James Cameron's Avatar

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i still love the movie though

lol!

Saw it Saturday in 3D. Overall: Awesome movie. Sure, the story's not original and blah blah blah, but that doesn't stop it from being a damn good movie. My only complaint would have to be with the 3D. This was the first feature film I've watched in 3D and while it was cool in parts, it still just felt too wonky at times. I understand that modern 3D cinema is still relatively new and they can't do drastic overhauls to theaters and whatnot, but here's me nitpicking about the 3D:

- The Framing: probably impossible to do 100% correctly, but there's a lot of problems with the framing of shots. The fact that many of the things in 3D are cut off by the edge of the screen drastically pulls you out of the 3D experience. Either more careful considerations need to be taken to the framing of 3D elements to avoid this, or the screen side would have to be increased to help build the illusion of peripheral vision, rather than looking through a window

- The Focus: it's obvious that the movie was meant for 2D because of depth-of-field inconsistencies. For the most part it was so subtle I didn't notice it, but there was a section where we have a top-down shot and we see a seed floating in the air. The seed is completely in frame, however the seed was completely out of focus. When watching in 3D, this seed should have been in focus (along with the rest of the image), but in 2D it would have not been in focus (as it was). Now obviously this is nit picking and this would mean a 3D print and a 2D print etc etc, but just saying.

- Element Juttering: I think this is actually an artifact of having the left eye and the right eye seeing two separate images, but certain elements in motion stutter across the screen. My description of how it looks to me would be like if the background was running at 30fps and the object in motion was moving at 24fps. I'm not sure what this issue is or if it's even fixable. Like I said, nitpicking.

Granted, at least Cameron didn't put in any of those cliched moments that are always so-obviously FOR 3D, but there were just little things about it that makes me think that it will be a better movie if seen in 2D.

Anyway, nitpicks aside, absolutely stunning movie. Definitely going to see it again and get a bluray when it comes out. My recommendation: If you want to see Avatar for the experience, see it in 3D. If you want to see Avatar to WATCH Avatar, see it in 2D.

Quote from Seldoon182

EPIC MAN!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_Me_Joe

seriously

Perhaps it doesn't mean that they stole anything, just that none of those movies, books or games or whatever were very original.

ok, my last post about this topic, i promise.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/Mov ... index.html

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":2iklzvwa]ok, my last post about this topic, i promise.http://edition.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/Mov ... index.html

what's real important here is the question the movie raises: if a movie can make literally thousands of people feel like this, what will be the next step? if similar movies, or even media, games, can tell people what to feel, wouldn't that be manipulation? while i am impressed by the movie's ability to make people feel this, the ethics behind it, and the standard it may create are very, very questionable.

Quote from Sentura

what's real important here is the question the movie raises: if a movie can make literally thousands of people feel like this, what will be the next step? if similar movies, or even media, games, can tell people what to feel, wouldn't that be manipulation? while i am impressed by the movie's ability to make people feel this, the ethics behind it, and the standard it may create are very, very questionable.

What?

All this tells us is that the movie was so immersive and well made, it can have an effect on some people. The same stuff has happened from Star Wars, Star Trek. This movie is no different. I read about people back when Star Wars was released. They did not want to live in the normal world anymore or have their typical job. Some wanted to be Darth Vaders son.

yup what Dark said, end of story no need to get all deep~~~

i would argue there is a difference between people who have been incarnated star wars/trek fans and people who watched avatar, that has had no previous connection to any sci fi movie ever. regardless, it is interesting whether or not you could actually bend this effect. the reason i brought it up also was that i might be writing my thesis paper about something similar.

Who knows how much people started posting there because they wanted to make everything sounds much worse then it really is.

Quote from Sentura

i would argue there is a difference between people who have been incarnated star wars/trek fans and people who watched avatar, that has had no previous connection to any sci fi movie ever. regardless, it is interesting whether or not you could actually bend this effect. the reason i brought it up also was that i might be writing my thesis paper about something similar.

No offense, but I hope a) your thesis paper will be better understandable to the reader or b) said reader is smarter than me because I have no clue what you mean. Didn't you bring up a few posts before the sci-fi story "Call me Joe", so apparently there IS a a previous connection (albeit not a movie)?

i think making people understand what i mean will be my biggest problem...

but yeah, what i meant was that the effect of the movie itself is interesting. how can it be that it has affected people in such way? why, if at all, should we be concerned regarding ethics? going even further, and perhaps even more unethical, one could ask whether the effect could be replicated - and that's where the debate really starts. if you can subject people to different feelings through media, where does the line draw between simple occurrences and brainwashing?

Ahh oki got ya!

I don't agree with the following quote at all but appreciate its well thought out point of view

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Okay, so I finally saw this movie. I've also seen Dances With Wolves, Pocahontas, At Play in the Field of the Lord, Gulf War I and II and many other films/media versions of reality that are tossed around as the original "going native"/exploitation of aboriginals stories.

Everyone who says that Avatar rips these off is wrong. Avatar, and James Cameron in particular, is brilliant.

Avatar strips bare the archetype that all these other films are built around. More precisely it strips away all the equivocation and ambiguity of context and bias that any discussion of analysis of those films is plagued of. All of these other films, like Pocahontas, DWW, or even the Iraq War, are clouded by their historical context. We are the product of the trouncing of the natives. The food we eat comes from land stolen or cheated from the Native Americans. We are the people who killed the natives sitting on the shit we wanted. So all of the earlier films of this archetype we're subject to the criticism that, while what was done back then was bad, the product of it, us, is good. Therefore, the criticism goes, those films are biased because they don't present the good that came out of it. This is the entire basis of conservative criticism of film.

