Avatar - James Cameron Returns! (Spoilers in thread, obviously!)

If anyone is interested, here is an explanation of the floating mountains from the Avatar scriptment.

Josh can see volcanic buttes and mesas towering above a
lower cloud blanket, like the Tepuis of Peru. Streamers
and whorls of shredded cloud swirl around the mesa tops.
Then the pilot tells them that they may get a glimpse of
the MONTES VOLANS, the famous "flying mountains", which
planetologists say are the rarest phenomena in known
space.

Also called the HALLELUJAH MOUNTAINS, they are like
floating islands among the clouds.
Literally floating. Mountainous chucks of rock, some over
ten miles across, hovering thousands of feet above the
ground.

Here's how it works: Polyphemis (the massive planet around
which Pandora revolves) has a mother of magnetosphere... a
naturally occurring magnetic field a million times more
powerful than Earth's. As Pandora rotates and revolves
through this field, its molten iron core generates its own
field, with "cells" or vortices which are small regions of
intensely powerful magnetic force at the surface.
Added to this unique phenomenon is another... Pandora is
blessed with a naturally occurring substance a million
times more precious than gold. Its joke name of
"unobtanium" has stuck, over the years. Unobtanium is a
rare-earth mineral, formed volcanically, which is a room-
temperature superconductor.

The room temperature superconductor has been the "snark"
of modern materials science... a substance which transmits
electricity with zero resistance, but at normal
temperatures, rather than the liquid-helium cooled
superconductors of human science.

Unobtanium does not exist in our solar system. It is
unique to Pandora. And it is the reason to go there...
the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow bridge.

Another interesting property of superconducting materials
is that they will levitate in a powerful magnetic field.
This magnetic levitation, or maglev, effect has been used
to lift trains and run them without wheels since the late
1980's. On Pandora the effect causes huge outcroppings of
unobtanium to rip loose from the surface and float in the
magnetic vortices. These floating islands circulate
slowly in the magnetic currents, like icebergs at sea,
scraping against each other and the towering mesa-like
mountains of the region. The Pandorans call them the
Thundering Rocks, and the entire area is sacred to them.

Which could be a problem, since the humans have come to
mine these mountains and get rich. Which is why they are
called the Hallelujah Mountains.
Click to expand...
 
Just came from seeing it in 3d wow

I think that you can clearly see a story in there not as in other big effects films.

Anyway those scenaries were impressive (and in 3d no words....)
 
Nektonic, that clears it up. :)

Luis & Inaki, nice reviews!




And regarding the 'waterfall' conversation; My wife presented a comment at lunch: who says it's water?


- Mikko
 
Well, time for more in depth review..(well kinda…)


First of all, what makes a good story? for me and I think that for many of you is the main character and its surroundings (co characters, conflicts, whises, shortcomings, dreams, handycaps…). In the case of this film I think that this was covered well enough to keep me interested from 8:15PM to 11:00PM.
Anyway this whole thing that I’ve written now may not make any sense… forgive meal the errors but it is 1 in the morning….

SPOILERS AHEAD
I find that the main plot is similar to that in the last samurai, guy lacks of something to fight for, is given a mission, gets there finds something to fight for and fight against his past. The main difference is in the ending.

-Jake Sully:
Clearly and well defined as the main character and driver of the story. He follows the typical (and well proven) Learning process, He starts with a handicap which I consider to be a lack of family feeling. Yes, he is a Marine and has lots of people to share his live with, but he doesn’t have some ideals to fight for (that he really cares about). Life has hit him pretty hard with a physical handicap (that for me shows that underlying lack of something to fight for…).
He is later given the opportunity to fight against these shortcomings. By getting into his avatar he no longer is handicapped which gives us a positive vibe about his future. We know that something good will come from that situation. That made me want to know more, thus getting me hooked.
In this process of becoming his avatar he gets help from Sigourney Weaver which will become his mentor (together with Zoe Saldana, Neytiri) This two characters will help him get into this new world of goodness, no handicap and something to fight for, a community, a girl, a family, a membership….

Sigourney Weaver will be his mentor during his time in the real world, he will receive moral help, and an example of this is her insistence about feeding him.
Zoe Saldana is his mentor inside the new world, she will be the one that’ll teach him everything he needs to become one of them, she will teach him how to survive, she will teach him about history… This will come in handy later during the end of the film when he will have to apply everything he learnt to deal with the evil (I’ll call them bad humans).

He had found something to fight for and he didn’t want to know anything about his previous live. He even refuses a new pair of legs (and remember that he was really fighting for that). That act of leaving the previous live behind is shown by the death of Sigourney Weaver’s character, remember that she was his mentor in the real world (now no needed any more).
​
Thanks to that process of learning he will defeat the bad guys and bring freedom to the world of goodness. To show that he achieved all that and that he became one of them he will symbolically die and reincarnate in one of them. He is a totally new person, an adult person.

