f13.net

"James Cameron's Avatar (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0499549/) tells the story of a planet called Pandora, where humans try to coexist with the local Na'vi race, with some difficulty. The scifi epic filmed in motion capture and stars Sigourney Weaver, Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana. The release date is December 2009."

Anyone heard of this? Opinions?

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=5870.0

(Project 880 became Avatar and yes they are still making a game based on it too).

Bleh, sorry.

It's not a problem, that topic was about the game (well actually it became a thread about the costs to make an MMORPG).

Cameron is putting a lot of effort into the movie's 3D effects.  The footage he's shown off to other directors and people in the industry has gotten a lot of positive response.

The script for this (or at least one of the more recent scripts) was easily available on the internet at some point and I read it one day at work. Reads a bit like a Jurassic Park ripoff, but execution will be everything.

Comingsoon.net has a report of 24 minutes of footage being screened at an expo in Amsterdam. (http://www.comingsoon.net/news/avatarnews.php?id=56535)  Minor spoilers in this rather long article.  Also there's going to be an Avatar panel at Comic Con but I don't know if they'll be showing any footage or not.  They need to start looking at ways to get word of mouth out there since Final Destination 3D is the only non-kids 3D movie coming out for the rest of the year, so it would be their only possible way to get a 3D trailer out there before the movie hits.

Trailer (http://avatar.substance001.info/)

Looks pretty awesome.

Typo in your URL, and I think it may be region blocked, because I'm not seeing a trailer, or link to one on the co.uk site.

Working Link (http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/avatar/)  (bleh, needs Quicktime)

Streaming Link (http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/avatar/trailer)

Thanks Vash. Looks pretty nifty. They had me at 'scantly clad blue skinned elf women riding flying lizards'.

What is this I don't even.

Seriously, this trailer looks like the most confusing bizarre thing ever. At the same time it looks like it could be awesome.

James Cameron has made a Warcraft film with Night Elves in Nagrand. With special guest stars, the Starcraft Terrans.

Looks like.. Humans want planet, so they make up these replica aliens, and transfer the minds of soldiers into them.  They use these "avatars" to scout out the planet before invasion.  Obviously one of the avatar/soldiers objects and helps the aliens.

I was hyped for this until the trailers came into my theater yesterday.  I'm really, really, really not liking the CG for the aliens right now.  Haven't had a chance to watch the 3D version yet, but probably will tonight.  We're going to be playing it in front of some 3D X-Games movie that's opening tomorrow.

Yeah, I have a bad feeling.

Of course you do. It's full of mechs.

Aye ya... somehow this is related to such stellar movies as Spy Kids 3-D and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D.

I wish I hadn't watched the trailer.

The trailer reminded me of Dances With Wolves.

Ya, I'm in the same "I was looking forward to this but now am not so sure" crowd.

Since it's another full quarter till any of us get to see Avatar in its final release form, I'm not going to delve too deeply into the trailer. I've had reservations since I first heard of the project, because I am rather anti mo-cap. I just don't think it's ever been used truly successfully - its high-point being Gollum in Jackson's LotR trilogy (and even then he gets more of a reprieve by dint of not being human-enough for the uncanny valley effect to kick in). The worst that I've seen was Beowulf, which could have been twice the movie if it had been actually animated.

I'm hoping that overall, Cameron's use of mo-cap will work because of the Navi's obvious non-humanity. At the moment, I do get the sort of overriding feeling that this is Jim saying 'Ok, George, you've had your fun, but it's my turn now'. I think it could still be a good thing.

I have a Gungan feeling about this :P. But hey, hope it's good.

It looks like a kids cartoon.  Now that's not to say the CG is bad but it doesn't mesh well with live action added and it doesn't lend itself to be something I could take seriously.  It reeks of immaturity in its art direction, lending more towards pretty eye candy cisuals than any sort of realism.

Hrmmm.  The trailermusic was okay...

For some reason, the trailer struck me as some weird Blizzard retcon fest. You have naked draenei/nightelf hybrids versus Starcraft terrans in the new battle of mount Hyjal from Warcraft III.

Looked like it might be cool none the less, but then again, this is from the guy who made Titanic.

Uh, also some little films called Aliens and Terminator. And anyway, aside from the very fact that it was a period romance and not a sci-fi action movie, what was wrong with Titanic? It was an exceedingly well-made movie and god forbid a director show a little bit of range.

Yeah, Titanic probably doesn't deserve the rap it gets.  I saw it the other day again and the better Di Caprio gets the more Titanic seems to be appealing to me.  He has turned into a pretty solid actor.

Let's not forget "Piranha 2: Flying Killers".

I dont think anyone has to champion Titanic, it won more awards than Jesus and generated 10 zillion dollars. You might not be preferential to romantic dramas, but it is far from a horrible movie. Don't besmirch the mans credentials, he created The Terminator,Aliens and Abyss for fucks sake. Almost every movie he writes and directs ends up excellent.


Edit: That would be Piranha 2: The Spawning  :awesome_for_real:

Heh, I even loved "True Lies" (beside the Terminators, the best Schwarzy movie by far, IMO. It was really hilarious and action was nice). And let's not forget he also wrote "Strange Days".

A buddy of mine saw this in a sneak preview the other night. In his opinion: "It wasn't bad. Not great, but not bad. I think that if you want to make a CGI heavy movie you should make it ALL CGI, but I was pretty impressed with the animals on Pandora.... Not the cheesy looking big blue aliens, but the animals, yes. And the bioluminescent forest at night was absolutely beautiful. Beautiful! But the aliens looked ridiculous"

Now this is a guy who is a pretty good judge of movies. He is the go-to-guy for movie info and recommendations which I believe are spot on. That said, I commented to him that it looks strikingly similar to the ants, from the movie Ants, in the face with additional collagen. meh..i'll wait for the PPV.

Titanic is an indescribably awful piece of schlock. It deserves to be mocked harder.

Down the ballroom staircase flows the syrup onto the treacle. If you're not throwing up by that stage, you're not alive. I hope all you Titanic apologists are tortured with Celine Dion for your lack of taste.

Not if you're outside the US it isn't:

(http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/71GVXPKHG2L._SL500_AA280_.gif)

Yeah, it really isn't that bad.

Predator, Last Action Hero and Total Recall are better Arnie movies than True Lies. True Lies is decent, but it's not his next best movie after Terminator 2 by a long shot. IMO of course  :why_so_serious:

I'd agree on you with Predator, but True Lies is way better than Last Action Hero or Total Recall.

Conan the Barbarian>Terminator>Predator>Total Recall>True Lies> other stuff

Total Recall and True Lies are interchangeable in the rankings.

I'm with the folks who get a bad feeling from the trailer. It may just be that it doesn't look good on a small screen, but the art direction on the aliens really looks wrong if the film isn't aiming for the kiddie market.

I think it's definitely aiming for a young market. Oh the story might be serious but it's still gonna be geared towards kids with the blue monkey people.  I guess I was just expecting something more serious sci-fi, the movie might be good in its way but it doesnt look like its something i'd need to watch in the theatre.

I guessing that's intended. Cutesy, pastel aliens (THE GOOD GUYS) contrast with the angular, metallic war machines (THE BAD GUYS)... somebody wanted to make a version of Ferngully (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104254/) for the big summer action movie crowd.

I did not mean to besmirch Cameron's work before Titanic, I loved the Abyss and Terminator 1/2,  but Titanic  was given awards and got acclaim more because of it's gross box office receipts than because of it's chops as a movie. At the time it cost so much that no single studio was willing to put up the dough to produce it. Sure, the sinking of the boat was cool and all, but it was definitely not the best film that year. L.A. Confidential was far and away better, and the other 3 movies up were also at least as good (and an hour shorter).

I will stick with my statement that Cameron's work after Terminator 2 has all been pretty meh and more about serving his ego than anything else. This is all a matter of opinion, of course.

DiCaprio has always been a great actor.  The people who think otherwise were almost universally in /middle school at the time of Titanic's release and were forced to hate DiCaprio and everything he stood for on principle.

This is just about right. I love me some Conan the Barbarian.

Duh, I forgot about Total Recall, loved the movie and Arnold performance in it, at least on par with True Lies (not really liked him in Predator).

Conan the Barbarian was more of a "fantasy musical", c'mon, thanks to the great score by Basil Poledouris, but not exactly remembered for great acting :)

Well, the Basketball Diaries in 1995 were phenomenal.  Everything prior to that was utter shite.  Titanic was pretty much a first for him.

LA Confidential was a slow ass snooze fest.

And True Lies beats Total Recall any night of the week and twice on Sunday. That scene where he is out on the Martian slope succumbing to the lack of atmosphere before oxygen starts pouring out of the mountains.....sucked. The set design in Total Recall? Sucked.  "Hey we are to cheap to spend money on set design so we will film the whole thing as if they were in tunnels!"

I'm fine with you saying things I disagree with when Schwarzenegger is concerned, but L.A. Confidential is anything but a slow ass snooze fest.

Hey, James Earl Jones was good. And while Arnold doesn't exactly act, he plays a part very well-suited to his strengths. He's like John Wayne that way. He doesn't have any sort of actual range, but as long as you cast him in the right part he'll carry it off in a way nobody else can.

And anyway, who gives a fuck? You don't watch Conan for acting, you watch it to see a giant snake get decapitated with it's head nailed to a wall by arrows, and guys go into a pagan orgy where people are practicing cannibalism and turning into snakes and shit and then they go in and kill everyone and set everything on fire. Man, that's a movie.

They just don't make them like that anymore. We need more movies with tits and giant snakes and gratuitous beheadings.

He also punched a Camel for lookin at him funny!

Titanic led to me getting a lot of action and I <3 DiCaprio as far as young actors go. But every performance in that, including his, was shit.

I think I was a junior in high school when it came out. I had to see it 5 times, mostly because, well, who's going to turn down high school chicks?

It is the weakest and yet somehow most spectacular bullet point on his CV.

No. The DiCaprio hate is BECAUSE of movies like Titanic, Romeo and Juliet, etc. where he is essentially playing the same goddamn annoying, douchey character. I was well-past college when I saw Titanic and it was SHIT. The last 20 minutes when the boat sinks was the only redeeming part. The other two hours of the movie was tweener girl wankmeat. Now, luckily I've seen DiCaprio in Blood Diamond, which changed my mind about him completely. He can act, but I have to be convinced that the movie is good before I'll see a movie that he's in.

I concur. The hate is not so much for the actor but the assbag roles he had (whether by choice or otherwise). Gilbert Grape was his break out and I can't forget him in Basketball Diaries which lured me into a false sense of security. The string of crap roles he got after that pushed his movies down the pipe for me, even The Beach, which i liked the story about, did nothing for him. Only after Catch Me and even Gangs did he start to climb back but never hit it till Blood Diamond and Body of Lies.

Never watched Titanic and never will. I got enough hate from the commercials, the song, and it being constantly in my face with pop culture references. How many times do I have to see a recreation of them being on the prow of the ship? I will stab a mother fucker...

Ahem... anyways. Ya, used to hate on Leonardo myself for a variety of reasons and not just Titanic's overwhelming presence. But the same movies already mentioned have changed my mind about him as well. He's a pretty damn good actor.

Pretty much.  I hated DiCaprio up until The Aviator - which I thought he did a fantastic job in.  Then The Departed blew me away.  Then Blood Diamond.  Then Body of Lies.

Oh fuck ya! I can't believe I didn't mention that one.

(http://www.gonemovies.com/WWW/Raketnet/Drama/TitCal1.jpg)

I do believe this describes everything perfectly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAPyipuT-Jg

Meh, that's probably the least funny one of those I've seen.

This reminded me too much of District 9 and,yes, Ferngully. Halo universe too except with a sympathetic covenant.

Fuck until I saw this trailer I though James was making a movie based on the Last Airbender.

That confused me too Lorekeep; I kept asking when M Knight Shamalamadingdong and Cameron started working together; wasn't until I saw the trailer for this in theaters that I realized they were making two different movies.

That said, the trailer looked...wierd enough that I'm going to wait for a DVD release.

Isn't that just going to make the experience worse? I mean, at least in a proper movie theater you get the spectacle of it.

NO. The American version simply did not work the way the story was intended to. If you liked Departed, you owe it to yourself to watch the original, Infernal Affairs. The American one, while decently acted, was a big pile of ass compared to the Asian version. And this isn't some "lol i liek asia" thing. It's simply the superior movie. Some parts are acted better, some worse, but the movie itself is better paced and simply comes across as the genuine article whereas the American one is paced POORLY and comes across as a bad homage (though not the outright theft a Tarantino film turns out).

Probably, but I can watch a DVD at a friend's house or via Netflix for free, rather than blow $10 on a maybe.

This. I can't stand people who say Scorsese made a great movie when all he did was take a better movie and make it HOLLYWOOD!!!11!

He ruined the ending too.

12 Page Profile of Cameron from The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/26/091026fa_fact_goodyear)

There is a new trailer out.  A full length one, not a teaser, but unfortunately, i can't seem to find it online at the moment (we just got it in to be placed on some of the new releases at my theater this week).

I'm going to have to go with the people who were saying that this looks like it i going to be a Blockbuster Action version of Fern Gully with Space Marines and sexy aliens., with a bit of Titanic Love Story thrown in.

Probably be a good popcorn flick.

I was reading several accounts where James Cameron wanted to film Avatar right after titanic.  At the time he supposedly couldn't film it because the special effects couldn't be done.   Only recently the article claimed that advances had made not only Avatar possible but feasible to fund.  It will be very interesting to see what he comes up with.  I am hoping personally for a really great movie, but I have seen quite a few high budget special effects movies lately not being worth the price of admission.  I guess we will see...

The new, longer trailer, is now up at http://www.avatarmovie.com/

Still getting that Fern Gully with Space Marines vibe.

My wife said, "It looks like Fern Gully with CGI," when I showed her the trailer.  Heh.   If that movie had been bigger that might be an issue.  Hell, that it wasn't that big might also be an issue since Avatar seems to have the same "Technology bad, hippie life good" vibe.

Gawd. You can smell the preaching on the trailer.

DVD rental for the fact that it's Cameron and not some no-name schmuck.

That trailer makes me root for the humans to crush the natives, plunder their resources, and infect them with diseases against which they have no defense. Wasn't there supposed to be an MMO of this or something? I want to roll a human and give those natives blankets full of smallpox.

Edit: Then again, the humans have mechs, so fuck them!

Dances with Wolves Junior in the Amazonas?

There are literally hunderds of examples throughout history of technologically superior civilizations curbstomping primitive indigenous people. Hell, it's pretty much how war has been done since the dawn of time. Tribe A invented bows, curbstomped tribe B which hadn't and took their stuff. There wasn't a need to create a setting with CGI to make the story work, that's just bullshit.

Well, except for the fact that according to the guy in the trailer, the natives are "very hard to kill", such to the point that it appears they might actually be able to go hand to hand with the battle frames the marines use.  So in that sense, the technologically advanced humans may not exactly be curb-stomping the natives, but when they go to war, fighting a pretty nasty battle of attrition.

I doubt "very hard to kill" in this case means they deflect high-explosive rounds with their skin. Not even Aliens do that. It's often very hard to exterminate a population though (even if they just have sticks and rocks for weapons), which is what I assume they mean.

Ok, it's an excuse to show off CGI and explosions. I get that. I just expected something more... interesting from Cameron after all these years.

So you fall back, then nuke their settlements from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Hell, get some Hunter-Killers and orbital-drop them on the planet - no need for humanity to even land until the natives are thoroughly subjugated.

Here's what REALLY bother me.

1)  The modern army is becoming more and more mechanized, removing the soldier from the battlefield entirely.  After all, why spend all that money training someone only to have them blown to bits.
2)  We have tiny, TINY cameras that offer spectacular resolution and good FOV now, so imagine what this space marine crew has at their point in the future.  Fuck, my iPod has an awesome camera that's smaller than the nail on my little finger.
3)  Between satellite recon, AWACS and live updates from field personnel modern battlefields toss an incredible amount of data around.  Imagine the datalinks and gathering capabilities this future military would have.
4)  They can build battle frames that react as quickly as human response time.

Combining all of those.. why does their military look anything at all like it does.  There should be tiny, unmanned recon vehicles that would do info gathering better than some biologic construct who gets a furry hard-on at the first blue boob he sees.  Those gunships have no reason to be manned, nor do the battle frames.  With the fantastic cameras of the future there's no limit to the amount they could toss on a vehicle to avoid "tunnel vision" commonly associated with camera view.

 You'd need a much smaller cache of Remote soldiers.  The frames/ mechs are getting fucked up anyway so that's not the issue if one of their mechs 'dies' but at least you'd still have a pilot that didn't need fresh indoctrination to the war zone.  Plus, there isn't the urgency to recover/ rebuild a mech that there is with a person.  And as a last resort you can at least melt the fucker down for new raw mats.

The more I think on it, the less feasible these movies are going to seem as time goes on.  We're going to be removing ourselves from the field while movies are still tossing WWI trench fighting on screen using 'future' weapons.

1. Cheaper to use humans combined with the scale of the battle. If world spanning stand up engagements were still on the table I doubt we would be gearing our military in the same manner. As opposed to having a military geared towards conquest and plunder in which manpower is plentiful and casualties politically irrelevant. You aren't going to be using the same military strategy to take a planet as you are to battle hut dwellers and insurgents in an urban environment. Many military minds are already claiming the current US military would be ill prepared for a large scale conflict. The modern military is not geared towards the eradication of the enemy. Just about every possible rule of war I can think of limits the effectiveness of the military as a force of fucking folks up.
2. No clue
3. Most of the wars waged with this level of technology have been in a pretty limited area. Would the data saturation remain the same if it was a planet wide engagement? If we didn't already the intelligence infrastructure from decades of development already in place. And even if it was possible would it be economically viable?
4. One super weapon doesn't mean all areas of technology are going to receive the same funding and availability.The fact the humans can create "avatars" is more glaring than the disparity between ninja suits and manned hover crafts. Probably a bit more viable in all areas if you have that level of science is to just use chemical or biological weapons.

Cant use the extremely limited nature of modern war doctrine with something so alien and fictional and expect it to jive. But even now if we could make a terminator with plasma weapons at 100 million a pop, we would still be using humans with rifles. Most of what you say assumes unlimited resources and unlimited availability, which doesn't make much sense since they are displacing a people for some ore. Ignoring all the scifi handicaps on technology that tend to exist in "super advanced" fiction. Their army is a band of marauders looking to plunder some blue skinned heathens. And thats exactly what it looks like.

Yes but it seems ridiculous since they appear to be sending soldiers piloting these mech things and gunships while simultaneously sending an artificially grown body being remote-controlled by a crippled guy. You'd imagine it would just as easy to make sure everything that isn't an actual soldier with a rifle was also being remote controlled.

These guys can be alien tribal supermen for all it matters. Any army at even a WW2 level of technology would just bomb them from thousands of feet in the air and shell them with artillery from miles and miles away, while they sat there holding their spears and wondering why the fuck the world was exploding.

Maybe  the shit they want to mine is relatively fragile and they don't know where all of it is? Thus large scale bombardment would be a no-no (I have no idea why I'm trying to justify the idiocy)

I was kinda interested in this, saw the latest trailer, then thought "Oh. This old story again."

I guess if the stuff were really volatile and close to the surface, and the humans didn't want to set off the equivalent of one of those century-long coal fires that would make some sense. Even then they would have to be woefully ill-equipped for their mission in order for it to matter.

I mean they don't need to assert political control over a country, they just need to convince some natives to move from one particular area. Defoliate it with some intergalactic Agent Orange and they'll move when they don't have anything to eat.

Assuming there's no other circumstances keeping them from carpet bombing the planet. We could ask why America didn't just nuke Vietnam into glass.

Goddamn liberal pansies, that's why.  :why_so_serious:

I doubt Cameron will even go there, but I can see a bunch of human pro-alien hippies on "Planet Whatever" tying themselves to trees and protesting the rape of their territory and culture.

Because nuclear weapons were seen in a much different light than conventional weapons, and because the North Vietnamese were the military proxy of an unfriendly nuclear-armed superpower. I mean sure, I suppose that with sufficient creativity Cameron could cook up SOME reason for the humans to launch missiles at the natives from mechs at point-blank range and not from fixed positions thirty miles away. But looking at that trailer, I doubt the movie will even bother.

I'm looking forward to the dumbest example of technologically advanced badguys losing to primitives for no good reason since the last act of Return of the Jedi.

Yeah be pretty hard to say "Its against the rules to nuke indigenous populations or otherwise blatantly slaughter them for their resources". Ya know, like the real world with dozens of historical incidents of similar tenor that strangely were not resolved by carpet bombings and nuclear weapons. We had to tip toe around this shit with the Indians and still broke the "rules" to do so. Modern conflict seems to be about a bit more than the ability to slaughter your enemy via any means possible. Not sure whats so unbelievable about it being in fiction, since its happening in the meat world at his very moment.

Or you could watch the part of the trailer that says they are supposed to be seeking a diplomatic resolution (Cant go slaughter them all) and that they are on the brink of war. I doubt the brink of war is a statement referencing the planet bound blue folks. That army looks like its been seeing some conflict unrelated to bow wielders. Treaty of blah blah explicitly states you cant go fucking sentient folks up, so you gotta use sneaky methods that have the same net result durf durf. Not like there are any real world examples of technologically inferior peoples battling forces that are superior by every conceivable metric and "winning"  :facepalm:.

