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

I also forgot to add about that Avatar review, that I hate it for making me recall that hideous abomination of mind and soul that is The Garbage Pail Kids Movie...I thought I had buried the memory of it deep within my subconscious for good, only to have it dredged up again like some monster from the deep, assaulting me with PTSD like shocks of repressed terror at the recollection of its lurid images...The horror...the horror...
garbagepailkids1.jpg
 
who the hell designed those^ characters??? because he deserves an oscar for special effects!
The worst of all is that i've seen people that look exactly like that........
 
Finally saw it in all it's 3D, seven-story high glory.

So I can finally say, without speculation, EPIC, EPIC, EPIC, EPIC, EPIC, EPIC, EPIC, EPIC, EPIC, EPIC fail.

I did everything in my power to lower expectations for this movie, even waiting FORever to see it. I couldn't in good faith lower the expectations to, say, that of Cool World, but I did say to myself before walking in that it should at least be as good as the sequel to Alien. And god how this was not even in the same stratosphere as the sequel to Alien.

The script was not "servicable", not for a movie that is supposed to be comperable to the greatest sci-fi films of our time. Seriously? Blade Runner, The original Star Wars Trilogy, Dark City, Alien(s)??? This movie is a JOKE. I knew there had to be a reason for the marketing to be so aggressive and for the Hollywood machine to act so desperate. The Iron Giant had a better script than this and that's a 2D animated flick. I was actually MOVED by The Iron Giant -- and the Lion King, for that matter. When I saw Aliens in the theatre I remember people literally CHEERED. I heard people laughing at some of the lines in this movie.

Compared to say, The Incredibles, The Little Mermaid, Final Fantasy, this movie is good, but compared to anything with any depth or insight or, hell, any intelligence at all, this is just plain kidney beans.

Anyone who has ever seen an episode of Sesame Street could see every arc and piece of dialog and outcome coming in this movie. Is this REALLY what cinema expectations have devolved into? Really? That of Batman and Robin? Han Solo being frozen by Bubba Fett was a surprise, this dude transferring his body over (the CLIMAX of the movie, mind you), was like, "Yeah, duh."

"Shell Beach"

"Tears in Rain"

"Get away from her you b*&^#!"

The only time myself or anyone else who I went to this movie with felt any sort of emotional reaction to ANYTHING was when the tree went down. Do you understand how distrubing that is, that we literally identified more with the TREE than with any of the CHARACTERS? And that was only because we could infer our own position on trees. I promise if the tree would have spoken to the audience and been given a traditional character, it too would have become devoid of any soul.

This movie was so bad I was literally angry when I got home. Like, angry! At a movie! LOL Or, moreso angry that I had previously had to argue my speculations, especially for a movie that at its heart is so very wretched.

I literally had to re-watch the last couple seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer just to get the taste of this thing out of my brain. Not only because the script was SO BAD but because it was an affront to its own supposed "message". The idea that environmentalism can exist apart from speciesism is so fundamentally disgusting IMO that the very INTENT of the movie made me feel gross inside. There was no real sense of giving two shoots about the environment or gentrification or speciesism in this movie, there were only story devices and pretend intentions used at the behest of those devices so that this script is not only deeply flawed but also morally defunct.

You cannot honor the spirit of something you kill one second and then strap a saddle on the back of a bird and fly it for shoots and giggles and tell me you understand even the most remote notions of speciesism. The fact that the main aliens were humanoid at all shows how terrified and low-brow the writer (Cameron) actually was in all this.

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday people will see this movie for how truly distasteful and god-awful it really is.

I went with a gang of people and all of them thought it was equally bad, but them not being as much the movie-goer as myself were actually more disappointed with the special effects than anything. All of them went in expecting something that looked real. Every single one of them walked out saying it just looked like a bunch of digital effects. The actual people looked alive, the creatues and aliens looked fake.

