AVATAR--I have the sneaking suspicion....

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  • Re: AVATAR--I have the sneaking suspicion....

    At the end of the day though money is money, and besides people talk like 3D is a given to give a film a boost, but it was arguably the opposite (you have to get people to shell out that extra money after all!). It's not like 3D or IMAX had been a big draw prior to Avatar (Beowulf etc), so Cameron took a big risk. If he got them to pay a few bucks more for their ticket, all the more power to him, it certainly wasn't inevitable.

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    • Re: AVATAR--I have the sneaking suspicion....

      Originally posted by MacG View Post
      AVATAR's final b.o. -- while impressive -- with need to have a huge asterik after it to account for wildly expensive 3D and IMAX ticket prices.
      But that asterisk is not a handicap. It's a testament to the power and viability of technology countless people shrugged off until now.

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      • Re: AVATAR--I have the sneaking suspicion....

        Finally saw this. As I may have said in some other post some other time, if you want a visual experience watch a sunset or ingest mushrooms. Technology should and can enhance and augment a story, it should never overwhelm it or try to take its place. The latter three Star Wars should have been enough of a lesson in this.

        Avatar had some great visual effects yes, but the story was at once juvenile and stupid and confusing as hell. I ask one question: how did the native that Jake first meets (the girl) and saves him speak English? At least give us the Star Trek explanation and say everyone has a universal translator in their brain. And there were a million other questions I had. But that's little stuff.

        Overall, this could have been written by a 12 year old. I honestly don't care that the technology is amazing and that it will break box office records. It was dumb.
        Quato Lives!

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        • Re: AVATAR--I have the sneaking suspicion....

          Originally posted by EddieCoyle View Post
          I ask one question: how did the native that Jake first meets (the girl) and saves him speak English? And there were a million other questions I had. But that's little stuff.
          If that was the big question, the little questions must be really easy. Your question was completely answered in the film. The purpose of the Avatar program was to work with the natives. They had a school for the native people for years. It's why her character was so revered for a human. The school was not only mentioned, but it was shown.

          If your issue is with the technology and the basic story that's understandable, but the world was very consistent.
          If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.
          Dave Barry

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          • Re: AVATAR--I have the sneaking suspicion....

            Wasn't the school for training new avatar people, not natives? Whose character was revered? Sigourney Weaver? If they had a school for years, why would he have to speak to them toward the end to try to prevent a war? Shouldn't they have already had great relations and had a whole slew of people to communicate what was coming?

            Why would they take him into the forest after only a day of training when he seemed to know nothing and not ten seconds into his first trip into the forest he's almost killed by two wild beasts? If it's that uber dangerous, why would anyone go in without a huge batallion let alone him and two scientist types?

            Why are the natives blue? It's a forest world, and they are in tune with nature. How does being blue help them to survive or blend in with their environment, especially one so dangerous? They'd stick out everywhere and be sitting ducks all the time.

            Why do humans this far into the future, who have mastered space travel, still use basically the same kind of ordinance that we have now?

            I could ask a million more questions. Maybe I missed the part about natives learning English. I found much more than that inconsistent and silly.
            Quato Lives!

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            • Re: AVATAR--I have the sneaking suspicion....

              Originally posted by EddieCoyle View Post
              Wasn't the school for training new avatar people, not natives?
              No. The school was for the natives, for humans to teach them to be less "savage." There was even a throw away line where the head of the corporation said, "we built them roads, we taught them english, but blah blah blah..."

              This isn't the movie's fault if you missed it. There were several references and the few complaints in this thread are the first I've noticed of anyone confused about it.

              Remember, the humans had been on Pandora for a very long time before Jake arrived.

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              • Re: AVATAR--I have the sneaking suspicion....

                Originally posted by EddieCoyle View Post
                I could ask a million more questions.
                I think the most important question is: How do you write a movie that turns out to be as successful as Avatar?

                Mulling over tenuous plot points won't help.

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                • Re: AVATAR--I have the sneaking suspicion....