There are going to be helicopters getting taken out by nets and catapults while anyone sane scratches their head and wonders why they don't fly 50 feet higher and you damn well know it. Or hey, maybe there won't be any fighting in this movie at all, because of the treaty of blah blah. Or there will be, but it'll be like the real world. You know, when the US Army put aside it's overwhelmingly superior weapons and fought the Indians with swords, allowing them to win the day.

Idiot.

Edit: Seriously, unless there is a treaty which states that marines with futuristic weaponry are required to engage from spear range I guarantee this is going to be ridiculous.

Yeah, or like how the US military nuked them Vietnamese,Koreans,Afghanis and Iraqis right? For a ardent fan of shit fiction you sure have a limited imagination. Oh noes atmospheric distortion on the planet makes long range engagement impossible! Military rules of engagement ban the use of WMD's on sentient creatures! Absurd, there is no real world analogue for anything like this. I bet Dune caused you to have a seizure, OMGZ dudes with fucking daggers made of teeth displace a galactic spanning nuclear power! RIDICULOUS! Emperor should have nuked them! Yeah we sure displaced them Indians by committing the full military might and not by the systematic process of treaties,indoctrination and deception over a period of decades. NEWP we rolled in and slaughtered them ALL in a titanic battle of conquest! The US hasnt subjugated South America through economic means and "low tech" proxies, newp. We nuked em!

War in REALITY is not conducted in the strange retard manner you try to portray it. Let alone whats viable in the context of fiction. Yes there will be absurd battle sequences that are completely unrealistic, welcome to scifi you are in for a bumpy road.

Oh they could tell a plausible and believable "colonialism in Africa" story where the humans come in and stomp everything flat in short order, then occupy the place and suffer attrition in an endless guerilla war that's horribly unpopular on the home front, ending with the natives eventually gaining independence decades later. They could. If they wanted to. But they won't. This movie isn't that nuanced. This movie is "We will prove that this is our land!" and "Bows and arrows against gunships? Hyuck hyuck, let's do this thang!" followed by guys in mech suits running through the woods. Probably about to fall into quicksand or something stupid like that.

We're going to see mechs tripping over vines and shit, and dudes falling into pit traps, and there's gonna be a part where the hero looks at the pilot of an attacking helicopter all smug right before a boulder smashes it. I can just fucking SMELL it from that trailer.

But anyway, please tell me how something like... say... Korea compares to this in any way, shape, or form. Korea being a proxy war between superpowers and involving, among other things, a shitload of air-to-air combat.

Their spears and arrows are made with the magic fucking metal handwavium. They are all Namor level beings with magic weapons in an environment the human forces are extremely hampered by. The indigenous life is made this robust by a confluence of factors, primarily it has 100 times the gravity of earth and their physiology is heavily laced with handwavium. The native life can rend human weapons with claws and arrows, the naturally existing predators are on par with the technology of man in close quarters. The rudimentary weapons and tactics (netting fast moving aerial predators,land based juggernauts) the smurfs employ in their daily struggle for life effectively counters the nerfed human military (which is just an expeditionary force). They are warriors born on their own turf, with a traitor human filling in the blanks.

The use of long range weapons is largely nullified due to these factors combined with unknown forms of radiation that greatly reduces any means of long range targeting and observation that handwavium produces. In addition, there is strict galactic protocol in which such weapons can be used against sentient life. And even if these factors did not exist the ore itself is extremely fragile in its untempered form and would be destroyed if such means were used. A perfect storm of why blowing everything up is not a possible strategy.

The human military industrial complex is seeking a manner to swindle the ore without blatantly breaking the rules, so they use avatars as a means to get the goods without sustaining casualties and causing a political shit storm. The natives initially deceived about the nature of the conflict go along with it until they witness first hand the implications and destructiveness of man. Rampant propaganda portrays the native life as worthless bloodthirsty monsters, the avatar believes these lies until the truth of their savage nobility is revealed (blue boobs with a dash of human corruption).  Push comes to shove and the hardboiled marine leader says fuck the rules and begins the combat in earnest (probably using their self defense as justification). He is not an evil man (simplistic perspective/being corrupted by a corporate lackey), the ore is crucial to his peoples survival in a far greater conflict. The ends justify the means,he has his eye on the prize and smurfs be damned. After an extremely small scale battle (In galactic terms) in which casualties are sustained on both sides. Eventually the public/command becomes aware of these events through the machinations of the good Dr. Weaver whose participation in such an unseemly scenario was predicated on avoiding the destruction of the native people. A Pyrrhic victory of sorts is gained by the native people and humans are shown to be the shit heels they are.

Is any of these "reasons" for the shit you hate really that unbelievable that you cannot get over it? Dune has the same rough shape for why technology is limited, is that as weird to you? You seem to be asking why this movie isn't something completely different and then using extraordinarily spurious logic to justify why its dumb. Judge fiction by internal consistency not how it relates to your ideas about how war in the "real" world is waged. Nothing you are bitching about is exceptional either in stupidity or in comparison to scifi in general. Thats not to say the movie wont be trite preachy nonsense with little to no explanation given. But the premise itself is not something that requires extraordinary means to explain. Personally Im thinking the military forces we see are part of a forward base that will be crucial in a brewing war, the military is so poorly tuned to the environment due to that conflict being ancillary in the "Big picture".



The list of conflicts I gave isnt demonstrating how those are the "same" as our conjectured theories of Avatar (Tho just about every other example is VERY similar). Its demonstrating we don't just blatantly slaughter our "enemies" using all methods available. We dont wage war in that manner, we haven't for centuries (if ever?),using it as some form of standard how "real war" would be waged is silly. The limitations placed on our military are not based on technological capability. So smurfs not instantly being nuked/bombed into oblivion shouldn't be unbelievable. Did we destroy Hawaii's indigenous population or did we sublimate the existing command structure? And use our standard cockfaggery that is used in every other instance we want something that outright taking with force isn't an option. Christ we could just say they need the indigenous people to farm the handwavium to explain why we wont destroy them outright and it would work. I do agree that the technology implied by the use of Avatars seems to be vastly beyond the tactics and weapons we see the humans using.

Fake edit: The mech engaging the smurf with a "dagger" caused you to spit blood I bet.

Is this movie even worth a paragraph of text?

No. But nerd rage does silly things to people.

Hey, the Ewoks did it so...

From what plane of existence did you guys phase shift to these forums.

Take a look at that trailer again. Then think about what you have done. Be quick about it, else this is not going to end well.

But it sure could end funny.  :why_so_serious:

gryeyes, WUA's point isn't that a plausible explanation cannot be constructed, but that they probably won't bother even trying to construct one in the first place; instead we will get CGI Ewoks.

Magic > Technology?    :why_so_serious:

see also Tesla.

This thread is going places.  :awesome_for_real:

I think the movie looks potentially entertaining.

Yeah, like I said, it's not impossible to come up with something. (Hopefully something less stupid than what that wall of text suggested.) Cameron's best movie, after all, featured a squad of futuristic marines getting eaten by what amounted to a pack of animals, and those marines WERE perfectly willing to just nuke the place given a chance.

I'm looking at that trailer though, and I'm not seeing some sort of Little Big Horn scenario. I'm seeing a bunch of guys who put enough effort into their mission to reverse-engineer the alien DNA and create avatars, but who didn't bother to bring any of the plain old dirt-common conventional weapons that would make armed conflict with the natives a non-issue.

I'm seeing infantry standing all bunched together in a row like they're fighting for Napoloen, alien dudes using swords to fight mechs, and helicopters getting eaten by dragons. I can't quite shake the feeling that their gunships are designed with those enclosed rotors specifically because someone wanted to see that last one, either. I mean without it being totally gory and hilarious.


No, they weren't. At all. You listed two proxy wars between superpowers, and two long-term guerilla conflicts in countries where the attacker was trying to nation-build. Meanwhile in the movie we're talking about getting one village to relocate.

But hey, maybe it's me. I mean I thought we blew the Iraqi Army to shit from the air in no time flat, and then only had things go to hell when we had to try to occupy the country, struggling to root out a substantially foreign-funded resistance while making efforts not to antagonize the general population. But maybe I've been watching the wrong fucking news channels.

Maybe what REALLY happened is that the US military decided smart bombs and stealth aircraft and artillery were all totally inappropriate to use. (We didn't nuke the Indians after all!) So instead they sent the army in there with nothing but small arms and light vehicles, whereupon the plucky Iraqis defeated them with nets and spears to save the day. Maybe that's how it was, and I'm the fucking idiot instead of you. I mean how could I have overlooked the ironclad history lesson of how Iraq won the Iraq war and remains a proud and unoccupied land to this day?

You fucking stupid cunt.

Imagine that, getting CGI Ewoks in a movie about CGI Ewoks, would it really make you feel better if why the are so martially accomplished against the Empire was explained? Nothing he mentions NEEDS an explanation, the military beefs need no elaboration because war isn't conducted like that in reality, so it not being done so in a scifi setting requires no explanation to be believable. The reasons why the smurfs aren't bombarded to death at the onset has so many rational justifications (Ignoring it makes for a shit movie) that explaining in detail on screen is superfluous (This also assumes that no reasons are given). The concept of the natural evolution of alien life creating beings whose natural abilities matches or surpasses that of technologically based man is a staple of scifi, it also needs no extraneous explanation.

Or at the very least if you attempt to discredit a fictional setting with real world examples make sure your argument isn't completely inaccurate in all comparisons with the REAL world. It will produce fan wankery of far higher quality.


Your right, none of those conflicts involve a vastly technologically superior military fighting a native low tech population without using WMD's. Good call! You even fucked up with the Aliens example, the only people willing to nuke the planet was after the entire chain of command had been decimated and the choice was laid at the feet of a fucking corporal. It was heavily implied that choice was NOT something that would usually happen.

Leaving aside your well-established mech idiocy (They can provide their own cover with plates on their arms!) you're the same dipshit who stuck up for the competence of the guys in Starship Troopers. Guys who made your average Stormtrooper look like Rambo, and who had to sustain a million casualties fighting giant bugs at point-blank range with foot infantry before remembering that aircraft exist. You enjoy the aesthetics and terminology of all this sci-fi military wank, but you plainly and obviously do not have even the most basic "guy on the internet" grasp of... well... anything.

Who the hell was ever talking about WMD, besides you with your pile of pathetic and badly-constructed analogies? Do you know what I'm actually talking about, what is actually required to blow up a village full of natives while they have no idea what the fuck is hitting them?

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/66/M101-105mm-howitzer-camp-pendleton-20050326.jpg/300px-M101-105mm-howitzer-camp-pendleton-20050326.jpg)

That's a light artillery piece from WW2 and has a range of up to seven miles. All you really need in order to fire it accurately are a high quality map and good math skills. Go ahead and explain to me again how, when the shit hits the fan, sending in guys in mech suits to get in swordfights isn't fucking idiotic. Bear in mind that hyperbole about nuclear weapons and carpet bombing the planet won't be tolerated.

Also, calling the Vietnamese and Iraqis and such "low tech natives" is pretty motherfucking hilarious. Oh those low-tech North Vietnamese with their spears and catapults and MiG-17s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_People%27s_Air_Force#1964-1974_.28North_Vietnam.29). You flaming dipshit.

what happened to the Avatar MMO?

It bombed.

So true the use of long range artillery preemptively on indigenous populations that possess natural resources we want to exploit is so very common. In fact its so common that any method other than that to accomplish the same ends is completely unbelievable! Even in a fictional setting! Good call captain dipshit! Sorry my dim witted friend we don't carpet bomb,Nuke or otherwise slaughter those with things we want to possess (Well we do, but not in that manner). Why we don't do this is obvious for even the most fucking retarded amongst us (expensive,unnecessary,violates all sorts of pesky rules,destroys the resources we want in the first place,destroys the indigenous population we need to harvest said resources). In fact we rarely do this even in open warfare, let alone in incidents of rat fucking the third world. And sure as fuck don't do this in any sort of "modern" war.

You still don't seem to be grasping the concept of limitations placed on military not stemming from technological capability. Or even more mysteriously not being able to conceive of why the heroes instantly being obliterated would kinda put a dent in the story. This of course ignores the complete idiocy of why "itz not believablez!?!".

You haven't yet referenced stardestroyer forums in your ode to stupid wtf man?


PS. Having a technologically inferior military doesn't imply one is wielding a sword.  :awesome_for_real:

So this chick I'm seeing says this is based off some kids-esque cartoon series she loves....? She is pretty geeked about it.

Personally, I don't think it looks horrible, and that's good for me cause I'll be seeing it in the theaters with her. I am one of those 'suspension of disbelief' kinda guys though. I try not to pick apart movies unless they really deserve it.

I think someone is is arguing that the story of this movie won't explain all the cool stuff the director/producer/storywriter decided to put in because it looks cool. He also mocks this.

It also seems to me that someone else is arguing for the sake of argument, but I am not sure what his point is.

Is this politics seeping into another subforum again or is this still fallout from the tanks vs mech thread ? I missed most of that thread. And I still miss it.

Wrong Avatar.  She's thinking of Avatar: The Last Air Bender (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Airbender) which is being filmed under the same name as the cartoon.  This one is the Cameron Sci-Fi movie that's supposed to have some MMO tie-in that we still haven't heard about.   You might want to inform her of this before she flips out upon seeing blue furries instead of Quasi-Asian teenagers.

 
Tank vs Mech nerdfight... which is pretty much what I was hoping for when I started stirring the pot.

I believe I read an entire article about James Cameron where this was the case. Explaining away details because what mattered more was impressing the visual WOW rather than solving the logical HUH?

That is what I took away from Titanic.

Visual effects and boobs = $$$.  Thinking, storytelling and logic = Oscar/ Art film.  Sometimes you can get both, but not often.

So THATS why you posted, you sly dog you.

It seems to be an unholy amalgam of both, which threatens to devour our souls.

You moron. The alien dudes will just catch the artillery shells in their vine nets. Problem solved!

For some reason I read that as, "gine nets," and thought something totally different.

Anyways...Avatar.  Heh.  Maybe it'd be better if they were 'gine nets.

To my knowledge there have never been plans for one.  There is a single player game coming out around the same time as the movie though.  It uses 3D effects similar to the movie, which of course very few people are going to be able to experience outside of press events since it requires a 3D capable TV.

Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxim_gun#History)


You slobbering fucking dipshit, you still don't understand, do you? We're not talking about the difference between conventional weapons and blowing up the planet. We're talking about the difference between conventional weapons that can be fired from a safe distance, and conventional weapons that require you to walk up to close-quarters so that you can be killed by a bow and arrow.


This is one of those times where the fact that you don't fucking know anything at all forces me to SirBruce the shit out of a thread. I mean I don't want to because it's generally frowned upon around here, but you consistently pack so much failure into even small amounts of text.


Achieving your goals through long-range fire is far simpler and less expensive than engaging in messy close-quarters combat. Every military in the world prefers the former to the latter given any choice at all.


Having rules of engagement which permit attacks by mechs and helicopters but forbid the use of any long-range weapons would definitely put these guys at Stormtrooper levels of stupidity. (These same rules must also dictate that helicopters can only attack from low altitude where they're vulnerable to native weapons and dragons popping up from the foliage, or else they alone would moot everything else we've seen.) I also have to laugh at the idea that any military would scorn the brutality of light artillery and take up bloody hand-to-hand combat instead. It's like putting aside your revolver as being too violent so you can kill a guy with your machete.


You know, minerals are usually underground. Besides which you can just air-burst your shells and kill everyone you need to without even making craters.


Wait, so now your politically constrained space marines who can't even get away with using light artillery are going to go in, subjugate the natives in brutal close-quarters fighting, and fucking enslave them? Also, are you really under the impression that even a small howitzer is somehow a weapon of overwhelming destruction? That gun I linked a picture of has a smaller caliber than the main guns of most tanks.

Let me state that again, since your stupid ass seems to be laboring under the impression that even light artillery is somehow a WMD of overwhelming brutality that no one would ever dare use: That howitzer that can kill you from miles away has a smaller caliber than the main gun of most modern tanks.


Entire Iraqi tank units were erased from the map by American aircraft. The British were perfectly happy to use cannon and machine guns to kill many times their number in Zulus or whatever. You do not know what you are talking about. At all. This is exactly how almost everyone fights.


And you, as usual, are shockingly fucking ignorant in everything you say.

Psycho.

Blow it out your ass.

Edit: Everyone who pays attention knew I was insane ages ago.

It's true, we did.

In the meantime, here's another prod to the anthill:

Yeah, that. And all those battles in Africa where the casualties consisted of 12 Europeans wounded and 6,000 dead Africans or whatever. I mean there was more to colonialism than just dropping the hammer on everyone left and right, but when the natives got restless and tried to meet the colonists in battle the hammer got fucking dropped hard.

Or to put it another way, I don't have a problem with "The civilian government would never tolerate the space marines turning the space natives into giblets with artillery!" or whatever. I just laugh at the idea that turning them into giblets with infantry and armor would somehow be acceptable under those circumstances.

Edit again since I'm stuck flying cross-continent in WoW: I'm sure you can handwave up SOME contrived reason for the humans to have to fight in what would seem to be stupid fashion. I just doubt this movie will really bother, and I reject mechfucker's hooting that "nooobody has ever used powerful weapons on anyone ever looool".

Dude, you gotta edit in more crazy. Any chance for your shit posting getting published?

Oh no chuckles, you're way past the point of pretending to be the sane one. You're just crazy and stupid. I can't believe how long you spent loudly equating artillery with WMD for no comprehensible reason, and arguing shit about nuclear weapons that nobody ever said. In fact...

Reason you're a stupid piece of shit #782: That one little throw-away line of yours about the potential for magic "distortion" to mess up targeting and disallow long-range fire. It never occurred to you that all you really need to hit a fixed position is a fucking map, or that long-range weapons existed long before any electronic targeting to be distorted, or that even modern artillery is mostly targeted by observation and not fucking radar or whatever.

No, you just opened your fucking cakehole and let fly. The fact that "Mysterious radiation keeps us from locking on!" is a well-known anime excuse for why high-tech combat should involve stupid shit like robots swordfighting? TOTAL COINCIDENCE. More History Channel (Or even books!) and less cartoons. You fucking tool.

Yes, you're basically just getting a bunch of sublimated trollishness that hasn't had any Trammel or religion threads to escape into lately. No I don't care. Because you are a tool.

I'm waiting for liberal use of caps lock next.

Not enough charts and/or tables.

  :heart: WUA

"So you fall back, then nuke their settlements from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

"Assuming there's no other circumstances keeping them from carpet bombing the planet. We could ask why America didn't just nuke Vietnam into glass."  :awesome_for_real:.

Careful bro your crazy is making you block out posts! Of course whether its a nuclear weapon or some other form of high explosive fucking a wide area of shit up  is irrelevant to the entire "blow the shit up you want is bad idea" "slaughter the entire population not kosher" deals. Medication, take some.


Oh it did occur to me my insanely stupid friend, hence the whole "against the rules" "destroys the ore". Yadda yadda, the whole electronic distortion aspect was more to explain why they would have to get so close when battle actually breaks out. The whole "bomb em from space durf durf" was curb stomped by a plethora of easily understood reasons. Pretty uninspired Ad nauseam defense, try harder.

TBH I enjoy bitch slapping you around religious threads more. I kinda feel bad, like im kicking a retard or something.  :heartbreak:

Coal powered mechs with shields?

You have an overdeveloped sense of self. WUA is winning this argument hands down. Ya he's fucking nuts but he's also fucking right. You might consider putting the helmet back on because the damage you're doing to yourself banging your skull against the nearest hard target is coming through in your posts.

I mean seriously. Maps, motherfucker. And scouts. How hard is that to comprehend? Instead you go with handwavium or whatever the fuck you said. Just... damn, dude.  :facepalm:

Yeah, you should stop posting. MAPS AND SCOUTS, well holy fuck balls that completely changes everything! I mean, when you have maps of the people you cant blow up for various reasons that changes everything. Thanks for your input, die.

I LOLed.  And it wasn't with you.   :awesome_for_real:

The real losers in this battle are those of us reading it.

Yo guys, I'm really happy for you and I'ma let you finish, but Star Trek vs. Star Wars is one of the best nerdfights of all time.

I need this argument in stereo 3-D.

I like nerd fights and I can not lie
You other poasters can't deny
That when gryeyes walks in with stupid fuckin' case
And some handwavium in your face
WUA gets sprung
Coming with some nuking huff
Cause he fuckin' hates that mech stuff
Sweat soaked to the shirt he's wearin'
Line by line psycho shit he be swearin'
'Oh gryeyes I wanna fuckin' hit ya'
'Cause my shit is right like scriptcha'
'Other poasters tried to warn me'
'But that shit you spit'
'Make Me so Nerdraged'
'Ooh, fuck you WUA'
'Your war shit don't apply here'
'Fuck Arty, and nuking cause the blue people's shit be blue see?'

'My head is bruised from bangin
If these walls could talk they'd be laughin
You're whack, on crack, bout time for another smack'

'Sir Bruce likes your technique
You're a line by line fuckin' queen
Like Slay does in a Trammel fight
I'm gonna troll you day and night.'