I could go on for another twenty minutes as to why the special effects failed at accomplishing what they (I assume) were trying to accomplish, but one of the easiest things to point to is the rudimentary design of the creatures. If you look in ACTUAL nature, dogs do not have the same mouths as lizards or birds. Monkeys and people and bugs are not the same color. Nothing anywhere had any hair on it except for, miraculously, the "human-like" people who, of course, are the ONLY thing we're supposed to identify with on a human level as everything else are just "beasts" or "enlightened vegitation", right?

The concept design was flawed so it would have been challenging to come back from that, but when it came to the actual creatures and humanoids, the CGI simply cannot exist in light the way living things do. I'm not a tech guy, but I'm assuming it has something to do with the outerlayers of our flesh, hairs, etc being able to absorb light (not reflect or simply bounce it). That's why scales and shells typically look more life-like -- because they respond to faux light in a more naturalistic way.

The effects were fine for an animated film, and I think with enough tooling the lizard birds could probably stand next to a human being and look pretty realistic, but this entire movie looked like one big green screen flick (which I'm guessing it was). The humans looked real and the rest of it looked fake. Everyone I was with said they liked the effects in Jurassic Park better -- thought the mixed effects worked far better in interaction with real people.

I don't care who disagrees. I KNOW this movie was horrible. There is not a doubt in my mind that this script was garbage, and I feel more than entitled to feel just a bit of anger towards Cameron using themes on environmentalism and speciesism to do nothing more than to serve a mediocre story.

The only imagery I will keep from this movie is, "Don't take my property, the thing that I own, kill and destroy everything that lives there, even though it's not THE sacred tree, it's MY tree on MY land that *I* own -- me. Anyone who wants a piece of earth that I OWN is evil and everything should die to keep that evil from taking anything from MY LAND. Now where's my saddle...?"

Just distgusting. This movie was made by a very stupid man with way too much power. And, unfortunately, all the drones are falling in line, completely oblivious to the fact that they were just force fed the very thing this movie claimed to stand against.

Shame on anyone who argued with me. You KNOW this script was bad, and if you didn't know you were brainwashed and lied to, hopefully the fog is starting to lift and you can step out of line.

Bad writing. Disturbing morals. Hackneyed acting. Bad execution. Decent CGI effects do not in any way make up for any of it.
 
Dude you went in with the intention to hate the movie. Even before it was released, you were hating on it. Shame on you for writing so much worthless diatribe. SO you didn't enjoy it. Big deal. Doesn't mean any of us have to agree with you or have our own opinions. A lot of us enjoyed it or aspects of it. Don't try to take that from us. Just not cool.
 
Well, we set out to make an impression upon the viewer - and judging by Chamber's response, we made one.

Mission accomplished.
 
Sad Max said:
Well, we set out to make an impression upon the viewer - and judging by Chamber's response, we made one.

Mission accomplished.
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ROFL!

Yes, the impression was made that the movie had a crap script and executed some morally irreprehensible methods in order to create weak characterizations.

Mission accomplished.

LOL

It is literally unfathomable to me how anyone over the age of 5 or not a current Dragon Ball Z fan could possibly think this movie wasn't crap writing from start to finish.
 
Rodney V. Smith said:
Dude you went in with the intention to hate the movie. Even before it was released, you were hating on it. Shame on you for writing so much worthless diatribe. SO you didn't enjoy it. Big deal. Doesn't mean any of us have to agree with you or have our own opinions. A lot of us enjoyed it or aspects of it. Don't try to take that from us. Just not cool.
Click to expand...

No way! I said I hated the MARKETING of the film and was EXCITED to see it. I said in my post I literally had to LOWER my expectations because of the hype.

So I will ABSOLUTELY try and "take that from" you -- this idea that this movie was anything more than 3 hours of low-brow video game playing.

My diatribe is most certainly NOT worthless because it points to specific, objective errors with the film and the story and its much-touted "message".

