be a little reluctant to buy it because it’s so obviously not real.
CGI always seems out of place
I think it’s more an issue of CG getting noticed when it’s out of place. It can either be fantastic effects, creatures and landscapes based on fantasy, or simply poorly executed. However, there’s also a ton of CG that doesn’t even get noticed - from small details to complete landscapes and environments. Perhaps not so much the case in this movie though.
The movie is visually stunning as advertised, and there really wasn’t a philosophical cringe moment in it.
The thing that makes me want to scream though, is as Far as the Plot goes its not horrid, its just stolen.
Any Science Fiction Fan that doesn’t walk out of that movie, as I just did, and say, I just saw Dune (with elements from the Game Alpha Centauri too no less) is deluding themselves.
I’m replying frommy iPod so I don’t have the resources at hand to point you in the right direction, but research the director’s quotes concerning his concept for these aliens. When you do you will no longer doubt why I dubbed them with the pejorative term of “noble savages” , because Cameron has sought to impersonate that bankrupt philosophical notion through them and paint all industrialized civilization as evil and destructive.
I was actually referring to someone else’s statements on the preview for Iron Man 2.
So has anyone seen the movie?
So has anyone seen the movie?
I saw it, I kinda like it. It is a mixed bag. Avatar is anti-fascism and anti-industrial, with similarities to Tolkien themes. The blue people of Pandora are science fiction versions of Tolkien elves, most of the humans present are cast in the role of orcs, and just a few scientists act as human beings. I’ll write more later.
Seems to be “Dances With Wolves” set in an alien culture.
I think I’m going to skip Avatar until the Blu-Ray is available from Netflix.
I’m interested in the visual effects, of course, but I’m not shelling out an extra dime for yet another “white guilt” movie.
The “evil” corporate thugs go to pillage an otherworldly resource that is so valuable… err.. more valuable than the cost of getting there, and having a planetary war over?! No trade is possible? No rational communication might save money, equipment, lives, etc? We have become technological genius’ but reverted to savage killers at the same time? That can’t be it, I hope.
I thought along the same lines when I read the setup synopsis.
I mean, why go to the trouble of implementing the avatar tech if they’re just going to go in guns-a-blazin’ anyway? If the corporation is so evil, why not just slaughter the aliens and mine their ‘whateverite’ willy-nilly? Why send in one of their own to try to persuade the aliens to move, someone who knows their tactics and weaponry? And why is it that the ‘whateverite’ they need is ONLY available on the aliens’ land? Surely such a resource would be abundant enough to warrant an expensive and time-consuming journey through space to acquire it …
Maybe they have plausible answers for these questions in the near 3 hour movie, but the “white guy goes native, learns the ways of the noble savages, and fights his former comrades to save his new friends” story is not only way too played out, but based on a politically-correct revisionist history of American settlement and expansion.
Minor spoilers, not much more than reading the rest of this thread plus reviews and seeing the trailer.
Well, I thought this movie was a fantastically well executed idea, but the message it sent was one I dislike intensely. The effects lived up to the hype in my opinion (I saw some problems, but I think that was the 3D not the CGI). The acting was good. Writing was good, except a couple instances where the message seemed to get too heavy handed (i.e. “Shock and Awe” “fight terror with terror”). But overall writing was really good. And the world of Pandora was beautiful and interesting. Not sure how it would evolve, but the world seemed well thought out.
As for “how is this substance so valuable it can finance all this” etc. criticism: It is stated in the movie that the material, unobtainium (obviously a tongue-in-cheek name for it, even in the world of the movie), is worth 20 million dollars a kilogram. A couple thousand tons and it is equal to the entire gross domestic product of the Earth in 2009. So, it can definitely finance all these operations.
Now, the idea/message itself: not so good. I can give it some excuse because the native’s religion had some basis (apparently all the trees on Pandora are connected, like a giant computer network or global brain) and the people and animals can tap into it and connect with each other, etc. So, its got some basis. So, there is some basis in their “nature is awesome” attitude. But, that does not mean that it justifies the plot. Humans offer the Na’vi, the aliens, anything they want to move away from their tree-city thing, and they decline (the settlement lies right on top of the biggest deposit of unobtainium for 200km, perhaps as far as they’ve surveyed, though they don’t say that; I presume that going further would be very dangerous, as the local life is quite hostile). Okay, and I understand the humans deciding to just kick them out of the area, after all, they don’t have property and are a bunch of collectivists anyway, so whatever. However, they don’t give diplomacy much of a chance, and I think their attack is needlessly violent. Anyway, the humans succeed in their endeavor.
And then the human-traitor, the main character, decides to lead the locals into battle (totally ridiculous, and pointless, humans got what they wanted, so we won’t bother them any more). Humans decide to blow up this sacred tree thing (really important to the natives). How do they do this? A simple nuke? Nope. A gravity bomb, just a big rock dropped from orbit? Nope. They fly a giant-ass pile of high explosives in, and release it in a ridiculously stupid way. Anyway, the humans whoop up on the natives and just smash them to bits, but then the planet’s consciousness or whatever makes all the animals attack, and the human warriors die. Then the rest pack up and leave. End of story.
Now, this doesn’t make any sense. I’m sorry, but humans won’t just stop. They just know that they’ll have to go bigger in the future. More guns, more bullets, more bombs, and let’s just drop a nuke from orbit and take out that tree. Use bio-weapons to wipe out all life within a hundred kilometers of our base. But at 20 million a kilo, humans won’t stop. A big war could easily be financed. And we’d almost certainly win.