(http://i395.photobucket.com/albums/pp38/douglas_davis/ewok.jpg)

Because those long range conventional weapons are generally heavy (ie howitzers and artillery) and cant be moved quickly, which means that the enemy (who is a light footed unconventional warfare type) can sneak in from any direction and fuck up the crews manning them. So then you are stuck having to beef up security around them, which means you have now wasted manpower and resources in holding a piece of land to protect a piece of equipment with a long but limited range the enemy can simply move out of or move so close to that you cant shoot them.
Happens all the time in insurgent and unconventional warfare situations.


Yes, but unfortunately you dont always get to dictate the battelfield, and if the enemy moves beyond the range of or into a spot your long range weapons cant get to (ie underground bunkers) then they become ineffective, and you are reduced to either a long term siege type battle or fighting them at closer terms. 

Almost as stupid, as say Iraq where they came to town and immediately fired all the cops and former military forces? Or used vehicles with absolutely ZERO armor on them even though we had the technology to armor said vehicles? Or you mean like flying our own helicopters so low to the ground (because they have to in order to do their mission) that they can be shot down with 50 year old RPG-7's?

I like you WUA, but your lack of understanding into the tides of a war and all the fucked up shit that can happen to you is showing through. Or you are just arguing with this guy for arguments sake. Either way you have some pretty blatant misconceptions about easy shit is with cool toys to back you up.

What channel is that show on?  It sounds interesting.

I'm not even sure what the two positions here are.

It's absolutely true that only a century or so ago, European forces (primarily British and French) had a more absolute military advantage over many non-Western societies than has probably ever existed in human history before or since. And they used it. Though the thing is, it was more unusual for them to use it to flat out slaughter African or Asian military forces on a battlefield in huge numbers. If there was slaughter, it was more depressingly of the kind that the Germans inflicted on the Herero people of southwest Africa: basically a "round them up and kill them all" thing.

After 1945, automatic weapons, explosives and logistical innovations in guerilla warfare have pretty much made it more difficult for societies with technologically advanced militaries to straightforwardly impose their will on others. In a straight up battle (Gulf War I), advanced militaries pretty much kill the shit out of even slightly less advanced militaries. But (on the other hand), if the US and Western Europe suddenly found that no coltan (used in cell phones) was coming out of Central Africa at all and they decided to go get it using military power, I think they'd find that all the advanced weaponry in the world wouldn't really help very much. Occupation is expensive, guerilla warfare is almost impossible to fully suppress and it can do a lot of damage to even the most advanced occupying force, and if you want something from the place you're occupying (like resources) you're either going to need local laborers or you going to need to import (at very high cost) foreign laborers.

There are plenty of light guns that can lob a shell ten miles and weigh less than an SUV, and if they're trying to attack your artillery positions then that's absolutely great anyway. Because now the natives have to come to you and rush at your machine guns with spears, instead of luring you into their clever Ewok jungle traps.


Except the fact that these guys have shitty weapons doesn't automatically make them unconventional ninja insurgents. If you watch the damn trailer, you'll see that their goal is specifically to defend and hold a particular piece of territory. Exactly the sort of scenario a conventional military is intended for.

If a bunch of Al Qaeda guys decided to pile into one of their Afghan training camps and scream "We shall prove that this is OUR LAND!" like that one blue schmuck in the trailer, I guarantee whoever was in charge would have the Air Force blow them to hell while laughing hysterically rather than march the Army in there to check for boobytraps with their faces.

If the natives melt away into the hills to fight a guerilla war, the humans can just fortify the little piece of land they need and ignore them. They aren't there to restore democracy or build a nation, they're there to relocate one village. They're not going to be going out on patrol trying to win hearts and minds.

Quit trying to make this Iraq. I know it's trendy, but there's absofuckinglutely no comparison.

Edit: Or to put it more baldly, these guys aren't the insurgents. They're the guys yelling "Yeah we'll show those American pigdogs what's up!" as they piled into their forty year old tanks. The insurgency came after.

They shelled the living crap out of Iwo Jima but still had to dig the Japanese out one sqaure meter at a time with ground troops, up to and including flame-throwers, sword, and hand-to-hand combat.

It mostly depends on the terrain, resources, and mission objective.  There is no one answer.

Battlefield 360 has a great episode on the Iwo Jima battle BTW.

No, I see what you're saying. But they did shell them into the caves, and then dig them out with flamethrowers. They didn't just go "Fuck it, you know, we didn't nuke the Cherokee!" and run up the beach to get in swordfights. Which is what I saw the equivalent of in that trailer, and is all I'm really arguing against.

It's a fair point that WUA's making. This isn't an argument about whether it's possible for a technologically inferior force to defeat an aggressor through attrition but whether a military with several decades advance on us would decide it was best to fight a load of guys armed with bows and arrows by sending in dudes with rifles and small mechs designed to take people on at ranges of 20m. It's going to seem fucking retarded if you ever stop to think about it without some relatively imaginative thinking. Since WUA's other point was this doesn't seem like the kind of movie that's going to to give us that the point pretty much stands. No he's not absolutely right but in terms of the movie this seems to be, seriously this isn't an argument worth having.

And now we get to the sad part of these threads, the bit where a post that isn't abusive but seems to sum things up relatively well gets totally ignored while someone calls someone else a horrible retard and quotes a Sci-Fi movie or other thread to continue a pointless argument about nothing. And while this may seem horrible egotistical, I though we'd reached this point a page back but it still hasn't stopped.

Seems like there are some assumptions being made based upon the trailer I would say. Did they know they were even there when they sent those guys in? What their capabilities were?  Hubris can lead to making those kinds of mistakes. Trailers also often jumble up the time line.

More to the point though: it is a well-worn Sci-Fi trope. Doesn't have to make any sense.

I'm actually assuming that since the monetary value of that rock is in question that these are not in fact the military of any nation but rather hired mercenaries.

Eh, it's all neither here nor there. All they would really need to do is have some villainous officer go rogue and lead his infantry unit on an illegal attack against the natives while the loyal officers in charge of heavier weapons hold back. (There mechfucker, I just solved the whole problem with no historically ignorant tard-frenzy or anime technobabble required. You moron.) But like I said, I just have a gut feeling that the movie is really going to try to bash us over the head with how awesome their blue guys are as they defeat the hapless humans with their amazing native ingenuity.

I could be completely wrong, and the movie could be totally plausible with a few brief lines tossed in here and there that make everything sensible and clear. In which case good job James Cameron, I will be pleasantly surprised and enjoy your movie. Of course, my being wrong about the vibe I took away from a two-minute movie trailer won't make gryeyes any less of a hapless ignorant dipshit.

 :awesome_for_real:

If you limit your argument to that defensive type scenario then inevitably those with the technological advantage given roughly comparable manpower will win out (ie you are right). But you seemed to be arguing around a broader field of engagement. My interpretation of what you were saying is that technological advantage would always win out in nearly any situation and if it didn't it was because only idiots must be running things. If I misread your argument then I apologize.

The argument was kind of all over the place, so I can see what it wasn't immediately clear. But yeah, I was talking about the scenario laid out in the trailer, based on the limited information given. There's natives in the jungle, they need to vacate this one village but otherwise we don't give a shit what they do, they're pretty strong close up but they don't have any advanced weaponry. In which case marching into the jungle to fight them with small arms is pretty silly.

We're cool homes.  :why_so_serious:

So, since we've already established that the humans are perfectly willing to play God by engineering a new race, what is the argument against a nuclear airburst again?

Bored and sleep-deprived, waiting to talk to someone on European time. I LIVE TO SERVE.

(http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e121/GrimDysart/mechass.png?t=1257329933)

It's SF Ferngully/Dances With Wolves, so I'm sure there's some technobabble plot-device reason why they're going in with small arms fire and mechs. Like, if they bombard the village, it disrupts the energy matrices of the magic rock that they want to mine or somesuch shit like that.

BTW, calling it now but the natives have some 'special' connection to the mineral. Be it their holy rock or they are little blue sandworms and that is the spice.

What I like to know is why they let the wheelchair marine guy still use his Avatar to help out the man-size smurfs?  If you could transfer consciousness like that, I think it's easily assumable that they could watch what he's seeing.  I mean, they did something like that in Fringe.

So they watch what he's doing and then stab him in the chest when he betrayed his own people for his own life-size Smurfette fetish.

Well, if the point is that he's trying to be a fifth columnist that will get the Smurfs to move peacefully from the village, it's easy for him to explain away everything as just trying to gain their trust, etcetera. Just from the trailer, I'm inferring that when he genuinely goes native, some of the other Marines join or support his choice and that the facility where they're going into their avatars made not be under Marine control. Or it might be that if you suicide or get killed in your original body while dialed into your avatar, your consciousness survives in the avatar body--so there's another call, at some point the guy is going to choose to literally 'go native' and give up his human body.

Meh probably.

Saw the trailer last night. Got a serious ferngully vibe from it.

 :facepalm:

I just want to know why those marines don't just nuke the blue people from orbit, since they are clearly so advanced.

I think the last couple pages of nerd battle with WUA and greyeyes will probably be more interesting than the movie, sadly.

Main reason why I didn't bother reading the thread and just posted my impressions.

Next fucker that makes me Den a post from here gets banned.

That goes double for people that paid to see Twilight.

The "gundam" guy in WUA's mech chart looks like Connor from Angel.  Thanks for ruining this thread for me, after a run of fantastic posts. 

That guy in the cardboard box is the most awesome cosplayer ever. At least in the "not a girl with nice tits" category. Which admittedly isn't saying much.

Wow.  This is an impressive thread.


Observation on scale -- apparently, on an entire planet, this fancy unobtanium is so rare that it is only available in useful amounts under one village.  What are the odds of that?

I just finally watched that video that's now sitting in the den. (Link (http://movies.ign.com/dor/objects/800318/avatar/videos/avatar_hardware.html)) Am I allowed to comment upon it in the context of the last three pages of the thread, or not, or what?

Depends if you think I'm going to Den your post :awesome_for_real:

Oh, well in that case I'm not worried. I really was just intending to comment upon the video in the context of the thread.

On one hand we have James Cameron saying that the humans are restricted to "mid-21st century technology" by magnetic something-or-other. Which, wow, is some really specific radiation. But since we don't know what post-21st century technology is supposed to look like, and nobody was talking about it anyway, I guess it doesn't matter. There's nothing said about anything restricting them from firing their existing weapons at range.

We see LOTS of heavy firepower. They have some sort of flying battleship, and the helicopters all appear to be packing missiles. We also see lots of intense combat. So the idea that the humans either didn't bring or won't use serious weaponry is right out the window. We even have "The Na'vi can't really fight back when the humans use gunships, machine guns, and these AMP suits" right out of James Cameron's mouth.

On the other hand we still see all the aircraft flying at extreme low altitude so that they can be swarmed by dragons and shit, and we can pretty much count on the hero and his blue buddies winning out in the end somehow. I hope it's something convincing, but I still have a feeling that I'm going to be asking "Wait, why didn't they just fly ten thousand feet up and missile the village to death from miles away?" when it's over.

I should have just watched this in the first place. It doesn't say anything like what it was supposed to have said.

You mean "nuke it from orbit"?

Because that's the vibe I got from this video. It's like they took all the equipment from Aliens that didn't make the cut for that gritty sequel and instead threw them into Halo: The Miner's Adventure (or, they changed the color palette from Aliens). The gunship looks like the Aliens drop ship. The mech warriors look (and are even presented the same way) like the construction walker from Aliens. I'm thinking with Sigourney Weaver is going to climb in one at some point to rescue some kid.

At least your link shows more about the story itself, something that's been sorely lacking. This is useful, because I can manage my expectations down and then hopefully enjoy the movie once I see it :-)

Yup. Looks like it's to limit computer guidance and control. So people can get lost in the woods and they can't use a GPS or radio.


It looks like the Planet is the real problem. The atmosphere is toxic. The planet's natural magnetic fields fucks with electronics. The animal life is numerous, large and belligerent. Nothing that can't be overcome, but the point seems to be that Pandora is a world hostile to humans.


Good lord, man. I know this is your pet issue, but every piece of fiction is by definition unrealistic since it's not real. They could shore up all your complaints and then put Pandora's solar system 500 million miles from earth, or have the base medic defrib a flatline, or have a fire sprinkler system put out nice clean water.  :awesome_for_real:

Dammit I'm used to Stormtroopers and Redshirts being incompetent slobs. I expect better from James Cameron. I mean, the damn GPS or whatever had BETTER work. The entire premise of the movie revolves around being able to reliably broadcast and receive huge amounts of complex information to and from an avatar in realtime while it runs around waterfall diving and falling in love with blue bitches.

Maybe they can just have a fucking wizard on the base casting spells while people bring him offerings. "Helicopters cannot fly above 400 feet! Cross my palm with silver and you'll be able to broadcast data, but only if the reciever is blue! Missiles will kill your enemies, but only when close enough for them to fight back! Mechs are viable!"

I get the feeling that one of the reasons they dont jus "nuke them from orbit" might have to do with the whole reason they are there in the first place.  I imagine that very expensive grey rock they want so badly is probably somwhat unstable, and dropping heavy ordinance on their villiage (which is right above the biggest deposit of it) would probably obliterate their intended source of profit along with the natives.

Someone should probably tell that to the chopper pilots in that preview who where blowing the hell out of shit left and right. While they're at it, someone should also tell them to do it from fifteen thousand feet in the air so that monsters can't swoop up on them unexpectedly.

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fc/Rambo_first_blood_part_ii.jpg)

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/44/True_lies_poster.jpg)

Cameron didn't direct this.

Avatar is meant to be a movie showcasing cool shit, not logical shit.

Cameron also directed Aliens, a movie where (under specific and extreme circumstances) a corporal could potentially call down an orbital nuclear strike.  :awesome_for_real:

But more importantly, a movie where determined and well-armed humans were killed by face-ripping monsters WITHOUT the writer portraying them as flaming idiots or resorting to technobabble. You can nitpick the Colonial Marines if you really want to, but they were LEAGUES ahead of most sci-fi militaries when it came to not looking like retards. And yet they pretty much all died, without it smelling like railroaded bullshit.

I hope this movie pulls it off, but we'll see.

Aliens was back when Cameron was young and (moderately) hungry. He's fat and happy now playing with toys.

Starship Troopers still has the best sci-fi military to ever put on the uniform. 

(http://fireofdarkness.googlepages.com/rage.JPG)

 :awesome_for_real:

You mean the guys who disarmed themselves moments before the confrontation that killed 90% of them? Who knowingly entered an alien nest with a majority of them holding their dicks instead of weapons? Whose officers are completely unaware that the place they are deploying is a giant nuclear reactor?  Shit they don't even keep a backup android on the mothership just encase shit gets hectic and they need orbital support? The entire situation is as contrived and stupid as "lawl EM distortion to limit technology".

Yeah, everyone disarm you might shoot the walls! No don't return to the APC and rearm, continue onward to hand to hand it with the feral monsters who killed a few hundred colonists.

They thought they could get away with using just the flamethrowers in the first encounter. Didn't say they were perfect. But nobody came in packing weapons that were grossly inadequate or piloting ridiculous vehicles with glaring weaknesses, nobody threw away massive advantages for absolutely no reason, and nobody dropped their gun to pick up a sword. That in itself put them ahead of almost every military to ever show up in a sci-fi movie.

In any case, nobody gives a shit. Even I don't give a shit.

What's more interesting is that video you posted. Specifically the helicopters blowing the living shit out of everything in sight. I thought this was supposed to be a bunch of lightly-armed corporate shills unwilling to really unload on the natives for diplomatic reasons.

Of course all those helicopters were flying absurdly close to the ground and bunched together in broad daylight so that dragons could kill them in a giant pewpew set-piece battle. Unlike all the helicopter gun cam footage you see in real life, where a guy hovers miles away under cover of darkness watching some Iraqi insurgents scratch their asses obliviously, then blows them to giblets before they know what hit them.

It's going to be balls-out fighting by the end, but conducted stupidly enough for the guys with spears and animals to eek out some sort of victory. I don't know what stake you have in denying this, other than being buttsore in general.

Protip: Please don't do that thing again where you assume that every weapon requires some sort of radar lock to hit a target from miles away. It. Just. Doesn't. Work. That. Way.

So they made mistakes, they had the wrong gear, they had incompetent officers and their mission was poorly defined and badly executed?

Sounds pretty realistic to me  :why_so_serious:

Incoming variation upon "As opposed to Avatar, where stupid WUA thinks everything is supposed to work perfectly in the military!" I'm sure I will be totally unprepared for it.

They only had I believe 2-3 flamers (somehow drake ends up with one). The guys with the flame units also weren't in the "front" they were intermixed with the unarmed folks which is wonderful position for a flame thrower. There are 3-4 "armed" guys discounting the ones who cheat. Its moronic, its completely irrational and unbelievable. They dont even get swords, they get NOTHING. Yeah, being completely unarmed isn't throwing away a HUGE tactical advantage or anything. Of course nobody gives a shit most people understand how Scifi works, YOU dont give a shit because you haphazardly and randomly apply fantastic rules for what is "believable" and what is not. I'm just pointing it out.

Its readily apparent at some point the "marine" dude goes apeshit and decides to just attack regardless of the rules. And even then it appears they are firing unguided rockets. Im not sure guys with a fleet of hovercrafts and mechs are "lightly armed schills", but what THEY ARE is private security for a corporation.

The helicopter cam footage using FLIR and all sorts of electronic image enhancement/locking? Yeah, ive seen it...its like asking "why are those guys so close?", ive seen guys with rifles shooting people from miles away with only their eyeballs! Why would they EVER need to get so close!

Protip: Understand whats reliant on computer enhancement and electronic devices outside of "radar" to hit targets miles away.


Yes, yes it does.

This nerd slapfight gimmick has gotten old.

There must be a million tiny bruises by now. :why_so_serious:

Yeah, it has gotten old.

I'll leave it with this: If the magical background radiation were powerful enough to bork not just things like avionics and active radar, but also closed-circuit systems like a gun camera or thermal imaging, then pretty much nothing should work. They should probably just crash, and you sure as hell wouldn't see things like mech suits precisely duplicating human motion under those conditions.

The unguided rockets carried by a present-day Apache can be usefully accurate out to 6 or 7 kilometers.

Nobody really wants to talk about Aliens in this thread. At all. Harping on it just makes one look butthurt and bent on going "NOO!" to anything I say.

Peace out to your homedogs. I hope this movie is lots better than my gut is telling me. I love me some Star Wars, but I expect something a lot smarter from Cameron.

(The cheesey parts in True Lies were deliberate, dammit!)

I wonder who's going to win the trip off the island.  :popcorn:

At the rate it's going, all contestants. Trippyrage is past the danger level, and still rising.

I dunno, I was basically done. This isn't as much fun as it was a month ago. I think I might be nerdfought out for the moment.

Or maybe you've finally realized how friggin' pointless it is to try and overcome suspension of disbelief in favor of everything making sense. Nobody in the Hollywood machine gives a fuck about logic or all this other shit you're trying to argue for in a special effects wonderland. They will use any means to justify the ends: do we have conflict? Can we tug at the audiences emotions? Can we make shit blow up? Etc.

I already look down on this movie because of the blatent inspirations from other literature and film. But as much as you are into the lore side and want to see good from IP's you're invested in (why invest in this new one anyway?), writers are going to carry the idiot ball from time to time to have a world meet some marketing or storyline requirement. This isn't a reality show where a scenario is setup and they just let things take their logical course.

No, it's definitely not that.  :awesome_for_real:

Dissecting something, moving the pieces around to see if they add up, and then slagging it when they don't can be fun. But meh, stuff gets old and this isn't even a particularly compelling nerdfight. I'm not so much invested in the IP as I'm interested in seeing James Cameron finally start making movies again.

Man I've been posting up a storm. Fucking insomnia. I've been awake since yesterday.

He still got a Razzie for his work on it. You can substitute Pirhanna 2: The Spawning if you like.  :awesome_for_real:
Cameron does good movies, but he still does lots of silly ridonkulous stuff to keep the story moving.
And I think Titanic was the movie where he finally snapped and became like prequel George Lucas. Avatar will be interesting if only to see if I'm right. 

Ratman, you're right.

You're so very, very right.

But thats the point you measure "lore" with INTERNAL consistency, not its relationship to the meat world. Dune being a prime example that is also directly applicable to this conversation. Drug addicted ninjas with teeth daggers displacing a galactic empire sounds absurd, but how the "lore" is presented and how it jives with itself is the yardstick. Not the viability of teleporting ninjas in a modern context. But yeah, horse dead.

So if I as a human tried to have sex with an 8ft tall blue girl, would she just crush my hips? I mean would I have to be in an avatar for that? Also can his avatar get blue chick pregnant? These questions are 1000x more interesting than tech discussion.

There's whole fetishes devoted to the idea of having sex with an 8 ft tall girl, a blue girl, both... etc. Cameron loves powerful women in his works which usually means that's his fetish of choice, similar to Tarantino's feet obsession or Burton's dark gothy beauties.

You assume parts are where you think they are.

Why shouldn't he? The smurfs in Avatar look closer to humans than a lot of critters on earth.