                  Originally posted by EddieCoyle View Post
                  Why are the natives blue? It's a forest world, and they are in tune with nature. How does being blue help them to survive or blend in with their environment, especially one so dangerous? They'd stick out everywhere and be sitting ducks all the time.
                  Electromagnetic radiation comes in many forms, gamma rays, x-rays,
                  ultraviolet, visual, infrared, and radio. Our eyes evolved to see in
                  the narrow range that the sun has its peak output -- the visual band
                  -- and the flora and fauna of Earth evolved pigments and colors that
                  work at these wavelengths. But this isn't universal -- some animals
                  can see a narrower region of the spectrum than us, and others see
                  farther into the ultraviolet or infrared. Our cornea blocks most UV
                  light, but bees, for example, don't have one and can see farther into
                  the UV. They can see patterns in flowers that we can't.

                  In fact, colors are really something manufactured in our brain -
                  physically colors are just different wavelengths of light ranging
                  uniformly from short wavelengths (violet) to long (red). What we see
                  as blue or green or red helps us differentiate sky from grass from
                  blood, but to a creature from another world, all these things might
                  appear as the same color. In fact, you could imagine that bats might
                  use echolocation to "see- rough surfaces as one color and smooth
                  surfaces as another. So since colors are something created by our
                  brains and not intrinsic to the universe (only wavelengths of light
                  are), it is virtually certain Pandorans would see color differently
                  than we do.
                  Alpha Cen A has almost the same temperature as the Sun, but it is just
                  a bit hotter. As a result, the star puts out most of its light at
                  visual wavelengths just like the Sun. But the star's output is only
                  part of the story - the oxygen and ozone in our atmosphere block much
                  of the ultraviolet light from the Sun, and water vapor blocks some of
                  the infrared light. Pandora doesn't have an oxygen atmosphere (if the
                  movie mentioned what gasses it contains, I didn't catch it), so we
                  might expect more of the ultraviolet light to reach the surface. The
                  creatures there might be able to see farther into the ultraviolet.
                  There might be all kinds of patterns that the inhabitants of Pandora
                  can see that just look blue to us. Maybe that's which there are so
                  many blue colors in the film. To take this a step farther, I would
                  have loved to see a scene where a character sees beautiful colors or
                  patterns as an Avatar, only to have this beauty evaporate into a
                  uniform sea of blue when he sees the same vista with human eyes.

                  More about the science of Avatar HERE

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                  • Re: AVATAR--I have the sneaking suspicion....

                    Originally posted by CrackDown View Post
                    I think the most important question is: How do you write a movie that turns out to be as successful as Avatar?

                    Mulling over tenuous plot points won't help.
                    You're right, 'cause the story ain't what's making this film popular. It's all those perdy pixels in 3D.

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                    • Re: AVATAR--I have the sneaking suspicion....

                      I saw it last night. I thought it was a fine film. Worth discussing.
                      I rock it for Jesus and I'm in love.

                      Dreaming the impossible dream, working towards realizing it one day at a time.

                      http://johnnyatthemovies.wordpress.com/

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                      • Re: AVATAR--I have the sneaking suspicion....

                        You guys crack me up.

                        38 pages of trying to figure out why this film is so successful, and now we're into gamma and electromagnetic rays.

                        @TerranceMulloy

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                        • Re: AVATAR--I have the sneaking suspicion....

                          Originally posted by MacG View Post
                          You're right, 'cause the story ain't what's making this film popular. It's all those perdy pixels in 3D.
                          13 years worth of movies since Titanic, filled with "perdy pixels" and even lovely looking 3D in the last few years, mostly animation (Up was beautiful)... and yet none of them even broke $1 billion, let alone became the highest grossing movie of all time.

                          Sorry to break it to you, but it's the story too.
                          Last edited by CrackDown; 01-28-2010, 03:07 AM.

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                          • Re: AVATAR--I have the sneaking suspicion....

                            It's the story... and even if it were those pixels, guess what? As the old WGA adverts used to say: Someone wrote that. Just random pixels are meaningless - a writer decided what the images would be, what the world would look like, how the characters would interact.