Furthermore, we implicity believe that science = good and religions other than today's mainline established ones are backward or pagan, which = bad. So the natives had to be civilized and brought forward into the present out of the past, and anyone that fought back wasn't fighting only the invader, they were fighting civilization, science and progress itself.

What Cameron has done in Avatar is constructed a story in which none of that equivocation is possible. It's set in the future, so it's about where we are going, not who gave us the world we have today. So he present a choice for the audience - nothing on the screen is you or your ancestors, it is about who you want to become, where you want society to go.

Cameron executes this brilliantly. Yes, the plot is completely predictable, not because you've seen it before, because you actually haven't. Avatar differs from the plot of every single one of those archetypical films in one extremely important way - the forces of civilization/progress/technology lose. The backdrop of Pocahontas and Dances With Wolves is that history tells us the natives lost and progress won - we are here today, aren't we, so we must have won. Whatever moral high ground the natives had was rolled over by the inexorable advance of progress. The Lakotas were a good and noble people. Too bad the U.S. Army kicked their asses anyway. Pocahontas's land is now our land. The Indians gave us corn, and we gave it to Monsanto to genetically re-engineer and poison us as HFCS. Civilization has perfected its title to the native lands.

So Avatar is the first of these kinds of films to make it clear that the people who represent us as we live today are the losers. But the reason everyone thinks the plot is totally predicatable is not because they've seen it before, but because simply by beginning with the premise that Pandora has a mineral that earth desperately needs, we already know how its going to play out, because that's the history of our civilization.

You're correct in pointing out that "unobtanium" is a macguffin, but Cameron wants us to know that he knows that. That's why he picked the name. He picked the name "unobtainium" to tells us that the "thing" we want could be anything we can't already get, He also wants us to know it will always be something. Once a long time ago it was salt. Than it was gold, metals, spices, trade routes, higher ground, clean water, warm water ports, coal, oil, natural gas, uranium, a place in the sun, etc.

Jake says as much on page 103 of the script: "When people are sitting on shit you want, you make them your enemy. Then you’re justified in taking it." That's the history of the world.

What unobtainium is is unimportant in the film. Unobtainium gets less screen time than than those corkscrew plants or that giant rhino hippo thing. All we need to know is that it's something that we can't get and it's worth a lot of money. Cameron doesn't bother to explain any more because he understands that audience knows implicitly that because we can't get it we will take it. This is brilliant economy of story telling. It's like putting a black hat on the bad guy. You don't waste any screen time explaining human's motivation on Pandora if the audience walked into the theater already knowing it like it was a universal truth.

Furthermore, Cameron constructed Navi culture to be completely reality-based. The glowing tree and the interconnectedness of all things is not their quaint unenlightened religion. It's an actual, real, objectively verifiable physical thing. Grace says, "I’m talking about something real and measurable in the biology of the forest...It’s a network -- a

global network. And the Na’vi can access it -- they can upload and download data -- memories." In other words, the pinnacle of our civilization and our history, the global communications network called the internet, grows naturally on Pandora. They didn't need to learn about mining, semiconductors, Maxwell's equations or the like, because what we managed to do with that they had already.

But it's not a function of religion, it's a biological fact. So who is more quaint, humans with their unprovable religions that they ignore when it's convenient or the Na'vi personifying the very real giant neural network that constitutes their whole world?

So Cameron has eliminated the casting of the Na'vi as being in need of civilization. They don't need it, they don't want it, and what they already naturally have is in many respects better. So the audience now understands that it isn't simply - stubbornness of fear of change underlying Na'vi rejection of humans gifts to them. It's that the Na'vi simply don't need what the humans are offering.

Finally, Cameron does one more to neutralize the typical criticism of this genre (the "going native" genre, not sci fi) - he casts military training in a positive light. Jake, we are told, is a marine, the first to control an avatar. And all of his achievements are couched as a product of him being a trained marine. He gets lost in the forest, and no one expects him to survive. But he is shown, fashioning a spear, using the local flora to improvise a torch and survive. As Jake says in a voice-over "But there was only one thing I was ever really good at. Ooh-rah."

Cameron shows us that military people are highly capable, adaptable, efficient, and very often moral. There is no negative portrayal of the military (another common conservative critique). There is a very negative portrayal of Blackwater/Xe-esque corporate mercenaries, however. But Cameron is not allowing the audience to use ambiguity in the story to conflate the two.

I could go on much longer - I love that the script is available because there is so much to dig into. But in the end, I think Cameron's film is brilliant because he recasts the archetypical film about the conflict between civilization and the natives into a question for the audience. Who do we want to become? What and how much are we willing to destroy in ourselves and others to get the things we want in a n effort to preserve this imperfect world.

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Saw it last week in 3D, amazing film.

It's been out weeks here yet the girlfriend and I went midweek, 3pm and got the last 2 seats for the showing. The queue was going round the lobby! So whilst it was an amazing film, it was spoilt slightly by being 1 row from the front, at the very left so had a bit of a duff neck after.

http://www.3dm3.com/visits/825

Making of!