Avatar

[WindupAtheist]

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?

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.

 

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.

[Abagadro]

Procure vast quantities of stink gas and itching powder.

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

[WindupAtheist]

 

[Ratman_tf]

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.

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.

[Velorath]

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.

[Venkman]

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'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?

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.

[gryeyes]

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.

[Mattemeo]

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*

[Merusk]

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.

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.

[gryeyes]

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.

[WindupAtheist]

"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.

[Ironwood]

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.

[Ratman_tf]

"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."

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

[gryeyes]

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

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.

[WindupAtheist]

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.

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.)

 

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.

[Trippy]

Nice going there gryeyes, see you in a week.

[Amarr HM]

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.

[Venkman]

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 

"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."

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

What's "hypothemalizing"? Wiktionary failed me.

[TheWalrus]

The fuck is a tier jerker?

[rattran]

It's what hypothemalizing leads to.

[Amarr HM]

The fuck is a tier jerker?

Being a jerk on many levels.

[Ironwood]

You rang ?

[Sir T]

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 

[Simond]

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.

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

[pxib]

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.

[NowhereMan]

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.

[Nevermore]

Shaka, when the walls fell.

[pxib]

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... much less something as heavily contextual as Chinese.

[Nevermore]

See? I know it's a fan favorite, but that episode drove me nuts.

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.

[Soln]

See? I know it's a fan favorite, but that episode drove me nuts.

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.

[NowhereMan]

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).

[pxib]

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.

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

[Lakov_Sanite]

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

[Samwise]

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

[Lakov_Sanite]

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.