                            Probably earlier in this thread I said the absolute gold that we should all be looking for is the idea of the Navi's braids connecting with all life on the planet. And if someone tells me that some old sci fi novel did it first, that makes us all even *dumber* and Cameron even *smarter* because he could see that obvious gold and nobody else did.

                            People are not naming their children after characters because of pixels. This story touched them - and if we evere want to succeed as storytellers we have to figure out how to tell as story this powerful. We need to see this film with better eyes.

                            - Bill
                            Free Script Tips:
                            http://www.scriptsecrets.net

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                            • Re: AVATAR--I have the sneaking suspicion....

                              Cameron writes a good, solid, well engineered story, you don't get that successful time after time if you don't know what you are doing in the story department.

                              Anyway, the latest Box Office stats are that Avatar is about to clock over 1.9 billion, by the end of this weekend it'll be over 2 billion, which in the world of Avatar would buy you 100 kilos of Pandora's finest Unobtainium.

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                              • Re: AVATAR--I have the sneaking suspicion....

                                Originally posted by EddieCoyle View Post
                                I ask one question: how did the native that Jake first meets (the girl) and saves him speak English?

                                .. It was dumb.
                                I think that was one of the strengths. The script originally had a scene to explain this, so we'd know BEFORE we met the girl that she would speak English.

                                However, after editing they took the risk of trusting the audience - they let this information get sprung on us and Jake. So Jake is surprised as well as us.

                                We weren't wondering long, however - because Jake (and us) learned the reason about 40 seconds later.

                                I'm sorry you missed it. But it really wasn't the movies' fault!

                                To take this a step farther, I would have loved to see a scene where a character sees beautiful colors or patterns as an Avatar, only to have this beauty evaporate into a uniform sea of blue when he sees the same vista with human eyes.
                                That would have been a great scene. It might be difficult to set it up so the audience understands, but it would have fitted in amazingly well.

                                OTOH, though, it isn't particularly surprising that many species in an environment doesn't particularly rely on camouflage.

                                Just look at our planet. Before going into the rainforest, the naturalist Gerald Durrell was convinced that all the birds that looked so bright in cages in drab England would blend in perfectly into their environment in the wild. He was surprised that while it was true for some of them, there were were plenty that looked just as bold and obvious to predators. In his book 'Three Singles to Adventure' he explains:

                                "It is obvious that most of the birds in the rainforest have never considered the concept of protective colouration, or if they have, thought that impressing a mate was a much more pressing problem".

                                Why do humans this far into the future, who have mastered space travel, still use basically the same kind of ordinance that we have now?
                                Let's ignore the obvious reality that we have space travel now ... but the guys in the OK corral would still recognise our weapons as 'basically the same kind of ordinance'.
                                Let's ignore the simple reality that kinetic kill weapons are effective ... and a handheld kinetic kill weapon is pretty much 'a gun'.

                                Let's look at another aspect of the film. Look how much language has changed in a short time. Look at how simple words like 'toilet' have changed - let along reading something written only a few decades ago and coming across words like 'Munroe bagging' and 'Quisling'.

                                If it was more genuine, they should have been talking using unrecognisable slang to the point that the audience would have trouble following some events. But the film maker didn't choose to do that. Can you guess why? If you had been in charge of the film, would you have made a different decision ?

                                Even more than that, it seems that when the audience pays money to see a film, in some way they are trusting the filmmaker. The questions you are asking basically indicate that you didn't trust the film. Instead of assuming that the natives learning English happened off screen you seemed to assume the creators of the film stuffed up.

                                People go to films like this to enjoy themselves. They are willing to not question everything if it maximises their enjoyment. Look at 'Mr & Mrs Smith'. The entire setup is inane. But the audience is willing to go along with it because the film makers promised that if you do, you'll enjoy yourself. And the film makers delivered.

                                If you aren't willing to put aside certain questions to enjoy the film, then at least make use of your stubbornness. Make a list of all the things YOU would want explained in a film like this and mark off the once Cameron chose to ignore. Figure out *WHY* he answered some questions but not others.

                                You'll learn more doing that, than simply saying 'It was dumb'

                                Mac
                                Last edited by Mac H.; 01-31-2010, 01:46 AM.
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