Oh, I forgot something. The human-traitor main character says at one point “their world has no green, they killed their mother” i.e. nature/forests/animals/etc. This is apparently a bad thing. Even though humans now can travel between star systems and have super-advanced technology. So this movie’s message was: “Nature is awesome and sacred, man is evil, civilizations slaughter all the natives, corporations are evil, money is evil, let’s all go live in the forest, f*** technology.” And that is absolutely terrible.
At least I have the consolation that in the sequel in my head, the locals get de-stroyed and humans win. And then human civilization spreads, and the locals get to have the benefits of technology (including the fruits of experiments with their neural connection ability). Yay civilization.
Okay…So despite the fact that CGI and animation keep me in a job (well not currently) but knowing a little bit about the new software that was developed for JUST this film and the 30 hours it took to render ONE frame of this movie…I would say that the CGI is a liiiiiitle bit better than Jurassic Park. Excuse the sarcasm, but common!! Some of the newest, and most optimized facial motion capture was used a long with new photo realistic lighting techniques…This can hardly be related to Jurassic park. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Jurassic Park, and the visual effects still hold up, but the tech. used in the post and Pre-Production of Avatar is currently in my opinion unsurpassed…
As the far as the plot line I totally agree it’s lame.
I would suggest seeing this movie for the visual effects alone.
I am just coming from the movie theater.
To me, the plot can be totally compatible with Objectivism and can be fully explained to our children and teenagers on Objectivist Ethics.
The film is about people A inititating violence against people B. As almost always happens in these circumsntances, it is A wanting to take something from B by force.
In this case, people A happen to he members of Homo sapiens species, while people B happen to be from an alien species.
One people is far more technologically advance than the other, as it is expected to be when two species so distant in space and time will be.
People A want the precious mineral below the giant tree where people B live, and to get it, they don’t care about destroying people’s B dwellings, or lives.
When I read people here describing this film as “anti-man” I think we should think twice the words we are picking. This is not an anti-man film, just as it is not an anti-man film a one that presents Nazis looting and plundering Jews, or Portuguese conquerors looting and plundering Guarani homes in Brazil.
Every time Ayn Rand refers to “man” she is always basing her arguments within the context of life on Earth, in this era. She didn’t mean to exalt man above any other possible rational creature of the universe. That was beyond her scope, as Homo sapiens was (and still is) the only species known to her/ to us, who needs a rational mind as a tool of survival. Certainly, all individuals needing conceptual thinking to survive, whatever their genetic configuration or the planet they inhabit, will qualify as “man” for philosophical purposes.
In the film, the aliens, while technologically primitive, use their mind as a way to survive just as hunters-gatherers societies used their mind for survival in our own planet not so long ago (and Ayn Rand recognized hunter-gatherer’s use of a rational mind).
The film has an important lesson for all of us to understand.
Initiation of force from one rational being against other rational being is wrong. It is inmmoral. It doesn’t matter if the agressor belongs to our family, our nation, our group of friends, of our species. It doesn’t matter if the victim is a collectivist, a Muslim, a hippie under the effects of LSD, a person with an IQ of 60, a bushman in the Kalahari, or an alies species.
In fact, some humans in the film realized that, and rebelled against the fascist commander, and even perished in defending liberty and justice. The main hero in the film, indeed, is not an alien but a member of the Homo sapiens species (Jake Sullivan). When the other heroic human, the scientist played by Sigourney Weaver, tries to explain what is wrong with destroying the trees, she does not appeal to any mystical or sentimental argument, but to scientific curiosity, the hunger of knowledge that has lift humans to the heights of civilization.
I repeat: this is not an anti-man film. On the contrary, it exalts freedom, reason and self-esteem as the essence of mankind, as well as the essence of all ultimately rational beings, wherever they live in the universe.
I repeat: this is not an anti-man film. On the contrary, it exalts freedom, reason and self-esteem as the essence of mankind, as well as the essence of all ultimately rational beings, wherever they live in the universe.
There is no freedom on Pandora, there is no need for it when the ideal is to conform to your social role in the tribe. There is no reason either, there is no progress when you already live in utopia.
I agree only for so far as I took it literally and accepted the science fiction premise. But allegorically it is all wrong. In the big picture, the movie inverts the usual (natural!) order of things by making the primitives virtuous and the technology loving humans evil. Humans that incompetent at managing large projects would have never gotten off the planet. And to compare with another film about going native, the na’vi people like the samurai in The Last Samurai are never depicted doing a bad thing. This degree of virtue is “unrealistic”, but Avatar is completely made up so that is a worthless charge to make. But the halo of virtue about the tribal culture sticks in the subconscious anyway, which is what I don’t like.
Utopia is for non-humans.
But the halo of virtue about the tribal culture sticks in the subconscious anyway, which is what I don’t like.
That’s a good way of explaining that.
I don’t think people will analysis this as much as people on this board or other thinkers. They basically see the shallow aesthetics – humans, with guns, ships, civilization is BAD; tribal, primitive, mystic aliens are GOOD.
If Cameron wanted to be pro-freedom or whatever, he could choice to use different characters and a different settings. He choose what he did for a reason. He’s an open advocate of environmentalism. This is his way of presenting it. Romanticized to utopia as always.