This learning and evolution process is in my opinion what makes the films story interesting and not a simple special effects film. As an example when he was about to be given one of those huge birds (I can’t remember the name now) he was climbing up the floating mountains something inside me was telling me “ I hope he gets it!” I got involved in the film.
The surroundings, the culture, the community, the world, the idea of the energy link reinforced the whole story. Who doesn’t want to connect to the past? That is really appealing. Who wouldn’t love to visit that world with those stunning phosphorescent plants!
Getting to the technical side. …3D WOW… the locations, the phosphorescent plants, the design of the world in general, the creatures , the camera work, the 3d work, the special effects, I loved it. It was really well made, even if in many scenes you could clearly see that everything is fake that didn’t took me out of the film. 3D WOW the only thing that upsetted me a bit (nothing to do with the film itself..) is that the frontal loudspeaker of the tfilm theater had some ground interference, and in some )plenty) of the silent moments you could hear that earth annoying noise…

Other than that nice film that kept me entertained for nearly 3 hours (for me totally needed to tell the story.
Anyway this whole thing that I’ve written now may not make any sense… forgive meal the errors but it is 1 in the morning….


Anyway this whole thing that I’ve written now may not make any sense… forgive me but it is 1 in the morning….
 
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You know one thing I have to think about is how this film looks to an average citizen not steeped in film, or science fiction, who doesn't know much about this movie. The whole idea of projecting yourself into an alien body and walking around an alien planet must be pretty fascinating to joe shmo movie watcher. Those of us who've been following the film for a while and have known about this concept, or have been reading science fiction all their life probably don't find it very novel, so we overlook it. Perhaps I'm not giving enough stock to that aspect of the film being different to audiences, allowing the familiarity of the white man meets noble savage and goes native storyline to overshadow it.
 
Nice review ilauzirika. Really sums up the heart of the movie.

Batutta, you may be on to something there. I'm sure LOTS of us have been reading Sci-Fi most of our lives and being into the film industry we're interested in what makes things work. Why they work... and we don;t get to have that sense of wonder that the average audience must feel. SO we do tend to forget sometimes just how mindblowing of a concept something like the Avatar must be...
 
Just seen it....


Oh my god, what a beautiful film... The depth, the real depth 3D creates... Wow.

The future is here! Let's hope others will use it properly and not just cheapen it!?!?!
 
Batutta said:
You know one thing I have to think about is how this film looks to an average citizen not steeped in film, or science fiction, who doesn't know much about this movie. The whole idea of projecting yourself into an alien body and walking around an alien planet must be pretty fascinating to joe shmo movie watcher. Those of us who've been following the film for a while and have known about this concept, or have been reading science fiction all their life probably don't find it very novel, so we overlook it. Perhaps I'm not giving enough stock to that aspect of the film being different to audiences, allowing the familiarity of the white man meets noble savage and goes native storyline to overshadow it.
Click to expand...

It's to bad you're not a slightly mentally handicapped child... imagine how real and fascinating Avatar would be. haha


DarkElastic said:
Just seen it....


Oh my god, what a beautiful film... The depth, the real depth 3D creates... Wow.

The future is here! Let's hope others will use it properly and not just cheapen it!?!?!
Click to expand...


You mean like making a Piranha 3D, 3D film?! haha!
 
Sad Max said:
That's a good point. To a lot of viewers the cultural/moral angle might be very much in the background.
Click to expand...

I don't know... it seems pretty 'in your face' to me.

I saw it today with two people who know nothing about movies, nor care to (other than they like watching them)...
afterwards one of my friend's comments was "Well, now we know what Dances with Wolves would have been like in space."

For the record - we all loved Avatar, and she was just trying to be funny... but can't say I disagreed with her too much on that point.
I think the cultural/moral angle comes across very obviously, and not really novel or subtle at all.
(not necessarily saying that's a bad thing)

That said - this movie is truly mindblowing in the world it creates.
I'm not one that feels the need to see most movies in the theater even once - and I'm already planning on seeing this again.
I can't remember the last film I saw in the theater twice.

Sure, the story itself on paper doesn't sound like much, no offense to Cameron, but thematically it's ground that has obviously been covered and recovered before (and will continue to be still in the future) ... but it truly is about the experience of watching it play out.
Same reason Star Wars works... same reason Dances with Wolves worked... same reason every well done Hero's Journey film works... its in the excecution.
This movie really is beautifully done - and, as a side note, I really felt like Zoe Saldana's performance was one of the highlights of the movie...
there were many moments that felt forced to me, in regards to the performances, but she was constantly spot on - and in some moments that could have easily come off melodramatic. Which is especially interesting considering we never actually see her.
She really sold that world to me.
 
As for the movie itself, I just now read through all of this stuff after watching the film in 3d non imax today.

First off, for me this film kinda came out of nowhere. For all the talk of advertising I had only seen one trailer for it and that was maybe a month ago. So where is all of this advertising you guys are saying they spent 150 million on? My friends felt the same way. That it came out of nowhere. In fact, I had the impression that this film was under-hyped.