Because, you could be very wrong.

(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_F1z3Oa3dJFM/R5AtuszvTtI/AAAAAAAAAOA/hSh9-a_SvCM/s200/Londo%2BS2.jpg)

I'm thinking any series sci-fi geek is going to be asking themselves the same question over this movie - in essence, why didn't they just nuke the motherfuckers from orbit? Rail guns don't really require any sort of post-21st century tech. If you can go from one planet to another, how hard is it to lasso an asteroid and project it from orbit onto a village of blue-skinned fuckers?

Wow. An alien species that looks exactly like humans except for their bad haircuts and silly genitals. JMS didn't put bumps on their foreheads, he put bumps on their foreskins.  :awesome_for_real:

You don't even need a rail gun. Just an engine with clamps and some rudimentary robot brain. Stuff we've had since the 70's.

Anyway. We don't really know the specifics of how this is going to go down. Trailers are intentionally edited out of context for more boom boom zap pow. For all we know, those choppers were shooting at other humans, or a bunch of critters who were coming to munch on the habitat's power lines, or maybe the noble blue savages after all.

I'll reserve judgement on the tactics and strategies until I see this on DVD.

Death by Snoo Snoo for you!

That's exactly where I was going to go and I'm sure I'm not alone.

It has tits. It is a mammal. Mammals generally tend to come with the requisite lower fun bits. Having more than the usual isn't off the cards, though. Or implicitely a good or bad thing.

Space aliens tend to have tits if they're female whether mammal or not. Probably a combination of making it easy for the viewer to tell the difference between males and females and easier than disguising breasts/hiring men who look like flat chested women.

You sure that's what they are?

Actually, here's the final version of Plan WUA.

1) Procure vast quantities of stink gas and itching powder.
2) Pour the stink gas and itching powder into bombs fused to airburst 100 feet off the ground.
3) Dump lolbombs all over the general vicinity of the village with complete impunity from a cargo plane 30k feet up.
4) Repeat #3 each day until natives all get fed up and leave.
5) Mission accomplished. Negligible loss of life on either side. Billions of dollars saved.

It's cheap, it's humane, and it works even if magical plot fairies restrict you to 1940's technology and optical bombsights. It also makes a terrible movie, but whatever. It's still much better than the WUA version of Independence Day, which would be about 30 minutes long and really depressing.

 :why_so_serious:

All that aside, the budget is rumored to be anywhere between $270 million and $350 million. How do you guys think this is going to do financially? Is there buzz for this movie? My usual sources for what's on the minds of nerds are all jammed by carbon copies of the last few pages of this thread.

You forget that Unobtainium is highly reactive to stink gas and itching powder and will turn to inert Cantuseitite.   :awesome_for_real:

 :awesome_for_real:

Cameron is a good showman, like Bay. I predict it will about double it's cost to make. (so about 500-700 mil.) Complete guessitmate there.

I'll thank you to never compare Cameron to Bay again.

This.

Just because it's "from the makers of Titanic" doesn't mean it's anything other than a geek fest. So it's going to get critiqued by geeks. Granted, you'll never please geeks entirely, but you should at least try.

Aliens makes sense in a self-consistent by-the-minute decisions making. They didn't have warp speed nor teleportation, so everything still corrollated to modern near-future physics, and is therefore self-consistent. Avatar will be looked at through the same lens. From the previews, I'm not sure it's going to survive the scrutiny.

Yeah, ordering your forces to disarm moments before a confrontation is self consistent with modern thinking on the fly strategy. Hey guys its the future with space war but instead of using some ammo that wont rupture a nuclear reactor you must disarm and wrestle the aliens.

When it comes to Avatar, I don't think I'll have a problem with th... I mean I don't think the majority of sweaty palmed sci-furry fans out there will complain.

*ahem*

You must've  missed the part where the Lt. was an incompetent douchebag with no real experience.   Ask the vets around here; that scene was more real than you might otherwise know.

Complete irrational stupidity is "realistic" I agree. Aliens was used as an example for a movie that didn't resort to "making the Marines behave like complete fucking idiots for the story to work". When clearly that is not the case.

"Possible civilian survivors trapped in a place that might explode if we fire our guns inside it? Well it looks quiet so far and we've yet to really fight the monsters, so I probably don't have adequate respect for them at this point. Yeah stow the guns that might blow the whole place to hell and just use the flamethrowers if anything happens."

"We're capable of interstellar travel but I'll be damned if any of our aircraft have a higher useful combat ceiling than a two-ton animal that relies upon muscle power and wings. Fuck it, fight them a hundred feet off the ground instead of ten thousand. Everyone else get in there and fight those super-strong natives hand to hand even though we're intimately familiar with their capabilities."

One is a believable mistake by characters who are not infallible. The other is complete fucking idiocy.

None of the crew of the Sulaco believed a word Ripley said.

Even after that disbelief took a pounding by, you know, meeting the Facehuggers and hearing Newts story, they still thought it was a simple military action.

Them getting fucked in the ass was the whole point of the movie.

I know you're hypothemalizing, but did you notice what the chopper/VTOL thingies were shooting missiles at in the trailer?

By that time they 100% believed they were battling aliens. They were on edge and afraid before even entering the "nest" (The entire sequence of finding "newt"). They saw the wreckage from the battles, they saw holes burned through the entire complex from dead aliens. They find live specimens with detailed medical records of what was going down. Yes the entire point of the movie is them getting fucked in the ass...

At least the argument has moved from "Obliterate them from space?!?!!" to "They are fighting below my imaginary standards for the effective altitude of various VTOL craft while I have clue what the circumstances are!". A much more nuanced complaint haha.

 :oh_i_see:

Sanity edit: You know, I changed my mind. I don't care. Whatever. I'm just gonna leave the quotes up for posterity hilarity. If you keep "moving" the argument along like this, maybe we'll travel all the way back to before you started posting here.

Nice going there gryeyes, see you in a week.

WUA winner by TKO.

I'm not wholly convinced that the CGI and real life interaction in this move can be pulled off. The Smurfs have too much of cartoony look, it worked for Roger Rabbit but that was a comedy.

Saw yet another trailer on TV. I think the marketing folks are getting a headache from this one. Every trailer/teaser takes a completely different look at this movie. Some it's the fun immersion of being on a new world to explore and a love story. Others it's just some military shooter with Borderlands-level tech on a same-named world. Others it's about infiltrating an "enemy" to do something big and bad. There's another that is the same schtick but adds in "for the Corporation".

It doesn't help that the last big thing Cameron did for the averag movie goer was a tier jerker where the cinematography was there to merely tell the story. There's going to be a lot of disappointed 30/40-something women looking for a tear jerker  :awesome_for_real:


What's "hypothemalizing"? Wiktionary failed me.

The fuck is a tier jerker?

It's what hypothemalizing leads to.

Being a jerk on many levels.

You rang ?

I'll just wait for the youtube vid where they are dubbed tot he Smurfs singing "La-la-lalala-laaa" and the head marine has the voice of Gargamel, thanks  :grin:

The internet is way ahead of you: NWS http://rule34.paheal.net/post/list/draenei/1 NWS

Why does the blue chick speak English? Why is avatar boy giving his pep talk in English? On a more personal note, I've always wanted the Universal Translator on Star Trek to make it so that nobody's lips match the voice we hear. It would be great if particular concepts made it so that we were still hearing them talk as they turned around... or so that they spoke for a long while in order to produce a two-word retort.

I kind of like that but really I'd see it being a funny gimmick that got old real fast. The second or third time someone spoke for 30 seconds for a two word retort would become a nightmare for the viewer and most people on seeing lips not matching up with the words would assume there'd been a mistake somewhere. Possibly if you always had the actual alien very softly underneath the main dialogue but really it doesn't seem necessary.

(http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/en/images/thumb/2/20/Dathon.jpg/210px-Dathon.jpg)
Shaka, when the walls fell.

See? I know it's a fan favorite, but that episode drove me nuts. If the universal translator can't decipher meaning, it definitely can't decipher metaphor. How can it understand that one set of sounds means "wall" if it doesn't understand that another set means "failure"? A "universal" translator that inept wouldn't be able to translate colloquial Finnish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_language#Spoken_Finnish)... much less something as heavily contextual as Chinese.

That was my point.  Well, not that it drove you personally nuts but that what might make for an interesting episode would be horrible if applied to a whole series.  That episode annoyed me after the initial 'hey, that's a neat idea' shine wore off, which happened relatively quickly.

probably my all-time fav ST episode and one of the best conceptual bits of SF writing I've ever seen/heard/read.

It is a really great episode and it's interesting to see someone actually tackling an aspect of how language works relating to a 'universal translator'. The problem is that it's something that a) Doesn't make sense if you actually stop for a second to think that any translator worth its salt wouldn't magically translate words literally b) It would be incredibly annoying outside of an individual episode and c) Pretty much anything outside of straight English translations would probably confuse the viewer unless clearly explained, something that itself would become annoying if you allowed for people coming into the series fresh every episode (oh God we have to listen to the explanation for why their lips don't synch again for the 20th time).

It's a really nice idea and kinda cool on its own but there are very good reasons why all aliens speak English (or English with subtitles).

The real ways a universal translator would fail aren't nearly as charmingly poetic as that ST episode. It would simply be impossible to communicate with that alien and everyone would be stuck forming some hand-signal pidgin that the universal translator would helpfully turn any conversational partner (It's universal, right? does hand signals too, right? it was translating for crystal entities who "spoke" with light, right?) into Amy the Gorilla (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112715/).

I'd be fine with subtitles. Star Wars' solution didn't bother me at all.

That's one way of looking at a universal translator but I like to think there's another way. Think of how we learn new languages, now imagine that knowledge could simply be inserted into your brain. I would consider a working universal translator not to be something that translated in real time but rather an implant that would simply allow you to understand and speak the language to the best of your physical abilities. As words change or new dialects are discovered they could be simply added to the chip/implant. Of course if you're accepting that level of tech, then everyone would be walking around with a full computer in their brains but hey it's the only way I could see it working aside from taking the time to learn 1000 alien languages

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/hitchhikers/gallery/images/340/babel1.jpg)

I was thinking that too but a babelfish is essentially the same as star trek in how it operates, thus creating the same problems with translation when you think about it.

The Avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote [/Kosh]

I find a plot that hinges on the stupidity of a person in charge completely credible. Or for that matter, a plot that argues that a technologically superior society might underestimate the capabilities of other societies for a few battles. See Isandlwana. Or for that matter GW Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech. But that doesn't mean that you get an automatic pass on that kind of plot: you need to explain why the stupidity of the person in charge has authority, or why the technologically dominant forces are underestimating the locals. Those aren't givens. Neither of those are static situations, either: usually when the dumb guy in charge gets enough people killed, he isn't in charge anymore (a point to Aliens) and usually when a technologically dominant power gets caught with its pants down, the next time around they come back with their big guns and fuck the locals up for real  (a point to WUA). Unless there's some non-technological non-technobabble reason why they can't do so (political opposition at home, legal or moral constraints, a need to preserve the political or social infrastructure of the indigenous society so that it can be of use to the colonizers).

Been more than a few years since I've seen it, but iirc, the concept was better than the execution. I think there were only five lines total, the ones that confused Picard until the end when he used the exact same ones with the rest of the crew left behind. A truly metaphorical language for a space-faring race would have a lot more source material from which to work.

Also, unfortunately it was about the only episode that dealt with the intrinsic problems of a universal translator that does little more than Google translate does today. Another lost opportunity to actually be sci-fi.

There was a lot more than just one metaphor. There were 8 or so. You really couldn't get more or the audience would get confused. It is a really good episode actually. Paul Winfield is great in it.

Five, eight, the few metaphors didn't bother me as much (since I agree with you about audience confusion) as the fact that Picard used the exact same ones at the end to communicate with the remaining crew on the other ship.

What other ones was he supposed to use? Those were the ones he learned the meaning of so it was the only way he could communicate with them. The whole point was that the other captain tried to recreate the metaphor to create understanding and in the process he taught Picard some basics. It's like complaining the the kindergartner couldn't quote Shakespeare to you when you taught him Goodnight Moon.

This looks like it should be called "Dances with Aliens".

Injured white soldier goes to live with the injuns. He falls in love with the simple, peacefeul, obviously-superior-in-every-way, culture of said injuns, and helps them fight the greedy, rapacious, technologically superior white-capitalist-imperialist military industiral complex [insert favorite anti-revolution boogeyman here].

The whole idea seems kinda tired to me.

Empire's review (http://www.empireonline.com/reviews/reviewcomplete.asp?FID=133552)

Despite the fact that I do agree with some of the more facetious Dances with Thundercats/Smurfgully comments made over the last year or so, I was never not going to see the movie, and while Empire's reviews are not always spot-on (they're doing a grand job lately of pretending they didn't over-criticise Iron Man in 07 with the sequel hypemachine in full gear now), this one certainly has me hungry for next friday.

All I had to read of that review was the top where it says '5 star, instant classic' to know it was full of shit.  Hell I'm even willing to believe it will be a good movie, one i may even enjoy but giving it full marks is just plain bullshit, this is not going to be a cinematic classic.

Not an indication of how it will all eventually play out, but it is running 100% fresh with 8 reviews in on rottentomatoes.

Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead) on Twitter after seeing premiere: "Avatar ........................ tweetless. Just tweetless in the best possible way."

"The movie is a game changer. Still buzzing."

Are we actually supposed to give two shits about the opinion of someone who non-ironically uses the phrase 'tweetless'?

Please catch up with the internet. We got over the ridiculousness of the word tweet some time ago. Simon Pegg has his wits about him and would tend towards scepticism, not hype. Therefore his opinion got me interested.

Same here. If Shaun is floored by it then I may have to check it out.

All the buzz I've heard about "Avatar" is good. I'm looking forward to seeing it and hope it really is something a bit different.

If it really is as good as the first few trickling reviews I've heard, then the marketing department should be fucking fired. The trailers have all made the movie look really trite and uninspiring.

It wouldn't be the first movie that marketing fucked up on. Hell, by the marketing I thought GI Joe was going to be unwatchable shit and was pleasantly surprised to find an enjoyable popcorn flick. (not the greatest example but the first one that came to mind.)

Considering this is a man who has made no secret of his revulsion of the Starwars Prequel trilogy in his personal life or indeed in the second series of Spaced, and considering the derision heaped on the Avatar footage seen in the last three months is of a very George Lucasian vein, I'll just focus on the positive nature of his first impression than worry about a stupid net-word.

Words stolen straight from my brain.

The Hitchhiker answer is to not think about it.

Apparently Hollywood is having trouble marketing films without Paul Walker in them to lend his incredible acting ability and voice talent.
Oh Hollywood, send us more plastic robots so that emasculated men can make impulse purchases during Best Buy DVD sales.  :grin:

sorry about double post, accidently quoted myself and wasn't sure how to delete. :ye_gods:

Actually reading the reviews at RT, it looks like all the positives are for the technology (the movie is in that new 3d, that apparently most folks haven't seen.) while references to the story and characterizations all pan it.   The movie should be getting a MUCH lower rating than the 91% it currently holds, but once again teh shiny wins.

Hippy Dippy.  :grin: I love it when someone like Cameron uses their money and technology to tell us a story about how money and technology are bad.  :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, I should point out that I don't need the humans to somehow do everything without making any mistakes. As long as they restrict those mistakes to a somewhat believable "Dude Gorman, flamethrowers alone weren't going to be enough!" magnitude, and don't just have the entire army go full retard and forget that missiles can travel more than 500 feet, I'll be a happy enough camper.

But leaving technical nerd shit aside, this movie just ain't grabbing me. I couldn't give a fuck less about the effects technology. We're pretty much at the point where Hollywood can create any arbitrary image in convincing fashion for enough money anyway, and we know they spent enough money. I like Star Wars because I like that sort of quaint pirates-and-knights space opera feel, at least in small doses. Not because I fap to CGI. And nothing about the feel of this movie so far is tickling me.

I live in the real world..... it's in the best 3D already 24x7.

So does this mean that if you're going to watch this, you should drop the 20 bucks or whatever it costs to see it in 3D?

That's certainly what I get out of the reviews.

A newish Imax theatre was built near my dad's house.  I'm gonna take him sometime next weekish and see it in 3D.  Havn't seen a movie in 3D yet.

I've heard it compared by some to be this generations Wizard of Oz. Apparently the story is meh, but the technology alone makes it an instant classic.
I'd like to see it in IMAX.

Are there some uber effects we're just not seeing in the trailers that are supposed to OMG CHANGE EVERYTHING or is this it? So far it looks no better or worse than any other CGI-laden would-be blockbuster with a multiple hundreds of millions budget.

3D.

Isn't the current 3D fad already a few years old at this point?

Nothing that relies on technology that can't be replicated in the home can be an 'instant classic.'   The Home DVD will be in that awful red-blue 3d IF it has it at all, and that will be total crap as it always has been.


It's only about a year and a half old for the "new" tech.   Brendon Frasier was the first guy I heard pimping it out, with Journey to the Center of the Earth.  He talked up the tech in a few interviews I'd heard, and how that movie was really just a testbed for the projectors and glasses tech, to shake out bugs before the "big" films started using it.   

The deal is this incarnation supposedly doesn't cause nausea, vomiting, and headaches.

It's better than red and blue, but it still causes trouble for some people.  I get minor but tolerable headaches, and my wife pretty much refuses to see 3D stuff any more because it's worse for her.

 Besides the 3D, the rendering of the special effets through the camera monitor while you are shooting, not in post,  is what I thought was pretty sweet.

I find it mildly headache-inducing.

I wear glasses, so wearing the 3D glasses is not very comfortable.

I find it pretty gimmicky (maybe they've done something awesome with it in Avatar, but I'm not gonna hold my breath).

See this is awesome from a geek's perspective, but it isn't enough to hang a movie on. What I've heard of the story sounds trite and uninteresting. I'm not paying movie prices for a goddamn tech demo.

You know as much as the plot may be shit, when you phrase it like that...I'm in.

The blue furry aliens with tails ensure that only geeks are going to see this. Otherwise I'm expecting this to be Dances With Wolves minus the tent sex.....which is a shame in a way.

We're going to see this in a few minutes on the XD 3d screen, its like IMAX-lite I think. I'm sure we'll be entertained no matter what  :drill:

This post made me go look at the imdb for Dances with Wolves out of curiosity.  And Holy Fucking Shit, I didn't realize that the chick from that was President Laura Roslin.

The trailers for this movie continue to bore me.
This. A thousand times this.

Also, is this 3D tech the same the used for Beowulf (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_(2007_film))? I saw that in Imax and wasn't particularly impressed.

(http://arynstary.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/mary-mcdonnell_l.jpg)

- Kicking Bird sad Stands With Fist looks like white man from botox and chin tuck. :uhrr:

Welp, it was better than Twilight.

Just got back, head running at a steady dull ache from the 3d.

It was basic_action_drama_0589  - There were no boundaries pushed and I called the exact ending at about half way through.  It was pretty, though.


But at least it was pretty.

 :oh_i_see:

I'm glad that was cleared up to everyone's satisfaction.

Movie was meh at best. The 3d started to hurt my eyes towards the end, very cliche plot.

Sorry if this has been mentioned already, don't want to read the whole thread due to *spoilers*.

Just read in the paper at work that analysts are predicting the movie will have to make 700 million world wide to just break even covering production, marketing and print costs.  :uhrr:

As well as a quote from Sigourney Weaver saying the movie will do better then Titanic.

I think a lot of people are in for a major dissapointment.

I've already decided I'm not going to bother.

The movie was awesome. The most fucking awesome movie in a long long time. Why? Not because of the action (which was ok) but because of the characters. The movie sometimes went a bit caricature, but overall the "good guys" burned with such intensity that I couldn't help but love them so much I almost started shouting encouragement to them right there in the theatre. Especially Sigourney Weaver. She was distilled :drillf:.

 Cameron knows how to tell a story, that's his gift.

Very well done, and very predictable, although I wasn't expecting  But overall, yeah, Dances With Wolves In Space. Fun battle scene at the end though. Crash crash!

Absolutely loved it! The 3D was not in your face like most animated films, at dded a really nice depth of field to everything.

The guy from Grandmas Boy was the worst by far.

Loved it.  I was afraid that I would find the 3d distracting but that wasn't a problem for me at all.  It looked like excellent
fantasy/science fiction illustrations brought to life.  And the animation of the faces and the eyes was incredible.  I don't
give a damn that it isn't a story that I have never heard before because I don't recall having that story told better.

Saw it too. They also showed a trailer for Alice in Wonderland in 3D as well. It was the exact opposite of Avatar, all garish and 3D in your face.

I found Avatar's use of 3D to be much more subtle overall. It didn't try to make the film jump out of the screen; more like it pulledl you into the movie.

Amazing special effects, so much so that the movie needs to be seen by that merit alone. Also it has to be seen in 3D, don't even bother with 2D.

That said, it was quite silly.  Also, it's fun to watch 500 million dollars flash before your eyes.

Saw it with a group of friends last night, and not one of us left the cinema unsatisfied. In fact it was a lot of fun seeing some of the somewhat shell-shocked faces coming out of the darkness and the general hubbub of elation.