I can't even say this movie was Phantom Menace bad because Phantom Menace didn't pretend to be a movie with a "message". Cameron is going around actually saying to people that this movie is somehow enlightening -- people are actually thinking that this "message" should be embraced when the entire message of the movie is just a rehash of man's ownership and superiority over the planet and all its lesser beings.

As much as anything in art can be, this movie is the definition of evil.

Evil, you know, an aspect of which would be using tactics of manipulation to serve personal malicious means (in this case to make bundles of cash)?

Don't tell me you can't see how plainly bad (and wrong) this movie is.

I can accept a movie that is morally reprehensible but well-executed artistically. This movie was full of bad writing and bad acting and decent visual effects. I can't be the only one who sees that.
 
This all seems to reinforce the supposition that Jim is a genius - just so far as Chamber is concerned, an evil genius.

Gotta take yer genius-ness where you can get it, I guess.
 
Dude, you're free to have and express your own opinion about the movie. You don't like it, fine.

But you seriously need to realize that it is only your own opinion. I don't agree with one single thing you said about this movie, so clearly what you consider to be "specific, objective errors" are subjective after all.

I did, however, have to laugh at the idea of "Bubba Fett, Redneck Bounty Hunter." :D
 
Well, the very use of the word objective in that context pretty much tells you what you're dealing with, anyway...

Captain Pierce said:
I did, however, have to laugh at the idea of "Bubba Fett, Redneck Bounty Hunter." :D
Click to expand...

He's gonna kill all them-all blue-skinned cat-monkeys!
 
Chamber005 said:
So I can finally say, without speculation, EPIC, EPIC, EPIC, EPIC, EPIC, EPIC, EPIC, EPIC, EPIC, EPIC fail.
Click to expand...


Hahaha..... Tell that to James, the producers and the millions of people that enjoyed it and billions of dollars that came from this film!

Remember that this is show business, this kind of movies (specially) are solely made to win money and entertain people, hopefully many times the story will hold itself.
 
I'll agree with Chamber to the degree that box-office success isn't a measure of anything but box-office success...
 
Ok, so I'm a late-comer to the thread...and out of 116 pages I bet someone mentioned it somewhere, but my personal reaction after watching it was that it was simply a "Dances with Wolves" remake, obviously with more focus on the broader action than internal personal questing, but still...
 
I agree, the box office numbers are just the box office numbers.

One more thing that I forgot to mention in my previous post. A movie can be bad, horrible, impressive.... but if the final goal is achieved (in this case entertain lots of people and make some, a lot of!, money) I think that the quality of the film isn't that important.

Now from an artistic viewpoint, the ability to entertain people or get lots of money is not that important, a film should have a solid story from the beginning to the end and a special attention to detail. Hopefully that will make the movie touching.

But in film industry you have to take into account that not everyone loves a touching deep and engaging story, some people prefer bad action flicks. So by mixing this two Ideas we get to films like avatar, where there is an underlying storyline and a lot of visually engaging scenes. By doing that you attract people from both segments and thus creating a movie that will attract lots of people. The film may not be as good and imaginative as others but it will serve its purpose as an entertainment and money making tool.

....
 
Sad Max said:
I'll agree with Chamber to the degree that box-office success isn't a measure of anything but box-office success...
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Well, technically perhaps, but I think it's reasonable to extrapolate that sustained box office success is a measure of how much people actually liked it.

Opening-weekend box office success can be attributed pretty much to the effectiveness of the marketing. Sustained, week-after-week box office success can only be attributed to people actually liking the product being offered.

When's the last time you saw an ad for Avatar? I can't remember seeing one since it opened.

So it's not marketing that's driving ticket sales anymore, it's people telling other people how much they liked it.

Note: this is not a measure of how "good" something is, but of how much people like it. It would be a rather unenlightened soul who would argue that McDonalds or Burger King is "good" -- but people certainly do seem to like it.
 
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