Anyways, I give the film a 9/10. I always get more excited about a film after waiting a couple of hours after seeing it. And dangit now I wanna see it again!!! It was long but did not feel long. It left me wanting so much more even though it was very complete as well (if that makes any sense). I think there is definite room for a sequel and I would love to see it.


Story/Characters - Simple but nice and sufficient 8/10
Visuals - Amazing - 10/10




HOWEVER -- Am I the only one who had some serious trouble with the 3d? It was not very comfortable on my eyes and towards the end my eyes started going crazy and tearing up and I had to blink like crazy. And I still kinda have the feeling of having strained eyes. Anyone have a similar experience? I don't wear glasses or anything. It was uncomfortable enough that if I see it again I want it to be in 2d.
 
This will happen with every 'new' tool.

Think about sound, color, zoom lenses, etc. All are introduced, then abused, then it levels off.... not saying abuse never happens again, but the majority of tech noobs calm down, move onto new toys. Expect 3d to stay and be abused by those looking to simply ride the gimmick, not utilize it in story.
 
Luis Caffesse said:
That said - this movie is truly mindblowing in the world it creates.
I'm not one that feels the need to see most movies in the theater even once - and I'm already planning on seeing this again.
I can't remember the last film I saw in the theater twice.

.
Click to expand...

Funny, because to me the world was excessively mundane, and so artificial that I never bought it for a second.

The emotional behavior of the blue cat people knocked me over. That's the holy grail of CGI. And BY FAR the best aspect of the movie for me, and so far up the field from anything else ever done in a movie, that it really might be a game-changer(copyright RED DIGITAL CINEMA) by itself. The ham-fisted delivery of an old and worn story, the deus-ex-floating-mountains, the beat you over the head message, the by-the numbers action sequences, all left me numb. But the cat people actually behaving like living creatures was pretty stunning.

Ironically, the machines felt the fakest of all. Just not in the least bit real to me. No grit, no grease, not a single believable moment with a machine in it for me. Helicopters: fake. Walkers-suits: fake. When I got home I popped in Apocalypse Now, because it was on my mind during that film, and the Hueys thundering through that movie had a power that nothing in this movie could ever dream of. Real helicopters. In this film, they were LOUD, but that's not the same thing.

The 3-D is lame. It adds something to the experience basically during the trailers. But it quickly becomes obvious that it brings nothing to the movie except a sweaty nose-bridge. Personally, I cannot wait for it to die...again.

The bigger critique I had of this movie was the lack of memorable or iconic shots. There's a ton going on and a lot of it's pretty, but there are no iconic shots in this film; shots that will burn themselves into the zeitgeist. Like these:

ellen-ripley-movie-catfigth.jpg

5140302_gal.jpg

terminator-eye-surgery-arnold-schwarznegger1.jpg

terminator_movie__2_.jpg


Things we've genuinely never seen before. For all of the whiz-bang of the CGI, this movie felt like nothing BUT things we've seen before. Titanic was the same way. The single iconic image that movie was lifted from "A Night to Remember."

Second biggest critique, and maybe it should be the first, was lack of any real fear for the characters. I felt a hundred-times more scared of Ripley being locked in the room with the crawling thing(a cheap piece of rubber on a string, mind you), than I felt of any monster in this movie(millions of dollars of man-hours behind a keyboard). Maybe that's because the crawler carries an insanely scary idea and these things just want to eat you. Maybe because, even though it's cheap rubber, it's a real thing in a real room with real people. But here, every time they ran from a monster, I looked at my watch. I never believed they were in danger. Maybe they should no tell us that is' CGI. Not tell how it's done at all...maybe that affects my judgment.

I really love Cameron. He's an honest-to-god movie-maker with an eye on perfection and a real love of MOVIES. Not necessarily FILMS, but MOVIES. I do feel like he excels under adversity though, as I find this and Titanic to be his two least engaging films(Piranha II excepted).

Finally, in general, even though there are some great accomplishments here, I just do not like this direction in filmmaking. I really wish they had just spent $200 mill building 25 acres of forest. Even though 2012 is the stupidest movie ever, God bless what's-his-name for building an entire city block on a gimble and just rocking that shi*. It's has real dimensionality in real space. CGI never does. At least not yet it doesn't.

None of which I would ever mind, but they insist on force-feeding us "realistic" literal representations of every last nose-hair of every person on the screen. So we have to hold it up to "reality", because they're claiming it is literal reality. Maybe if they actually left something to our imaginations...

It's what I loved about Harryhausen. His work clearly was not "realistic." But it was close enough to encourage my imagination to fill in the rest. I would look at the creatures in Sinbad or Clash of the Titans, and start to imagine what they would be like IF the WERE real. And my engagement in the film was total, because I was an active participant, helping to finish the job in my head. Not just a receptacle for what THEY want to cram into my eyeballs. The new one looks like they just want to cram a bunch of shi* into my eyeballs. And this film feels kind of the same way.
 
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