It's by no means a great movie. We're not talking a Godfather or Shawshank or what have you, but we are talking a special effects blockbuster to end all special effects blockbusters. And it is very much Dances with Smurfs, and fantastic for all the right reasons. It's cheesy as fuck. Seriously, seriously cheesy. And you won't give a damn, because Cameron offers you his finest cheese selection and you'll like every mouthful. Cameron is a master of manipulation like that. He's also a master of creating his dream audience crossover. There were the requisite ammount of nerds in on the first night, it's true, but way outnumbering the nerds were couples and families, the kids sat through near 3 hours of it. It's going to make a fuckton of money.

The 3D was used beautifully - nothing flew out of the screen, it was purely depth of field work, emphasising the jawdropping fantasy setting in a way that is going to make a lot of directors seriously think about changing up their game-plan. The technical impact of Avatar is massive - the other success against all odds is the mo-cap. It just hasn't been done this good, ever. There's no floating displacement, no interaction problems, and best of all, thanks to some truly beautiful animation, the Na'vi's eyes are real and expressive despite their largeness, and the whole 'dead eye/uncanny valley' problem doesn't exist at all. It takes but a moment after the initial avatarisation to stop noticing what's real and what isn't. Perhaps mostly because Avatar is sort of a reverse Roger Rabbit in that regard.

My one problem with the experience is 3D takes me so long to get used to. The scant 3D trailers just aren't enough to configure my eyes, and I was in some considerable discomfort for about 45 minutes into the movie itself and was seriously worried it was going to hamper my enjoyment, but I did adjust eventually.

It's fun watching the world-weary internet guys fume while their predictions of disaster based on nothing but the trailer turn out to be completely wrong. :awesome_for_real:

I thought the predictions were largely, "This is going to be a stupid movie that will have awesome special effects," Which largely seems to have come true. That said I might be misremembering, I started mentally blanking this thread when the nerdslaps started.

I think I'm the only one who thinks it, but Sam Worthington was the wrong guy to play the Hero/Messiah/Great Leader SkyDreamer.  I could see him falling in love with the smurfs/planet but not as the great war leader he was supposed to be.

Yeah, I don't think anyone entertains the notion that this isn't going to make a huge pile of money. If there was a disaster involved, it happened a long time ago when it came time to sign off on the budget. It needs to open huge and have good legs on top of that.

It's opening day gross is almost exactly the same as that of the recent Star Trek, a successful blockbuster in it's own right. In the unlikely event that Avatar were to finish up with a total gross similar to that of Trek, angry studio execs would have James Cameron executed for losing hundreds of millions of their dollars. On the other hand, it's opening day was also only a few million short of Return of the King. If it grosses like ROTK did, everything is golden and James Cameron is a hero.

Basically we won't know anything real until at least the second weekend.

That movie is fucking great.  You guys have way too much sand in your V_Card.

• The visual are stunning, like 11 out of 10 stunning

• The love stroy is not so bad and not overplayed

• The pacing is really good. The 3 hours passed very fast, much faster than any of the LotR movies

• The fights are silly but entertaining and well shot.  The action was less silly than a typical over the top action movie like Die Hard 4 or Transformers

• Avatar>X-Men>Transformer>New Star Wars trilogy

It even convinced me than MECH are worst than Tank, even in a jungle environment.  One tank would have won the battle.

Missed opportunity from the scriptwriter : a training montage were the humans train the blue guys and show them how to make rocket arrows with 2-3 guerrilla attacks to steal some equipment would have removed the silly. Training montages are awesome.

Just got back from an IMAX 3D version.  Mother of god it made a difference, far bigger than it did for seeing Star Trek on the IMAX.  Movie of the year for me now, now that I saw it 7 stories high.

If it dosn't the Oscar, and Cameron for directing it, there is no justice in this world.

I really don't get the praise. I can understand saying the movie looks amazing, but its the most trite plot by numbers story imaginable. Im debating checking it out in IMAX does anyone know if the 3d on IMAX is better than a digital screen?

I saw it on 3D and then 3D IMAX. The IMAX made a difference for me.

Opening weekend is estimated to be $73 million domestic, and such estimates are pretty much always on the money to within a few million, even this early. The overseas take is estimated at about $160 million, which is very encouraging. What they need now is a second weekend dropoff percentage in the low thirties. Over forty and there's cause for concern. Over fifty and it's time to panic. Fortunately reviews and viewer's scores are both substantially positive, which bodes well for having a small dropoff.

Factor in the east coast being snowed in opening weekend.

A ton of people go to movies between Christmas and New Years. I doubt they have much to worry about.

Seeing it tomorrow at IMAX Melbourne, the third largest screen in the world. Will it live up to expectations?

It was a very fun movie to watch.  All the depth of a pie plate, and I'm really sick and tired of the 'oh the noble savages who live in perfect harmony with all life yay' characters in movies.  But still a fun action movie, and not a smidgen as retarded as Transformers/GI Joe.  My only advice is to pass on the 3-D version, which really didn't add much of anything in the opinion of the people I saw it with.

Wha?  That's the exact opposite of about every opinion about the 3d I've read to date.   

I'm going to see it next weekend in Imax when the kids are at their grandma's.  Whee.

I suspect the only thing that might cause it problems will be Sherlock Holmes.

Saw it in 3D tonight.  Strangely enough, the trailers did it justice and also didn't do it justice, all at the same time.  The story is the same old shit we know, directed very well, but the combination of 3D and the mo-cap+CG are what really make this movie special.  They pull you into the world very easily, to the point that I often felt like I was looking through an illusion box into a real location with real Viamontians interacting with real Phazon-infused objects.

It's a shame that General Cynical Hardass turned into a full-blown caricature at the end, but that was pretty much telegraphed from far away, so not surprising.

I saw it there on Sunday night. Don't need to do what I did and get there an hour and a half early, 45 minutes will get you good seats in the back. Also, no trailers either. I found the glasses they use at the IMAX more comfortable than at Hoyts too.


I thought it amusing that in another movie he would have been Bruce Willis in Die Hard 5000: Pandora edition.

Definitely worth seeing for the 3D. I was pleasantly surprised, even if I thought the alines were too Native American-like, and not enough alien. Sort of took me out of the fantasy setting more so than I would have liked. Story was interesting enough, although what had me really excited is what other kinds of stories they will tell with Cameron's technology. I keeping trying to imagine 3D Miyazaki movies that worked like Avatar did.

 :grin:

This is the only reason why I'm in this thread before I've seen the movie.

wat?

There's a pretty obvious part later on, "horse people of the plains," or some shit.


I would watch that movie.

It was obvious he was referencing American Imperialism, and referencing what America did to the Native Americans. Which isn't exactly original, but fine none the less. I just wish he was more subtle about it instead of giving the aliens horses, bows/arrows, and high pitched battle cries. I felt like they were distant cousins Pocahontas instead of aliens..  

Just saw it this evening myself and I agree with much of this. Shut your mind off - especially when it comes to the dialogue - and enjoy the best graphics a modern render-farm can crank out.

I think about 30-45 minutes could've easily been left on the cutting room floor; gratuitous flight scenes and whatnot that existed solely because of the 3D tech. For that reason, I'd recommend going to a 3D showing if it's not terribly more expensive than a normal one and doesn't make you nauseous.

I found the 3D to be supportive in a few scenes, okay in most, and incredibly distracting in a few places; primarily when they had foreground objects on-camera while the camera's focus remained in the middle ground. My eyes want to focus on things that suddenly pop up in front of them, but the camera's focus obviously doesn't allow that, so I'd have to consciously focus on the middle ground, which hurt immersion. There's a few scenes where the action, and focus, are moving so quickly that I had to actively search the screen for where I was "supposed" to be looking.

That said, if you're not going for the tech or visual direction, don't bother.

I feel that since there is little narrative value, the fx and 3D were the only big selling points of the movie, and what I went to the movie for. Therefore an extra 30 or 45 minuts of pretty 3D wasn't a big deal in my opinion. And even though I haven't seen the non 3D version, I felt the 3D added a lot in terms of aesthetic bling.

That's New England.  You're looking for the Lakota and Cheyenne of the Black Hills (Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Gall).

I was thinking Mohawks, because of um their mohawks, and Cherokee, because they totally should have used that 80's glam rock song "Cherokee" when they were marching down their trail of tears. Cherokeeeeee!

It's Pocahontas. In Space.

As much as I wanted the Terrans to win against Night Elves...it's just wasn't meant to be.

Eh.

Got motion sickness every now and then and had to take the glasses off and sit with my eyes closed for a few min for it to pass (didn't get there early and had to sit front-side), story was absolute shite, some pretty sweet cgi, 3d was underwhelming most of the time but on very rare occasions was pretty neat.

Worth seeing? Maybe.

Worth paying $40, which was the amount I had to pay because the fucking trains decided to stop running and I had to catch a cab home... nope..

I knew the story was going to be rubbish and it still pissed me off.. gah

Got a massive headache from it, I don't think the 3d added anything (besides the depth to some scenes). The biggest thing was the amazing sharpness of the new screens, but I was put in awe of how much waste was being generated from the 3d plastic glasses and packaging  :grin:

Just back from seeing it in non-3D. Very shiny. And since I happen to like shiny, it's all good.

Saw it in 3D.

In short: pretty and vapid. A near 3 hour tech demo. I got bored waiting for the inevitable conclusion.

My longer, petty gripes:


In short: if this film had been much, much tighter, it would have been more enjoyable and the stupid would have been able to slide right by. I would have liked to see Michael Biehn as the military commander though (he lost out to the other guy). 

They really called it Unobtainium (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Unobtainium)?

 :awesome_for_real:

With some of the names given to real elements, it's makes sense. For that matter, it was called that by the corporate manager who needed a tech to use the map display tool.

It's a room temperature superconductor that allows the construction of a world wide network of maglev train lines on earth that solve earth's transportation problems.  Earth's going to strike back in the sequel.

Ok, I saw this yesterday. I was all prepared to go in and be a jaded asshole. About halfway I realized I was grinning like an idiot and I didn't stop until the credits.

In short, if you don't like this movie you just hate fun.

There are a lot of people around here that hate fun.

I guess.  Absolutely everybody I've talked to not on these boards (IE, Real Life) has absolutely loved it.  This is a wide range of people from nerds to art fags.  Guess I have to go see it.

Well you may think you're having fun but remember all of cognoscenti will be laughing at you for enjoying a movie with such a trite, juvenile plot.

...who still payed their $20 to go and see it and now pretend they hadn't enjoyed themselves for three hours. Prerogatives!

ALL of cognoscenti?  Oh my.  I guess I should rethink what I like because all of cognoscenti will laugh at me!

Aint nothing more fun than watching a crippled whiteboy playing out all his adolescent imperialist alpha-male fantasies with a bunch of blue pagan technology worshippers, amiright?

I enjoyed parts, but there's no denying that the plot is just that bad. It's a half baked mess of poorly developed clichés, woefully stupid 'battles', and really bad acting. Some of the sequences, especially with flying, were pretty sweet. But it never escaped the stupid.

*snort* Do you just go out of your way to overanalyze movies? Where is all this repressed rage coming from anyway?

You mean because it's so subtle? I had to sit down for four hours with a notepad in a university library to figure it out, and you're not even giving me some credit?

I take it you are not white?

He used "aint", of course he isnt. Personally I liked it better when he role played a philosophy major.

No, it really doesn't. But that isn't even a major point, since it is just the excuse to create conflict.

I do hate to get too much movie nerd over a film, but "Avatar" looks great but says nothing. There is no dramatic tension, no surprises in the movie, nothing unexpected. It's completely by the numbers. Yes, it looks beautiful and the technology is great, but the narrative is completely dull. The characters are dull (was there any doubt at all that Sulley would flip sides? Any real kind of soul searching? No.) All the colour is on the screen. It's got the story depth of "Transformers".

It's like "Sin City" - something that looks great the first time you see it, then on every re-watching you realise exactly how dumb some of it is. Go and watch "Avatar" again. See it when the spectacle (and I love spectacle) has worn off and you are actually trying to be interested in the characters or the plot. If it was shorter, I might have been more swept away, but it runs long and I just wanted it to get to Colonel vs King Blue Elf at the end so we could wrap it up.

Complete side note: have evangelical Christians started picketing this film yet? I could see some mileage being made in declaring "Avatar" as pagan and anti-Christian.

Yeah, just saw it again.

I realized after my first viewing that there was little point in working hard to pick apart the movie's pacing and character shortcomings, because there's a limit to which this serves a point. avatar is self-explanatory as an experience. it is the quintessence of blockbuster entertainment. it's just neat. there is no need to pick apart flaws because it is so far beyond the threshold of succeeding as a wicked fun thing to go see.

addendum, though: that doesn't mean that you're being stupid for not liking it. We all have our own quirks involving what 'pulls us out of a movie,' and Avatar is a minefield of things that really, really fucking annoy some viewer typologies. Sticklers for real physics will scoff on contact with floating rocks with waterfalls, etc.

I drove 3hrs round trip to catch this in 3D.  Like others, I had trouble focusing in some scenes but overall I thought it was visually stunning.  Did they explain why Earth needed unobtanium in the movie?  They just said omg Earth's dying.  If humanity has the tech to fly to another planet couldn't they make drilling machines to bore under the sacred lands and mine from below?  Keeps the natives from shooting you as well.  But it's not a movie to nitpick too much, it's a popcorn flick of extraordinary magnitude.  Plus it had that hispanic chick in her t-shirt in 3D.  Fucking win.

Unfortunately, my enjoyment was constantly disrupted by the MUTHERFUCKER behind me who couldn't stop sniffling.  I mean every fucking breath was a sniffle.  There were three year olds in there who didn't say a peep but this guy couldn't stop snuffling.  I gave him the stinkeye twice and he seemed to ease  off, but Jesus, if you're that sick stay in bed.  Or blow your goddamn nose.  Why do all the fucks sit behind me?  It just kept jerking me out of the movie, I wish the sound had been in THX and blown my fucking ears out instead.

I'd wanted to see this movie anyways, but when I found out tonight that my 66 year old mom's been to see it (she took my niece and nephew to the show) - now I've got to go.  She even said she enjoyed it a lot.  That's kind of freaky though.

Comparing Avatar to Sin City?  Really?  The fuck.

For myself, Avatar was atrocious on first watch, and Sin City was still fantastic after multiple viewing.  The primary reason being, I think, that Avatar doesn't seem to know it's cliched and hamfisted, wheras Sin City certainly did and operates in constant joy of that fact.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-SVpZrnF34&feature=player_embedded

You thought Avatar was atrocious.  Really.  OK I can see differences of opinion on the story or script or acting, etc. but if you thought the visuals were atrocious I think you're just being trendy by hating on the new cool.

I didn't think the visuals were atrocious, of course not, but I don't see how they can carry a movie with that much suckitude in every other area.  If the movie focused primarily on it's visuals as it's raison détre, then it could be interesting, but as is they're like the candy shell of an m and m...except there's crap inside instead of chocolate.

Sin City is worse than Avater in almost every way. :)

Sin City sucked. I was on board until the end, then Bruce Willis had to kill himself to escape the infinite power of... a US senator? Dude just leave the country.

You missed the subtext that it's better to off yourself than to be forced to live in some other, lesser, country, WUA!

Anyway, second weekend Friday take is estimated at about $23 million, which is practically the same as their first weekend Friday take. The dropoff is going to be tiny-to-nonexistant and Cameron can pretty much tell everyone in Hollywood to bow down and lick his balls.

Again?

Hell, even with all the negative stuff im still going to go see it in the imax next week just for the sheer eye candy aspect. Original plot or not I'm sure a lot of people feel the same.  

Yup. 2.9 percent second weekend drop. Helps that it was a holiday weekend but it beat a much-hyped opening of Sherlock Holmes. 600M worldwide after 9 days.  Be surprising if it doesn't eclipse 1B.

My questions now are...

1) Can Cameron claim the top two spots on the all-time domestic box office chart by beating Dark Knight's $533 million?
2) Can he claim the top two on the all-time worldwide chart by beating Return of the King's $1.1 billion?
3) Can Avatar threaten Titanic's $600 million domestic or $1.8 billion worldwide records?

And my gut feelings are...

1) Quite possibly
2) Almost certainly
3) Nah, it might get close domestically, but Titanic's worldwide gross is unassailable.

Caught a 3-D showing (IMAX 11p sold out) last night, thoroughly entertaining flick, plot cheesy and characters one-dimensional but as others have pointed out, not a movie with merit based on plot and story, but you got to see it.

Best 3D movie ever (at least of the few I've seen, previous one I took in was Up).

Liked this review by Richard Bartle (http://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2009/QBlog241209A.html) that summed up my thoughts on my move very nicely…

The visuals were great. The story was like shaving my brain with a saftey razor.

My friend made the point that the VTOL craft look a lot like the ones in the Terminator films. The mechs were a bit underdone though (well detailed, just under-realised).

What? You don't think a heavy combat vehicle in close terrain should have a glass bubble for a canopy?  I can't think why not.

How do you know it's glass? Could have been transparent aluminum.

I saw this on Saturday in 3D.  Imax was sold out so I saw it on a regular screen in 3D.

I sat in the third row from the front, terrible angle.  There were edges of the screen that I could see outside the edges of my 3D glasses.

That being said, this movie was fantastic.  I don't care about the plot or the characters, though I liked them both.  The movie was stunning and I was dragged into the world because of the effects. 

All you people hating on the movie are fucking tarts and don't know how to have fun.

Yes the plot was simple.  So what.  Yes you saw the ending coming a mile away, so what.  Yes the characters were simple, but they were well done enough that I could care about them.

I loved this movie and I will be seeing it again in IMAX after the holidays.  Best popcorn/action flick of this decade, or at least top 5. 

Oh, lets not start that thread again.

I thought the movie was fantastic as well. Very very well crafted adventure picture. Well worth the 5 hour round trip to see it in imax 3d. (2d only on Cape Cod.)

As somebody who wears glasses, how would the movie be if I tried to go see it in 3D?  Would I be able to fit the 3D glasses over my glasses without much trouble?  Anybody have any experience (don't have the time to go back and read the thread right now to see if this has already been answered)?

I saw it with my dad who wears glasses in a Real-D or whatever the AMC theater was.  The glasses fit over his just fine and he didn't complain about headaches or any adverse affects.  However I've read that if you can wear contacts, wear those instead.  I would imagine though it really depends on the theater.

I had glasses on with the 3D glasses over top — worked just fine, though I did experience a slight nech-ache/headache due more to being near the front in a packed theater…

In my theater the 3d glasses were big. They looked like large versions of those sunglasses Jackie Kennedy used to wear and they fit over my glasses just fine.

Not even that part of the design - just the fact the mechs carried a single bigger gun (and a knife  :awesome_for_real:). They really should have been weapon platforms, glass canopy or not.


"Avatar" is the blockbuster film that is generally hated - all style, no substance - but here the style is so high that for a lot of people it seems to overcome the lack of substance. Personally I don't get it (the only time the characters have any dimension to them is when you wear the special glasses). James Cameron probably isn't weeping any tears over that, however.

I'm in the "visuals are game-changing, plot was already bad about ten re-tellings ago" camp. But The Jazz Singer is also not a very good film and yet a revolutionary one at the same time, for much the same reason.

I did have a side-geek objection to Pandora itself that was quite aside from my irritation with the Dances-With-Wolves retread plot. The visualization of it was spectacular, but the conceptualization didn't really add up--and it might have helped the movie a bit in the plot department if it had. Consider two questions: why does a planet where all life is symbiotically linked appear to have organisms whose relationship is apparently the same as Earth's ecosystems, with competition for resources, predator-prey relationships and so on? And why are there multiple bands or groups of Na'vi who do not automatically react to changing circumstances with one will but require a prophet-like figure to unite them? (Who previously appeared, we're told, in a "time of troubles" that vaguely seems to hint of warfare or conflict between the Na'vi?)

It's not even clear why a planet which reacts as a single lifeform, which is a literal Gaia, would have diverse lifeforms at all.

Unless: the neural linkages between lifeforms, coordinated through the trees, are a late evolutionary development in the history of the planet, a competing form of intelligence which appeared after the Na'vi achieved sentience and became toolusers. E.g., that in the past, the planet was pretty much the same in its development as Earth. And maybe the world-mind wasn't entirely benign in its initial relationship to other lifeforms, but instead actively colonized their bodies with parasites/symbiotes that linked them into the tree network whether they wanted to be or not.

Why this might have helped the film is this: 1) it's a way to make the Na'vi less one-dimensionally goody-goody and noble and 2) it's a way to make the choice that Jake Sully makes a bit more complex and odd, e.g., he's allowing a semi-parasitical and very alien lifeform to infiltrate his consciousness, with some suggestion that the world-mind may actually suborn or subvert the will of other lifeforms on the planet when it wants to. As it is, why *not* be a Na'vi? Physically more robust, has working legs, he's got a lover who is politically well-connected, the culture suits his personality pretty well, etc.

I made two assumptions that explained away what otherwise would have been some pretty significant logical inconsistencies:

1)   Pandora was likely bio-engineered by some dead alien civilization long ago.  The ecosystem of the planet was pretty neat and all but I find it highly unlikely it could have evolved that way on its own.  But having an ancient bio-computer as the starting point of the evolution of the moon makes a bit more sense.

2)   It seemed very obvious to me that the human presence on the planet wasn’t military but was just some mining company with some mercs hired on the cheap.  I’m pretty sure they even said as much in the movie.  Did those mechs even have integrated weapons?  They were probably just adapted from some kind of civilian utility mechs because either the company didn’t want to pay for or didn’t have access to real military grade stuff, having blown their budget on all those helicopter things.
     If it were a real military operation bent on a territorial grab then the natives would have been wiped out in short order.  But the company hired a bunch of for-hire clowns for security and/or 'relocating' the natives so they could get at their magic rocks, lead by Bozo the Head Clown who likely was mustered out of the military for being incompetent.  I find that reasonably believable given the likely expense of moving all the people and equipment to the planet and the typical cost-cutting corporations like to engage in.

That said, the plot was still pretty simplistic but it didn't really need to be overly complex to be an enjoyable movie.  I thought seeing the movie was money well spent, which is more than I can say about the vast majority of movies these days.

It's a mass market movie.  I don't know the percentage of population with enough basic biology knowledge to understand Khaldun's point but it must be pretty low.

Also, all the native animal life on Pandora has six limbs and four eyes, except the Night Elves.  It seems almost certain there was some engineering going on in the past there.

Yep, they were all bio engineered in Maya  :grin:

The everyone as 6 legs, 4 eyes and chest noses except the blue guys bothered me. Seems like the kind of decision you take to ensure people relate to the heroes.

Or maybe they didn't have all those legs because it was a fucking movie.

One of the creatures has two limbs that are fusing together (they also look like monkeys).

James Cameron's thinking according to his interview in movies online below:

http://www.moviesonline.ca/movienews_17127.html

"It's a love story, too. So the physiological differences, the more alien we made them in the early design phase we just kept asking ourselves, basically the crude version is, 'Would you want to do her?' And our all male crew of artists were basically like, 'No, take the gills out.' Do you know what I mean? It was pretty simple but then taken to a very sophisticated degree. "

yes, he said sophisticated  :awesome_for_real:

My other favorite interview of his is http://www.vanityfair.com/online/oscars/2009/12/james-cameron-on-avatar.html

Especially where he's talking about historical comparisons and states "You couldn’t get them to come to a movie theater and watch a film about the conquest of new Spain and how the Aztecs were slaughtered by the Spaniards for their gold. But you can get them to come to a movie theater and see how the Pandoran Na’vi are being slaughtered for [the fictional element] unobtanium. It’s the same frickin’ story, you know? "

He's not about the plot, he's about the $$$.

For how much "Avatar" cost, he has to be about the $s. But outside of Sam Worthington I'm not sure too many actors would be putting this film in their highlight reel.

 :uhrr:

Unfortunately I think he's right. You could make that movie but it wouldn't make $1 billion dollars or whatever Avatar's going to make. It would probably break even but I think most movie-goers these days are not into this kind of thing. Remember Gandhi? I bet if that was released today it'd lose money for the studio in a hardcore way. Our society is basically afflicted with society-wide ADD.

No, he fucking isn't.  Hollywood managed to sell a completely retarded version of the Meiji Restoration and the failed plot to kill Hitler, FFS.  Both Tom Cruise movies, incidentally. :awesome_for_real:

And how successfull were these movies? I don't remember either movie making a big splash at all really.

Considering I only emerge out of the desolate wastelands of the north to do exams, and have heard people talking about both movies, I'd say "well".

Ok, from the stats I could find on Box Office mojo:

Valkyrie made roughly $200 million worldwide in its theatrical release
The Last Samurai made roughly $450 million worldwide in its theatrical release

Avatar has made roughly $640 million worldwide so far in 2 weeks of release. I'm sure you can do the math here and see where this is going.

70% for the Last Samurai?  Probably for a budget that was less or similar?

Really, at this point, I have to wonder why the fuck you hate history?  Possibly only native American history?  Because it's all good if you throw enough Hollywood fuckstupid and inaccuracy on.  Also, I need to know how much beer you have drunk, because I need to know how smart I am (relatively) when I'm seriously impaired.

I looked up the stats on Mojo with the intention of making the same snark post as Riggs, but in actuality both movies did pretty well. Valkyrie and Samurai beat their budgets by $125M and $310M respectively. That's not Avatar money, the sort of money that shakes up the all-time rankings, but it's still very successful by any standard.

And of course, you could make a movie like Valkyrie several times over for the price of making Avatar, and still have a hundred million bucks laying around to light your cigars with.

Haven't seen Valkyrie, but Last Samurai was a Tom Cruise movie with an uber-Hollywoodified ending. Make it historically accurate and take Cruise off the marquee, then how much would it have made?

Avatar was as close to the Spanish invasion of the Aztecs as the Last Samurai was to accurate history anyways.

Oh, and I loved Avatar. I'm one to regularly pick movies apart, and my only real complaints here were the lack of dimensions to the bad guys, and a somewhat lackluster protagonist. I can't remember the last time I watched a three hour movie and didn't come out feeling that it needed to be edited down. I stopped actually "noticing" the 3d after about 15 minutes, and it just added a whole feeling of depth to the whole thing. Probably the most visually stunning movie I've seen since Crouching Tiger.

We'll see what legs Avatar has but so far it's looking pretty damn good. My point was that in two weeks it has beat both of their combined box office gross. I think his point is pretty damned accurate. People don't go to see historical movies in the same numbers that they go to other types of films. They just don't and trying to make believe otherwise is just silly. They will go to see a spectacle movie that has a slightly disguised version of some historical events in it.

Avatar was said to cost roughly $400 million including promotions and is now up to $725 million on box office. I think that the money is speaking for itself to be frank. If this had been a historical epic it would have cost less but also made probably half of what it has made so far.

And what makes you think I hate history besides the fact that I am not buying your idea that historical movies will be anywhere within spitting distance of a blockbuster? Keep in mind, we're talking about money here and not artistic merit. The Last Samurai is listed as #93 in the worldwide highest grossing movies. 2012 is listed as number 31. Do you get the point yet?

Edit: Ironically there is one "historical" movie that breaks this trend and that is Titanic. I prefer to think of that as just an anamoly though.

Saving Private Ryan?

This argument is fuck stupid.

Cameron made both your points. You can't make a 1:1 recreation of history and expect it to do well, but you can fluff the shit out of the same damn story and people will flock. Which, funny enough, is a point both of you have made.

CONGRATS! :awesome_for_real:

Yeah this is a stupid argument Nix so I'm dropping out of it.

My local theater is offering this in RealD 3D and IMAX 3D. Which one is better? I noticed that the RealD 3D costs $1 more for admission, so I'm wondering what the difference is.

I'm frankly surprised Valkyrie did that well. I seem to recall it being delayed and re-edited, along with a new ad campaign. Whatever they did must've worked.

Anyway, Avatar is sitting at #31 on the all-time worldwide box office chart and will probably crack the teens this weekend. In the next couple days alone it'll pull ahead of the complete worldwide theatrical gross of Star Wars, original and special edition releases combined. The complete run of The Da Vinci Code is probably already beaten, we're just waiting for them to count the money.

So yeah, this ain't a race. This is just a matter of watching to see how many victory laps it'll squeeze in. God I hope the noise about him wanting to do Terminator 5 is true. With the power he must now wield, if he wants it, he'll get it.

The whole Aztec v. Na'vi thing--that's sort of what science fiction is for. That's what made the original trek so good even tho today black on the left/black on the right is cheezy funny.

I hope he does Terminator 5. Maybe he can unfuck the franchise that the last two movies have done, introducing the world to a leather-clad Kristinna Loken aside.

I hope he just writes off all of the other movies as never having happened, and just pick up where 2 left off.

Much as I liked T2, I think it was going off the rails there. Another attempt at killing John Connor by another terminator. I imagine that in the future, there's this huge line for the time machine, with humans and terminators glaring at each other waiting their turn to go back in time.

Showing the future war is like showing the monster in a monster movie. There's no way it's going to satisfy as much as our imagination.

I say let the franchise go. They'll do a remake in a decade or two...

I came to accept the fact that you have to throw the logic of the Time Machine right out the fucking window to enjoy the Terminator movies.  I mean, why not send back an entire fucking army of robots.  In any event, ignoring that, the first 2 movies where great.  Just make up some bullshit reason in your head why the time machine only allows only 1 person to be sent back once every 15 years and yada yada yada.  The premise is fine beyond that as long as they are making good action movies.  They stopped doing that after 2 (though I actually didn't mind 3 as a movie.  Problem was that it was a rehash of T2 with nothing original to offer, and started fucking up the lore to boot).

They actually explained it in the first movie. The size of the sphere shows that about one man sized person can fit in the machine's effect, Skynet sent a Terminator back to kill Sarah Connor, and then the resistance gained access to the time machine, sent their own man back, and then smashed it so no one else could go back and stop him. There's some unanswered questions there, but you can't expect a grunt like Kyle Reese to know or even understand the answers.

One could theroize that changing the past created an opportunity for the second movies time traveling, but then you open the door for everyone going back and having a big time travel party. Which Sarah Connor Chronicles kinda sorta started doing.

The novelization of T2 explained the "how did the 2nd one go back" as well.  If I remember rightly; there was a prototype Terminator and a 2nd Time Machine at a location on the other side of the Skynet complex.  When Skynet sent the T800 back and nothing changed, it initiated the protocols to send the 2nd one back right as it was being shut down.  I don't remember if or how they explained the liquid-metal T1000 being able to travel without flesh surrounding it.

You know what would rock, James Cameron doing a movie that picks up where "Sarah Connor Chronicles" leaves off, with Summer Glau and all thems.

I want to see his version of The Thing. Man, that would rock.

Fair enough if you liked the program and are just making "I'd like it to rain donuts" wishes, but I don't think a movie likely to mystify the 98% of everyone who didn't watch that show is the sort of wide appeal Cameron shoots for.


1) That's... random.
2) Straight-up horror isn't really his particular thing, is it?
3) No one will do it better than Carpenter, leave it alone.

I really think that the impact of movies like The Thing and Exorcist cant be recreated now. What would it take to be shocked or amazed for a modern audience. Happy 2010 everyone, WUA got a new color!?!?

Fuck that, just check out the recent blu-ray remaster. Got a cinematic release in the UK late last year. Movie has never looked so fucking good, I swear to god I almost wept. Does not need a remake, not even with Cameron at the helm. I'd rather he got on with Battle Angel Alita.

With all the Pandora being interconnected, and the movie being set on a moon of Alpha Centauri, i'm hoping we get a game called Sid Meier's Pandora, or it's the plot of the movie sequel.

Pandora is clearly the 5th Manifold.

I still haven't seen the blu-ray version of The Thing, but I'd still like to see a Cameron version of it. He was able to expand upon the claustrophobic atmosphere of Alien. Why not The Thing? I read the novelization of the Carpenter version and I remember at least one scene that was left out because it was too much for the production. Part of the beauty of the Carpenter version was its willingness to take a slow burn but a balls-out Cameron version would be badass. His could be a separate story the way Carpenter's was totally different from the original.

I guess I just miss the R-rated sci-fi/horror movies from when I was a teen. I even want to see him do the Dark Horse comics version of Aliens vs. Predator.

I realize all of this is random... just had to get it out!

Just saw the movie and it didn't disappoint. Sure you can see the ending coming in the first 15min but that doesn't even matter because just like a rollercoaster where you know where you're gonna end up, it's a fun ride.

Read in EW that the glasses surcharge is being counted in the box office so it is benefiting from about 150M in extra revenue at this point compared to other movies from that source.

It's not really a surcharge for the glasses (bring back the pair you got from the previous showing and you're still going to get charged the extra amount).  It's more of a "it costs us a fuckton of money to get all these new 3D projectors" charge.

Not really.  Read the Cameron comment again, his entire point is that historical settings don't work even though the plot does.  Also, you need to want to fuck the chick.  Do I have to dredge up every horrible CGI movie here?  Maybe make a fuckability scale and plot Tom Hanks and blue chick on it?

I'd love to see that, actually.

And again, he is correct. If you dress up a historical story in some other way it is going to make more money. It's basically film-making 101. Steal a historical story, dress it up and make it modern/fantasy/scifi and it will outsell the same story done as a historical movie.

I agree, Schindler's List without Jews, Nazis, or Oskar Schindler would be a much better movie. :why_so_serious:

I still want to see a chart.

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1143749/Nasty.png)

I figured I'd include the Little Nicky guy and Smurfette.  This is estimated "I'd hit that" per capita.

I do not understand the chart.

Me either, I found the na'vi girl quite fuckable...well if you like night elves I guess.

Also it's probably been said but I could watch a whole movie of that marine security chief fucking shit up in a mech. Why give a mech a bowie knife? because its fucking badass, that's why. 

Random skin bumps.  Use protection.

Are you intentionally misunderstanding things? Noone has said better. Why do I let you keep dragging me into this silly argument when you keep trying to change what the discussion even is?

Actually it's a perfect example. Surely Spielberg, of all people, knew that the same plot would make a lot more money in big budget, other-worldly metaphor... but for once in his life he wanted to actually win an Oscar. So he pandered to the critics and the establishment and made a genuine Holocaust film. Cameron has his Oscar, and would rather just make (and spend) money.

Anywhoo..

Saw this in IMAX 3-d finally, today.  (Damn places was packed, too.)   I can't envision watching it any other way than 3D and not thinking it was bad.   Predictable & disappointing but sooo visually stunning I see what everyone's been creaming their pants about.  Fantastic use of 3d. Loved the way the computer holos and subtitles just floated.   The ash and seed pods were fantasticly well-used.

 The biggest headache, to me, was Cameron's use of traditional 2d tricks in some of the shots.   I wanted to look at something else in the scene, just to see what it looked like, but he had it out of focus because he wanted to draw your attention elsewhere.  The first example that comes to mind is in one of the first lab scenes on planet.  Something was in the foreground, blurred and I wanted to look at it.  My mind and eyes rebelled a bit when I couldn't focus on it and gave me a bit of a woozy moment.

Yes, shaky-cam needs to be banned in 3d movies until they figure out how to keep the whole image in focus.

Use any word you like: Schindler's List would be a horrible movie and in all probability would not sell well if you dressed it up as anything other than what it is, because the point of the movie is the context, and the entire dramatic impact of the movie is more or less derived from "Holy fuck, this is real."

I think the Holocaust would be a lot cooler if Shindler were like Aragorn and he cut Hitler's head off with a sword.

In your opinion. Better or worse is immaterial to Cameron's quote. He is speaking purely about money and getting asses in seats. You could easily make a movie with aliens as the jews and some brave human doing what he can to save as many of them from some horrible fate at the hands of the other humans and you'd make lots of money assuming the movie was decently made. I'm going to try again to leave this silly argument because it's becoming even more clear you're not even trying to discuss this in good faith.

District 9?

So I went to go see this in IMAX 3d last night at 11pm.  Sold out :(

I was going to wait and Netflix it (if a movie is going to take up 3 hours of my life I usually prefer to have a pause button handy), but after all the froth about the 3D I guess I'll try to see it in a theater.  Maybe about a month from now when it's possible to get seats without waiting in line.

I haven't seen District 9 yet but I figured it had some allegories. Considering where it is set I figured it was more about apartheid but hey, it works.

Edit: And Avatar has reportedly crossed the $1 billion mark. I have to wonder, if this surpasses Titanic as #1 will studio executives refuse James Cameron anything?

Jesus Christ, it's going up way the hell faster than I expected even once I saw the lack of a second-weekend dropoff. It may have a shot at Titanic after all, and is only a snort away from all-time #2 as it is.

Me too. I sort of assumed standard weekly dropoffs and so far it's only dropping about 10% per week. That's just crazy...

It'll be just a memorable a cultural touchstone, too, I'm sure.  :awesome_for_real:

You've got a 46% chance of getting laid by Tom Hanks.

Actually you've just killed any interest in Cameron remaking the remake of "The Thing". "Alien" was all about being trapped in a situation with something that was very dangerous. "Aliens" was about being trapped in a situation with lots of things that were very dangerous, but you've got lots of guns and trained team behind you. "Alien" was a horror film, "Aliens" was an action film. "The Thing" shouldn't be an action film, where the trained Navy SEALS kill hundreds of Things with M60s.

... of course, at this point, if Cameron said, "I'd like to remake "Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS" but really want the women to suffer this time", he'd have billions of dollars thrown at him, so my opinion is pretty irrelevant.

 :oops: :facepalm:

Just an FYI, they are actually working on a prequel to The Thing right now.  Ron Moore has apparently just finished up the script a few months ago.  The movie is suppose to be all about what happened to the Norwegians seen at the very beginning of the film.  Still in pre-production, but might actually be good if it gets green lighted.

Made less than Schindler's List.  But don't mind me, I'm not arguing in good faith.

Nobody said good movies can't make money.  Nobody said well done, accurate historical dramas can't make money.  It's just that historically (:oh_i_see:) those movies on the average make much less than your basic schlocky blockbuster.

You're splitting hairs, but I see your point. All I'm saying is, I'd like to see someone who can make a badass movie working on an updated version of The Thing.  It wouldn't need to be an action movie at all, and really, why would it?

Ron Moore working on it sounds cool, prequel or not.

And "historical" (note: I never broached the subject of historical accuracy) doesn't necessarily preclude "blockbuster", unless you're James Cameron.  Which is the argument.

Along the line of moneyhats, if you go here (http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm) you will note that Avatar doesn't even appear in the top 100 movies adjusted for inflation yet.  This would put it under:

The Bridge on the River Kwai (WWII Burma)
Lawrence of Arabia (WWI Middle East)
The Passion of the Christ (The history of passion plays is :awesome_for_real:)
Cleopatra (1963)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Forrest Gump (like an American history textbook with an extra retard)
Titanic
The Ten Commandments

So yeah, a mixed bag of historical fiction, dramatizations, or whateverthefuck is greater than the latest CGI wankfest in terms of tickets sold.

That is just domestic though.  Those days the foreign market wasn't much. Avatar is getting 2/3rds of its gross from overseas at this point.

I actually tried finding a global one adjusted for inflation, no dice.  I can't blame them, that would be a lot of math to make suspect numbers.

Yeah, yeah, and adjusted for inflation, Gone With the Wind is still SHUT UP GRANDMA.

They already have that list but you need to have a premier membership to see it.

That someone, somewhere, has compiled the number of tickets that every major and many minor movies have sold in every specific country is...  :ye_gods:

(http://www.filedump.net/dumped/l1262653511.jpg)

Awesome. Now, if only it turned out that the night elves take only 12 years to grow to maturity and pick a mate...

Technically it's more like ferngully and no one cares that the plot has been done before. I knew that going in and it still doesn't make it a bad movie. If we want to tlk about derivative we could i dunno, talk about every super hero movie...ever.

As dorky as this sounds, the movie is a lot like wow.  There's nothing new, nothing you haven't seen before but it's just been polished to a very enjoyable experience.

If it tells the same story as Pocahontas/Fern Gully but takes twice as long to do it, that's not polish.  That's coat after coat of varnish.  It's easy to confuse the two, though.

Have you seen it yet? It's actually a good movie and it didnt feel like a lot could have been cut. If anything I think it should have been two movies instead of one.

Cameron's said there's at least half an hour of footage cut from the theatrical release. Most of which is 'frame-fucked' (to use his vernacular), ie: many scenes trimmed by 10 frames or so that all add up, but there's a bunch of scenes that were shot/rendered but edited out due to time/pacing constraints. Judging by the DVD releases of pretty much every Cameron movie to date, we can expect to see them added in for the home release. We can also expect to see more blue boobs, too, bizarrely enough. Ney'tiri nip-slips were edited out for the theatrical cut, according to Cameron.

In other news, Avatar is the fastest movie to make $1b ever, is currently the 4th highest grossing movie of all time and isn't showing much sign of slowing down. We're looking at a very possible Titanic beater here.

Nothing else could beat Titanic except for another totally mediocre badly acted piece of trash with amazing CGI.

Well, this is officially #2 on the all-time worldwide list. It needs an additional...

$711.1M total to unseat Titanic as #1 worldwide
$158.9M domestic to unseat Dark Knight for the #2 domestic spot
$226.3M domestic to unseat Titanic as #1 domestic

It probably won't make much impact on the inflation-adjusted list, but nobody besides your grandmother or butthurt fanboys of something that just got smoked on the unadjusted list ever give a shit about that. Everything would probably make more money if it were released seventy years ago when there was no TV or internet and you could leave a movie in the theater for years.

Really enjoyed this I thought the lead guy was great really understated, no Brad Pitt bullshit. The whole virtual reality aspect to it was well done and thought it was done in a way that kids could enjoy and maybe get something out of it. The way they wrapped up a general indigenous peoples beliefs into the Na'vi was brilliant and the interfacing with the animals damn yeh that was well cool. If you didn't enjoy it you're probably just an aul cynic and I sympathise with you.

I did see a few plotholes or weak lines like Trudi Chacon was a bit of a strange/empty story line and the focus thing that Merusk mentioned was kinda annoying, not to mention my glasses were a little faulty and I got a migraine just as I walked out, but it didn't stop my enjoyment.

Finally saw it. IMAX 3D, just to be sure. Was mostly bored with it. Definitely worth seeing of course, and it's not too geeky. But I saw this story in every movie from Dances with Wolves to The Last Samurai. It was those exact stories (and Pocahontas). Adding the stereotypical one dimensional roles didn't do anything but add more noise between me and the spectacle of the cinematography.

I also don't know that this will set some future precedent for movie making like Matrix (bullet time), Lord of the Rings (big ass battles of fantastical creatures) or Black Hawk Down (gritty shaky cam). Cameron's method is WAY expensive, and there really isn't just one gimmick being employed here for lesser talented (or lesser funded) studios to ape.

I'm curious if he'll make a sequel or just going back to being the other ILM.

I may be compromised by the hype though. I'm the kind of guy who can go see Armageddon and enjoy it.

My guess is in a few years you will see more stuff like this. I remember reading that most of the expense was from having to develop new technology. Now that the tech is there it'll only get cheaper as time goes on.

Pretty much, yes.   And then it will move on to TV soon after, which negates my original gripe about the long-term impact of this movie.

 are launching this year.  (Hey look, that nice new HDTV is obsolete already!)    "Coincidentally" Sony, IMAX and Discovery have [url=http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/01/05/discovery-imax-and-sony-team-up-for-3d-tv-station/]announced the launch of a 3d TV channel (http://www2.counton2.com/cbd/news/local/article/television_in_3-d_expected_to_lead_entertainment_revolution/101035/[3dTVs[/url)

Now, everyone having just upgraded to an HDTV, I can't see the masses leaping to trash it and upgrade.. particularly at the pricepoint of $3k I'd seen floating around.  However, in time I can see it catching on if people can get over the wearing glasses to watch TV bit.

They're going to need to make a LOT more 3D movies to get people to give a crap about 3D in their home. The ESPN thing is going to help there, but we're talking five years at least, and evolving beyond those silly powered glasses approach, before there's enough reason for the average person to bother. And that's only going to be the case if people stay in the living room to watch TV at all.

It's nice to see the attention 3D is getting in the lead up to the movie and then CES. But I could see the adoption of that make the adoption of bluray look like the adoption of VHS by comparison.

Back oin topic, did anyone see this one in non-3D and enjoy it?

Any 3D games in development? I can see it as a common future graphics option - probably won't make the game more fun, but could add to some titles.

N'tal and Gem (or whatever Sony finally decides on) could be really interesting in 3D.

Sony has already promised 3D support for the PS3 "sometime in 2010", and Engadget had that brief article about Wipeout HD in 3D back a few months ago. And Sony's re-org (PS3 as part of the consumer electronics unit) can really help them finally align between consoles and TVs. Though I'm not a bit fan of Sony TVs...

Other than that though, I can see developers taking a big wait and see attitude.

I have to say that having tried out nVidia's 3d glasses thing that turns normal 2d games into 3d, it looked pretty cool.  If actual 3d looks vastly superior, which I imagine it would, this would be something I would really like.

But the main thing both 3d movies and 3d games have to have in my opinion is a better glasses design, one that will comfortably fit over regular glasses, because I can't see shit without my glasses, I don't use contacts, and wearing the glasses during Avatar was a little annoying, and certainly not something I'd want to do for many hours straight while playing games at home.  Oh, and those nVidia glasses?  Won't even fit over my glasses at all.  Completely useless to me.

We should stop our recent fighting about taste in games and start getting along based on our taste in movies.

There doesn't seem to be anyone who thinks Avatar is actually a good movie yet it's one of the most successful ever. I get that people want mindless entertainment but really?

There are millions of people who will buy a ticket to whatever's been pitched on TV, go "Hey that was kinda fun!" afterward, then never see it again and never give a shit. It doesn't have to deeply captivate anyone, it just has to convince a shitloat of people to blow the price of a ticket and then not piss in their face.

Also, I think your taking the "doesn't consider it a good movie" too far.  Most the responses have been basically that its not Oscar material but still a fun entertaining movie.  What I've taken away from this thread is that almost everybody here liked it, even if they didn't think the plot was deep or anything.

That sounds about right.  Most people will like the movie and not resent having spent 15 bucks for a ticket to see it.  There's a reason you see the same stories being told over and over in books and movies - it's because people enjoy them.

Yea. Certain themes just resonate. This seems to be one of them. Most of us didn't mind when the representatives were Empire and Ewoks. I personally have just seen this story too many times between then and now to really enjoy it. Mostly it was the predictability of events based purely on the characters. Meanwhile, something like The Fifth Element or Armageddon, no problem switching the brain off there. Maybe they needed Bruce Willis in Avatar for me to like it  :oh_i_see:

There is something specifically American about this story though. We have some sort of national guilt trip about how we imperialised the country or something :-)


I'm getting the sense that this movie skyrocketed more on word of mouth than advertising, tbh. If I recall, its first weekend wasn't any sort of omgworldchanging moment. It seemed to be the second and third ones that pushed it over the edge. Combination of word of mouth and people having extra time (and family around) for the holidays maybe.

I'd like to see the breakdown between the 2D ticket sales and the 3D ones though. Just not enough to go look them up...

Yes and no.  There's a liberal/ moderate sense of guilt there, but it rubs other moderates/ conservs the wrong way.     I didn't mention it before, but when I was waiting in line afterward to get my parking validated there was a group of 4 typical Cincinnati Conservative Yuppies in front of me.   They were talking very loudly about how they disliked the "liberal overtones" of the movie.  They mentioned it's use of keywords like "Shock and Awe" and the line; "That's how it's always been.  When someone has something you want, you make them an enemy so you're justified in taking it from them."   Seems the movie generally entertained them, but the message was displeasing because, as usual, white businessmen and the military are the bad guys.

The reason you keep seeing the Hero's Journey repeated is because it works.  People understand it and can identify with it. You won't see many drastically different changes in movies until people themselves change, and good luck with that.

I have not seen this

THAT wasn't the part I minded. Most of the movies I've ever seen have this angle in them. It was more the story of corporate/Imperial encroachment onto the native/"superior" lands for no other reason than profit/conquest (one in the same really). I just didn't get any sense that the story is what they cared about when making this film. It was like they looked for a story they could repeat as a vehicle for spectacle. Or, like that Pocahontas story summary above :-)


Wait, wasn't it their man that popularized these ideals?  :awesome_for_real:

Sorry, couldn't resist. My fault if this ends up in Politics!

I don't even mind the "corporate/empire" encroaching on the "native/local". That's a fine story, and sadly pretty well echoed in human history. What I mind is "devils" vs. "saints" aligning perfectly with the first binary--that's dumb storytelling unless it's deliberately a kind of fairy tale (a la Star Wars). It gets even dumber when the white man/empire guy who is the sympathetic protagonist turns out to be a genius at being a native, and does stuff based on a few months of immersion that is smarter and better within the native terms than any of the natives are. Even fucking Tarzan had to grow up among the apes, and Lawrence of Arabia had to spend years hanging around the Middle East: it's just annoying as fuck when Kevin Costner Jake Sully shows up and he goes from clueless newb to prophetic leader in a few months.

Well, I took my daughter to see this today and she sat quietly through the entire movie which is a minor miracle. This next part is anecdotal but the lines were just as crazy as they were on premiere weekend and shows were selling out. I know alot of you want to hate on the movie but those kinds of lines indicate repeat viewing to me as well as strong word of mouth. Hardly the kind of movie that people walk out of and go "ehh...the effects were great but the plot sucked."

I think some of you people are just too damned jaded to enjoy anything anymore. I know we're on a jaded gamer site, etc etc but jesus, just let yourselves enjoy a movie sometime because apparently most of the rest of the world is enjoying this one including me. Anyway, sorry to interupt, put the berets back on and light up the cloves and talk about how shitty the movie is. The rest of us will go back to enjoying it.

I enjoy movies.

Good movies. Not ostensibly serious movies about people hunting for "unobtanium." Then again I've never been impressed with a movie based solely on explosions and effects.

What on earth ever led you to believe it was a "serious" movie in the first place? It's just your standard holiday season blockbuster designed to sell tickets and make money.

and how!

That's kind of my point.

It's possible for an "event movie" to have a good script. Raiders of the Lost Ark and Die Hard are "fun" movies but they're also good movies with good acting, a good script and good directing. Hell so are T2 and Aliens.

Edit: You guys enjoy your brainless drivel. Meanwhile I'll be enjoying a coming of age story about a transexual goat herder in Libya. Harumph!

Heh. My wife came out of the movie talking like Rush Limbaugh. Was hilarious. "I hate movies that stereotype the white people and the military... try to make you feel guilty blah blah blah"

When did this become a thread about Transformers 2?  :why_so_serious:

Somebody sure fucking likes it. It was about $700M away from the all-time #1 spot when I made that post Thursday. As of Sunday night it was only $500M away. It finally showed an actual drop in the fourth weekend, but even then it was under thirty percent. Half a billion dollars is still a long way to go even on this scale, but Titanic may fall.

Fun fact: On the all-time opening weekend list, it's #28. Not all that impressive. But it's had the biggest second, third, and fourth weekends of all time.

I guess I just didn't understand how high the stakes were for Earth.  They didn't make it clear enough.  The earth's dying.  OK how long do they have?  Is this a last, desperate mission, sure didn't seem that way.  It seemed to me like it was just a money grab by a company who could afford ex-military. 

Also interesting is the anti-tech message of the movie when it is the most technologically advanced movie ever made. 

 

And they said Avatar didn't have a deep message.  :grin:

Didn't seem anti tech to me.  The whole planet is a giant network with I/O's.

Where exactly was this message given?

They never say(to my knowledge) that the unobtanium is to help earth, afaik it's to make money.  The main guy says he's from a dying planet and that his people killed their enwa(or whatever) but I'm pretty sure that these people never use the word 'earth' either.  Things seem to be kept specifically vague in the movie.

It's not anti-tech, it's anti-capitalism / pro-environmentalism / pro-sex with athletic women who already have boyfriends.

Don't forget the skin lesions. :drill:

This is pretty much because the opening weekend was in the same timeframe as nature dumping a shit-ton of snow all over us. East coast got hit particularly hard in many places.

Well...it started:

Avatar is a racist white man's fantasy!!!11!!?!! (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34805869/ns/entertainment-movies/)

The movie is too perfect on both sides. Too easy to root for the Na'vi, too easy to rally against the EVUL CORPORAT1ON. Yeah I'd say fuck Earth too if there was this wonderful interconnected society of respect and harmony where everyone is on the same page if you plug your hair penis into them.

Not really that much difference. Fox claims the blizzard cost them maybe one or two million that weekend. People who think they're lowballing call it three or four. Another four million still wouldn't have put it in the top twenty.

I doubt you'd be able to find a breakdown anywhere.  Suffice it to say that 3D outdoes 2D sales by a huge margin, at least based on sales at my theater.  Also note that the next 3D movie to hit theaters is Alice in Wonderland which opens at the beginning of March.  For theaters like mine which only have a few digital projectors, Avatar will likely run in 3D on at least 1 screen for the next couple months, whereas the 2D prints will probably get pushed aside to make room for something else a lot quicker.

I'll watch Alice in 3D. It's the spectacle of it really. I've seen enough 2D films that I crave something else visually stimulating.

Aside from Avatar and Coraline (which might be debatable) pretty much every major 3D movie released in 2009 was either a kid's movie or a really shitty horror movie.  2010 really doesn't seem to be much different except that it lacks any sort of equivalent to Avatar.  Unless you've had a burning need to see the Step Up franchise make the jump to 3D there's not going to be much for adults to enjoy in 3D beyond some of the kids' stuff that appeals to all ages (Toy Story 3, Shrek).

In talking this through with some friends this morning, I realized there was only one thing that annoyed me. Everything else was spectacle for the sake of (sfx) or mediocrity not even worth discussing (story and acting). And I didn't so mind the accelerated the hero's journey.

What got to me was the premise. I can turn off the brain on most of it except the World Tree. Two parts here: nobody established why unobtanium was so important; and, nobody established why on the whole goddamned planet they needed the one 200km away.

If the message was "to save Earth" instead of profit and they said "the only deposit on the entire planet" instead of because it was closest, I woulda been ok with it.

If we're in fantasy land though, I'd have preferred the entire human settlement have the epiphany that maybe a world war over the World Tree wasn't worth the hassle and instead they should, ya know, move the fucking base to some other part of the whole freakin' planet where there's more than likely an easier deposit to get to.

They didn't establish it in too much detail beyond profit to keep it simple and not overthink the human's needs and make it clearer that the Na'vi are 100% right and the humans can go fuck themselves for their pursuits.

Should have called it McGuffinite.

Uh, should I be insulted you thought I needed that explained?  :grin:

I know why they did it. I also figure they did it because that's exactly how Pocahontas did it, which they used lock stock and barrel rather than change nearly anything about it at all.

I'd just have preferred it be a bit different. Heck, even though I think it could be A New Hope for a new generation, even that had more depth to it (not by a lot, but still...)

Edit: trigger-happy Post click

No, you shouldn't be insulted.

Avatar was the #2 Box Office Opening for December, and would have beaten the unbelievable 'I Am Legend'. Well, I guess it had the Will Smith pull to it. So, the snow definitely played a factor. 77mil is fantastic for that month.

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/weekends/month/?mo=12&p=.htm

But, yeah the continued track record on the following weekends is amazing, and has Titanic as of the fourth weekend pretty well beaten:

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/weekends/moreweekends.htm?page=4&p=.htm

(Of course, inflation, etc, yadda yadda.)

Hay guyz, I'm finding some logical inconsistencies and lazy plotting in a story centered around "unobtanium."

Imagine!

Yeh cause allegorical stories/movies need to use authentic sounding words and plausible storylines.

I'm not sure but I don't believe they said that the na'vi tree held the only source on the planet, just the biggest. Also that wasn't really the world tree, those white  spirit trees were the central hubs for their networks so I assume the giant tree that did get burned while uncommon, there could be a lot more around the planet.

oOn the subject of Unobtanium: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtanium

Sure, it would still be nicer if there was a better term used, but that article helped me be a lot more okay with the choice than I had prior to reading it.

I've been considering posting that entry for a few days, now. Unobtanium is scientifically sound (it even closely resembles the systematic element names). [Un]-[oct]-[en]-[ium] would be a perfect fit going by current IUPAC rules, but lacks that certain tongue-in-cheek element.

It's not a far stretch to imagine in the future of Avatar, there are more variables to the IUPAC rules and in fact Unobtanium is the true given name. Plus, it's still less daft than handwavium  :why_so_serious:

Yeah, I was going to say, have you guys seen the end of the Periodic Table?

Americium, Fuck Yeah!

It was all explained in the movie.  This unobtanium was exxxxtreeeemely valuable and used for energy and stuff and it was only found in far away places which made it very expensive to get.  They also explained why they blew up the big tree house because it was sitting on top of the largest deposit of this shit on the whole planet, or at least in the general area.  So it that spot had the biggest payout as far as logistics etc anywhere.  So they just blew up the tree.  The tree wasn't anything special other than it was their home.  That glowy tree (as mentioned above) was their central harddrive so-to-speak.

If you saw, they were out there with one spaceship and it took them a bunch of years to get there, so it wasn't just as easy as pick up the base and all the mining equipment and go somewhere else on the planet.  They don't have Star Wars/Trek, Culture, whatever technology where they can just get up and move no problem.  This was a corporation also that was driven by profit. 

There could of been a better place to go but they were already established in one spot.  It was cheaper, and easier, to kill a bunch of blue people to get at a big chunk that would keep their operation functional and making money for the foreseeable future.

I don't remember if it was in the movie or if I just read it someplace, but Unobtanium in the movie is supposed to be a naturally occurring superconductor, which is why it floats in a magnetic field.

I just chuckle every time I've heard or seen the name, since it's always been a joke in my industry when referring to anything structurally impossible.

"What are you holding that up with? Unobtanium and Sky Hooks?"

I never understood why name it Unobtanium, although I also already knew the origin of the word meaning something impossible. Coming up with a fictitious superconductor name alone could've lent the movie twice the credibility to me.

The fact that they were mining something impossible according to the name, combined with a way to project a human into a blue elf blank? I actually equated this blank as lacking the tree computer the Na'vi needed to TAIL interface with, but this also had me wondering how the hell the humans took control of one. If they have a transmitter that took control of them, why the hell not just use it to shut all the other natives off?

Also...
I actually went back in this thread to check, and did remember a discussion of Cameron favoring naked blue natives over historical re-enactments, but I don't think anyone brought this tidbit into the discussion. The DVD is going to have a sex scene trimmed from the final cut. Source: Avatar fans promised alien sex scene on DVD (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/6931166/Avatar-fans-promised-alien-sex-scene-on-DVD.html).

Kind of makes me wonder what the rated R version would've been... Like some ultra violent 5 hour masturbation over blue natives, with twice the Bey-esque 'splosions?

Are you talking about the avatars themselves? The movie very clearly explains what they are: essentially clones with human and na'vii DNA mixed. It's a little handwavey but it works. The whole reason Jake Sully is there is that an avatar is made for one specific human but his dead brother happened to be his twin so they were "close enough" for it to work.

If you're not talking about the avatars then I'm not sure what the hell you're talking about.

I'm talking about him needing to be hooked to the machine, and it broadcasting him into the avatar. The connection should've been able to be engineered into a weapon against the Na'vi. I did get the mix of human DNA, but weren't they also able to permanently make him inhabit that body?

I guess I was not able to get past the glaring graphics to think about it until now, but basically I just don't get how any of that Avatar stuff makes sense.

If you're wondering how he eats and breathes, and other science facts...

la la la

That doesn't seem like a particularly large issue to me, it makes sense overall.  The avatars are designed and grown for that specific purpose, so presumably they have special modifications and possibly a special reciever placed inside them in order to facilitate this remote hookup.  If we have two computers that are similar, but one has integrated wireless and the ability to log into it remotely, the presence of those abilities on that computer doesn't imply an ability to use that wireless signal to interfere with the one that does not have that hardware.  The avatars have extra hardware that the na'vi don't have.

Even ignoring that, and assuming that it could theoretically have been developed into a weapon, it certainly seemed like pretty much all the actual scientists were not in favor of attacking and/or harming the na'vi, so it seems unlikely they would be willing to engineer this technology into an actual weapon.

There's a lot of relatively nonsensical things in the movie, but this really doesn't seem like one of them.

The only thing that really tweaked me about the movie after watching it a few times, was the timeframe.  Specificly, what kind of topography are we dealing with when it takes THREE MONTHS for a bunch of industrial grade, forrest destroying dozers to cross a distance that their aircraft seem to be able to cover in about 2 or 3 hours......

Also the scientists were not part of the mining operation, they just had their labs in the mining base since it was probably safest for the humans on that planet to stick together.  the avatars themselves weren't built specifically for the mining companies usage though the company may have been funding the project, hence the pull they had.

Also, why didn't they just take those eagles to Mount Doom?

Because the eagles were up north helping the Lorien elves defeat Dol Guldur.

It worries me about the mindsets of people that they try and derive some sense from what was quite obviously an allegorical fairy tale. I know Santa Claus doesn't exist, but I think I'm over picking holes in the fact that it's impossible for a fat dude to make it around the world in one night and climb down a gazillion chimneys.

Wait, what?

Flocks of crows spy for Sauron.  Presumably they would also be willing to swarm an eagle.  Gandalf also seems to be aware of the Ringwraith's flying mounts earlier than everyone else too.

Because the books would have been about 100 pages long and the trilogy would be one 90 minute movie.

Though Sauron (with ring on finger) casting hobbits into the Cracks of Doom would have been a good ending too.

It's specifically stated by the eagles that they can't carry large burdens for long distances, which is why they only carry Gandalf to Meduseld where he gets Shadowfax.  Besides which you had flying Ring-wraiths, flocks of large crows (ever see the Birds?), and likely more of the bird-dragon things that the Ring-Wraiths traveled on.  And Sauron can control the weather.  And you'd be targeted by whatever Sauron can do from Barad-dur making the last leg of the journey across Mordor.

That's if the eagles would even do it.  They liked Gandalf and they never helped him out too much.  They didn't particularly like many other people.

It's pretty well dealt with in the books.

*stands up while slowly and dramatically clapping, a tear in one eye*

This seems appropriate. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yqVD0swvWU)

Also, must LOTR infect every thread in this forum? Is a Tolkien-based debate going to pop up in "The Hangover" thread?

Hangover totally rips off Tolkien!  A group travels to a strange land and have frightening encounters; tiger, cops, Mike Tyson.
One even has the BURDEN of carrying a baby, something small and, dare I say PRECIOUS?  I think you know where I'm going with THAT statement yessir.

Tolkien's estate should sue their uncreative asses off.

So what you're saying is Sauron had established Air Superiority over Mordor.  Too bad he failed to use combined tactics to the fullest on his own gates.

I now understand WUA in a nutshell.

Finally went to see this last night, I enjoyed it.

A Wednesday night 7:45 PM showing in Bumfuck, Alaska. Temperature: -25.

The theater was sold out.

So now this is over, can Cameron hurry up with the Battle Angel Alita movie he's been mumbling about?  :drillf:

I imagine he can do whatever he wants. After Titanic he took a break and did some undersea adventuring.

I think the time has finally come for a Space Ghost movie.

Oh holy god, thank you.  I saw the anime version of that a long long long time ago.  I had totally forgotten what its name was and could only remember bits of the plot and a few scenes from it.  But trying to remember what the name of it was has been bugging the shit out of me for years.

Having said that, no, now is the time for him to tackle a Macross movie.   :drill:

Turns out that was mostly research for creating a believable and working alien environment in Avatar. While I never understood his obsession with the Titanic and found the movie of the same barely tollerable, I will never again question the man's motives when it comes to fleshing out his ideas, literally from the bottom of the sea up.

That was my beef. It wasn't the largest deposit on the whole planet, just the biggest within 200 klicks (he literally said "within 200 klicks"). Yea, they were fairly established in one spot. They were there even before the one ship of new marines showed up. And that base didn't look very mobile. And yes, the movie made it very clear that the Americans thought the natives were basically irrelevant and powerless. But it would have made more sense to scan the whole planet first (or at least change that line of dialog to say it was biggest on the whole planet) and then determine that the World Tree had it all under it.

I thought the scientists were being funded by the company?

If they've actually acquired unobtanium, it's by nature no longer unobtanium.

Was poking around the Colonel's imdb page and he was Ike Clanton in Tombstone.  Dude is nails.

Curly Bill: [takes a bill with Wyatt's signature from a customer and throws it on the faro table] Wyatt Earp, huh? I heard of you.
Ike Clanton: Listen, Mr. Kansas Law Dog. Law don't go around here. Savvy?
Wyatt Earp: I'm retired.
Curly Bill: Good. That's real good.
Ike Clanton: Yeah, that's good, Mr. Law Dog, 'cause law don't go around here.

Can anyone tell me the level of gore/violence in this flick? Is there tons of decaying bodies or focused on medical scenes (like stitches) or Saving Private Ryan level of arm waving?

Why are you suddenly interested in the violence level of movies?

Because I need to screen things before I take my Girl friend to see it  :drillf:

The violence is as cartoony as the concept of blue people running around in the forest, but the emotion of genocide and mass destruction is left intact.

Stop dating girls that can't get into R movies and start dating women.

 :facepalm:

I know I wouldn't want to lug some giant eagle to mount doom. They're heavy and scratch at your eyes when you try to carry them.

Stars Wars levels.. lots of fighting things blowing up and people/ smurfs getting shot but you've got to ask, "What's blood?"

This. Mostly indirect and implied. Final mano a mano is a bit graphic.

The only "violence" I really reacted to was when the felled the world tree.  Because that was the only thing in the movie I cared about  :awesome_for_real:

It should be noted that that tree was called the 'home' tree, not the 'world tree', and that it was far from unique.  There were multiple shots where similarly large trees rising from the forest could be seen far in the distance - at least one of which included the home tree that the movie focused on, so it is certain they were other trees like it, and not the one and only tree of its kind.

Yea, someone else mentioned that in the thread too. I'm purposely ignoring it, tbh. It's World Tree for me because if the space marines didn't shoot it down, Archimonde woulda climbed up it.

 :heart:

I found a chart. (http://www.the-numbers.com/interactive/comp-Avatar.php)

Saw it in 3d because some friends were going and asked if I wanted to go.

Was not terrible, was also not "teh bestest movie evar". Like Titanic, I can say I saw it, and never see it again.

Couldn't resist (because it's the way I felt too).

(http://www.darniaq.com/Images/Sawthemovie.jpg)

I saw it on opening day (w/work colleagues) and yesterday with the spouse (who wanted to see the special effects). Audience demographics were very different between the showings. Opening day was about 95% guys who wanted to see an action/effects film, but yesterday the audience was mostly middle aged and older couples with a few families w/kids.

Showings around here are still routinely selling out, even in not-so-great theaters. Titanic, watch out?

It did $41 million domestic in its fifth weekend and is now only a little over $100 million from the top domestic spot, $240 million from the top worldwide spot. Titanic should fall within the next week or two.

Man, that would sure suck for Cameron if it does.

 :awesome_for_real:

All this means is that battle angel movie is going to be completely untainted by the wishes of anyone but cameron. is this good or bad? you decide but whatever it is, I don't don't it'll be pretty.

Oh yes. It will be a complete disaster that nobody will spend money to see. Just like all his other movies.

Didn't know about this so just looked it up. At least the premise doesn't sound like a complete carbon copy of something prior. Maybe if you replaced Jean-Claude Van Damme with James Cromwell in Cyborg, that'd be similar...

battle angel is actually a fairly old anime/manga that even predates things like ghost in the shell( i 'think'). it will suck if it's not rated R though, it's actually a real gore-fest with cyborgs getting ripped apart routinely.

Battle Angel kinda makes me go Huh? If Cameron wanted to do Generic Sci-Fi Movie X Concept, he could just file off the serial numbers and make his own shit, like Terminator/T2, Avatar, etc, etc, etc. Hell, he already did the augmented badass chick thing with Dark Angel.

Is there anything about BAA that he wants to take to the big screen? Do a generiport like the Anime? Just get some cred (or possibly antagonize) the hardcore anime nerds who even know what BAA is?

Actually because he did dark angel it makes me think he may be a genuine fan himself.  Also I would say that battle angel need not be a geek only movie, really nothing about the content says it would only appeal to anime geeks.

Cameron sits on scripts for years. "Battle Angel Alita" and "Avatar" are (as I understand it) are among his first scripts he wanted to do but was encouraged to do films like "Terminator" instead.

Finally saw this. It's very pretty but this was probably the most depressingly predictable and unsuprising plot I have seen in a long time. Still enjoyable though, and the 3D was fantastic.

No way Avatar beats Titanic without 3D.  I wonder what 14 year old boys think;  is this their Star Wars?  Or just a cool flick?  I am wondering how much of a cultural touchstone this will be.

More importantly, will we have a Avatar Christmas Special? :oh_i_see:

I don't think it could possibly be the Star Wars for the current generation of 14 year olds but maybe I'm just too old to see it.  Are people going back to see it repeatedly?  Pretty much everyone I know has seen and enjoyed it at this point but nobody is so enthusiastic that they've gone back a second time.

My feeling is that it's just the "must see" movie of the moment and that it'll be pretty much forgotten a year from now.

I find it hard to believe a film that manages to beat out Titanic gets forgotten in a year. The storyline might be trash but it's going to be at least getting referenced as a milestone in special effects on par with Jurassic Park. I'd also guess 14 year olds think it's awesome, it has amazing special effects, big guns and a plot they probably haven't seen a million times already. The advantage with young people is you can rip off Last of the Mohicans, Ferngully and the Last Samurai because they probably haven't seen them yet.

One thing about this "box office record" shit everyone needs to remember is that ticket prices are considerably higher now than they were when the movies in comparison were out. I paid 7 bucks to see Titanic when it was in the theatres, I paid almost 12 to see Avatar on the weekend in 3D. Even if I had seen it in non-3d it would have been 9.50. That adds up pretty fast.

Titanic also had the whole "teenage girls going back to see it again every weekend for 4 months" thing.

But regardless, I have a serious question:

Why is it that alien natives always have to be Jamaican?  :ye_gods:

Dreadlocks are alien. See the Predator.

wait, wtf? Nothing about the aliens in avatar is jamaican. I'm not sure if you're thinking of trolls in wow or that maybe the actors playing a couple have dark skin but...jamaican, seriously? Have you ever met a jamaican person? you realize the aliens have ponytails and not dreadlocks?  I've heard some dumb things connected to this movie but...jamaican, really?

Did you listen to the accent of the shaman lady?

Ahem.

US inflation since January 1997: 35.73%
Ticket price change (9.50 / 7.00): +35.71%

So ticket prices haven't really changed at ALL since '97. Ergo, given the charts are adjusted for inflation, it's a completely fair comparison.

It's also important to realize that people are going to SEE this movie hand over fist even besides increased ticket prices (not even taking into account the increase about THAT for 3D screening) and a crappy economy.

It is being helped compared to other films coming out though in that you can only get the 'full' experience in theaters and there's not really any point downloading it. I have no idea what that amounts to in terms of numbers but I'd guess it's helping somewhat. That said I still haven't gone to see it but I've really stopped watching movies over the last year or two.

People are still buying videogames at 50 bucks a pop too. The economy sucks, but we're not in breadlines. (Yet)

I think the numbers are just generally getting bigger. We have 5 movies in the top 10 that did over a billion dollars. And the next 5 are close to a billion. And remember, by gross, Phantom Menace did better than Jurrasic Park.  :grin:

Not for to much longer. (http://ces.cnet.com/8301-31045_1-10434346-269.html)

Also:


Ha!

Why not? Titanic was.   I think later this month when TNT is showing it is the first time it'll be on TV in years.  I attribute that to the buzz Avatar and Cameron are getting in relationship to the movie, not a previously scheduled plan on TNT's part.

Avatar is a fair bet for best picture/director and a shoe-in for visual effects. I mean really, what else came out this year, precious? There's some good pieces of acting out there with the german from basterds being also a safe bet for best supporting but out of all the movies this year that could win picture/director the pickings are slim.

Thing is I really don't think you can say Titanic was just forgotten. Hell I told someone a couple of weeks ago I still hadn't seen it and they looked at me like I had two heads, it's just one of those films it seems most people have seen at some point. By not forgotten I didn't mean it's going to become a cultural touchstone or cult film but it's going to be one of those films everyone seems to have seen and it's going to win awards for effects by the bucketload. Really there doesn't seem to be a lot more you can really be expected to try and get for your film.

Coincidentally, I made this exact point to some folks recently.

I think it depends on whether there's a sequel. A New Hope was a great movie (back when it wasn't even called A New Hope yet :-) ), but it was mostly because of Empire and Jedi that we look back so fondly about Star Wars. Without those two movies, it would have been a cool one-time flick like Fifth Element, or what the Matrix shouldb have been.

In other words, Star Wars only became something we can use in a question like "is this their Star Wars" because of the trilogy that spanned so many formative years of kids.

If it takes him 10 years to do another Avatar movie, or it never happens, then it'll be a cool one-time flick that is made by a guy who knows how to fill theaters.

So instead of asking is Avatar is their Star Wars, we'll be asking, is James Cameron their Steven Spielberg  :grin:

Cameron surpassed spielburg for me, at T2.  That movie beat out any movie for me as a kid(though jurassic park is close) Also like avatar or not it's 100x better than titanic.

By the way, I really don't want to hear shit about inflation from 1997 to 2010. If we're going to play that game, Gone With The Wind owns everything, and Titanic isn't even top five.

For me it was Aliens.

Same.

Jaws and Raiders would take Aliens and T2 any day of the week. 

I aged from 11 to 16 in the time between Raiders and Aliens 2 though. Both are solid movies, and those would be two movies I'd be flipping between if they were both on. But I was a different person at Raiders than I was for Aliens. THAT span of five years is a lot different than me going from 34 to 39  :grin:

Butts in seats.

Jaws was before my time and it has not aged well at all. Raiders is still awesome though

Avatar gets pulled from 2D theaters in China. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/19/china-pulls-2d-avatar-fro_n_428798.html)

Wonder what that will do to the numbers.

Saw this tonight, it was fun. Yes, the plot was pretty obvious but I was happy to see that the female characters were like ... I don't want to say just as deep as the male ones, because no one was DEEP, but that's the best way I can describe it. The ladies were all actual characters instead of eye candy (Cameron's doofiness about wanting to make lead blue chick hot enough for men to want to sex up aside ... and even then, I suspect what he MEANT was that they couldn't make them SO alien people would just go "iew what" at the love story part, so "would you tap that ass" was the metric for how alien the aliens could be).

The fact I wasn't all SKIP to the END, PLEASE even though this was a long ass movie is a pretty good indicator to me as to how entertaining the movie was. No, it's not some High Art or whatever, but not everything needs to be.

Not much. It's going to pass Titanic by tomorrow and I am thinking this is going past 2B worldwide before all is said and done.

Yeah, if you look at that article it says the movie has done all of $47 million in China so far, and it's staying in their 3D theaters where it does most of its business anyway.

Finally saw it, quite enjoyed it.

One of the things that struck me was how much of the stupid argument in this thread could have been avoided by paying attention to basic plot points.  :awesome_for_real:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35085070/ns/entertainment-movies/

There we go. Kinda wish it had a better story but he delivered on the "Ooohs" and "Ahhhhs" categories.

So, if they were in a place that fucked up signal transmissions, how did dude manage to remote desktop into his avatar there?

And how did they get the 'horse clan of the plains' onto the floating mountain?  Because space horses don't really look flight-capable.

And after they got the space horses on the mountain, why didn't they have a better military plan from the ex-marine than 'run straight at the guys with machine guns'?

Speaking of which, why were ground troops on the floating mountain that they were going to just bomb from the air?

 :grin:

I think the fight at the end was taking place on the actual ground UNDER a bunch of flying mountains.

Yeah, the battle on the ground and the place they were bombing were all on the ground.  They were just flying through floating mountains on the way.

Having said that, WTF was the point of the ground battle?  I thought the entire mission was to fly over the sacred tree and bomb it.  There was no reason to drop anybody on the ground that I saw.  Well, other than to have a battle scene in the movie.

WUA. Paging WUA to the Avatar thread. WUA.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!?!?!

You know what? Nope, not even as a joke.

Suffice it to say, yes there are lots of ways for a spacefaring civilization to make things terribly unfair for a spear-carrying one, even if the natives are super strong and magic radiation means the spacefarers have to aim their death rays by eyeball.

All the AA batteries on the ground.  :awesome_for_real:

Anyone here could have vomited a better story that made more sense for people who like to think about such things. But that's why we're not getting handed $400mil budgets either. Instead, we get the sci-fi/fantasy section at Barnes & Noble  :grin:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJarz7BYnHA&feature=related (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJarz7BYnHA&feature=related)

I am surprised no one has provided a link to this video review yet.

I'm seeing more cynical backlash now. The Abridged Script (http://www.the-editing-room.com/avatar.html) is also available.

That might make Titanic watchable.

I would pay good money to have a version of Titanic that just skipped the boring love story.  Just the movie about the ship and her history.

I don't think much about the movie had anything to do with the history of the ship except that it sank on it's maiden voyage.

Though I do agree that the movie would have been 100000x better if it was just the boat sinking parts.

Or it sunk because of the battlemech attack.  :grin:

Also, FYI, no battlemechs in Abyss and True Lies.

Schwarzenegger was a battlemech in his prime.

I hope he makes a movie about a game forum where half the people say that battlemechs are the wave of the future and will elevate warfare to a whole new level, while the other half use science to tell them why they're full of shit. The pro-mech forum guys get together and build a mech or something in an abandoned warehouse and set out to prove the world wrong. They are promptly foiled when an annoyed eighty year old man walks up behind the mech and immobilizes it by sticking his cane in the ankle joint. The remaining hour of the film is the old man yelling racist stuff about Koreans at the terrified nerds in the cockpit.

Starring Clint Eastwood and Michael Cera

Fund it.

I'd buy that for a dollar!

I get a cameo.

The mini-subs and dive suits do not count?

angry.bob:  That has little to do with the phenomenon of mechs being concentrated awesome.

Oban:  It's a Newt Suit.

Metal armour? Check.
Motorized propulsion?  Check.
Battery powered?  Check.
Hands capable of crushing bone?  Check.

Battlemech.

Battlenewt?

Either way, Avatar was a better movie for having the mech suits.

My vision demmands Abe Vigoda. The original purpose was that since he's dead Cameron would break another boundary by having one of the main characters be played by an entirely computer generated representation of a real actor. However, it turns out that Abe isn't dead so he'd probably sue or something. Plus, a real live Abe Vigoda would be much mess cool. Though I do like the guy.

And the reason why Battlemechs being concentrated awesome is missing is that they're actually concentrated crap. They're usually cool in science fiction, but in real life they'd be pointless and stupid. The situations where a different, existing vehicle would be better are nearly infinite.

As much as I'd like to see this thread veer back into insanity as a "Tanks Versus Mechs" redux, I don't think it's going to happen. Mechfucker hasn't been around in weeks. He did something stupid in Politics and either got perma-banned or else ran off in a butthurt snit after yet another temp-banning.

WHO WILL TAKE UP THE MANTLE? THERE MUST ALWAYS BE A MECHFUCKER.

(http://th07.deviantart.net/fs46/150/i/2009/217/7/f/Lich_King__s_Helmet___WoW_by_Laitz.jpg)

It has to be said that Colonel Angry Marine's battlemech having a battlemech-sized combat knife was a fucking awesome bit of makes-no-sense-but-I-don't-care staging.

Small deep sea subs, giant alien underwater crafts, and F-16 and horses jumping buildings. I think he had it covered :)

Newt suit.

Mechanized aquatic knife delivery device.

Details, details.  :why_so_serious:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cI5GxM4f50

Avatar is New Age, Satanic, Demonic Paganism

Saw a 3d imax showing of this a week ago Saturday and the place was packed. Still pullin' in cash. Pretty entertaining flick.

It's going to be interesting to see if there is an IMAX fight around next weekend after Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland opens. I can't imagine that it's going to have the draw that Avatar has, and if theaters revolt and put Avatar back in, or if we do go on our merry way fo the rest of the year, with the other releases like How To Train Your Dragon, etc.

I, too, saw it about a week ago in an IMAX theater, and there wasn't an empty seat.  It's hard to imagine the theaters cock-punching themselves by putting Alice in Scaryland in its place.  Maybe they have no choice?  No idea wo makes those decisions, but I bet Avatar could sail along just fine until Clash of the Titans comes out.

In the case of Alice in Wonderland, Disney already pissed movie chains off when they announced that they'd be releasing the DVD 12 weeks after the theatrical release instead of the 17 weeks minimum that is generally agreed upon (some European theaters are actually boycotting the movie).  Even major U.S. chain AMC was holding off on agreeing to show Alice, and I assume they used the threat of a boycott to get a better bargaining position for their cut of the grosses and such.  Theoretically, it might have allowed them to continue showing Avatar on some of their IMAX screens.  Especially since for a movie that's been out for so long, they'd likely make more money off a sold out showing of Avatar than they would a sold out showing of Alice.

Clearly the answer is to put in more IMAX theaters.  I know I want to see that kick ass NASA one I saw the trailer for, but can't imagine them kicking any of the upcoming blockbusters to the curb for a geeky science flick.

The economy made it hard for a lot of theater chains to get funding for that sort of thing for a bit (it certainly slowed down progress in chains converting more screens from 35mm to digital projectors, and I assume it slowed down funding for new IMAX screens for a while).  Funding seems to be going through more now, although it's already too late now to capitalize on Avatar's success, and I'm not sure if anything coming out in 3D the next year or so has much potential for huge success.

Both new harry potter movies are coming out in 3d, as is the clash of the titans remake.  Apparently Avatar streamlined some new 3d tech and now its the new hotness that every movie must have.  I wish I owned a glasses manufacturing company, someone could make a fucking killing selling "High end" $15 super-comfy 3d glasses right now.

I saw you guys mentioning that Avatar is still raking in cash so I decided to check its grosses to date. Worldwide it is sitting at 2.5 billion. That's just...amazing. It makes Titanic look like a borderline failure at this point...

Clash of the Titans is a last minute conversion into 3D.  I'm not really expecting much from it.

New 3D tech has been hailed as the temporary saviour of the film industry. It will end when 3D technology comes to our home screens, but for now, expected to see pretty much everything in 3D.

Very good point.  3D is the about the only thing to entice me into a movie theater anymore.  I'm so sick of cellphones, babies crying, crinkling candy wrappers, talkers, etc.

Which will be relatively soon once Avatar comes out using that new 3d Blue ray spec.

This movie was the first to truly try the technology. (http://rottentomatoes.com/m/beowulf/) Even though it flopped in relation to it's all star cast, the 3D was epic and was a much better film than people gave it credit for.

The game already supports it.

Someone rented this, so I finally saw it. It wasn't T2 or Aliens, and you could see every plot point coming from a hundred miles away, but it wasn't bad. I thought Sam Worthington came off pretty well, and the whole thing had that "whole well-developed world going on" vibe that makes my inner lore nerd happy.

That having been said, here's the stuff you knew was coming. I'm not making you click.

Well, with the DVD release (breaking records (http://movies.yahoo.com/news/movies.reuters.com/avatar-sets-firstday-bluray-sales-record-reuters)) they're now talking about the Avatar sequel...

Now with underwater blue people (http://uk.news.yahoo.com/4/20100423/ten-avatar-sequel-to-be-a-deep-sea-affai-ea4616c.html).

Even more details in an article on SciFiWire (http://scifiwire.com/2010/04/more-from-cameron-on-that.php)

Heh. He's re-releasing it four months after the DVD came out. That's awesome.

That's the thing though isn't it? I agree with nearly all your points, I went in expecting all that scholck and even still it was a fun movie.  I know this sort of thing has been done before, it's high fantasy/low story akin to something like a disney movie.  Sure, it could have used some script tweaking but we can't know it would have come out of that for the better.

I'm content with avatar the way it is and I think I'll have to pick it up just for the commentary.

Oh, of course it'll be in the ocean. It's not like it's new territory for him. (Examples One (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abyss), Two (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic_(1997_film)), and Three (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghosts_of_the_Abyss))