Avatar - is visually brilliant - that's it. I've watched it 4 times, 3
times in the theater with the heavy 3D glasses and once at home on my
lappy. The entire tribe seemed influenced by African tribes, with the
braided hair and the facial cut which is beautiful but a notch
unbelievable. Also i like movies that have an under lying message - what
was that in this movie? ' keep your planet clean? ' well we'd have to make
less movies like these and spend that money instead in cleaning up the mess
on our planet :)
By the way what do the Navi people eat? Fruits? If yes then why were they
hunting?
In all the visual splendor of James Cameron's Avatar, it's easy to overlook the script. In fact, the Avatar screenplay has come in for the same abuse Cameron's Titanic script earned. You've heard the complaints: the story is a Pocahontas rip-off. The bad guys are just evil villains. The dialogue is stilted. In short, great visuals, bad screenwriting.
The critics aren't so much wrong as irrelevant. What they don't get is that Cameron is a brilliant writer of pop culture. He is one of three or four best popular storytellers, and his secret, which all current screenwriters need to know, is his mastery of genres.
Like Avatar, Titanic had fabulous visuals. But the key to its success was that it combined the disaster film - a sub-form of action - with the love story. These two forms are on opposite ends of the genre spectrum, which is why they are rarely combined, and why Cameron showed his true genius when he put them together.
The disaster film gives the audience the thrill of spectacle and scope, something no other medium can do as well. But for that same reason, disaster films have no heart. They're about the thousands of people in the maws of slaughter. They're not personal. That's why Cameron spent most of that film setting up a love story, which is about the community of two, the most personal, heart-filled genre you can get. So when the disaster finally hit, the pain of loss started at the epicenter of the two lovers and spread out from there.
Jump forward to Avatar, and Cameron is using the exact same strategy. Avatar isn't just a big, noisy war story set in an outer space future. It's an epic romance, the grand myth combined with the intimate love story. The technical definition of the romantic epic is that the fate of the nation is determined by the love between two people. That is a very tough story weave to do right, but if you do, it has almost infinite worldwide popular appeal.
An epic is almost always built on the myth genre, by far the most common genre in worldwide blockbusters. The key question for the screenwriter, especially when you are adding fantasy and science fiction elements, is what myth to use. In the Myth Class, I talk extensively about the ten new myth forms on which a large percentage of worldwide storytelling will be based. One of these I call the eco-myth, and that is beat for beat the new myth that Cameron uses in Avatar.
Of course, the "new" eco-myth has a history. For over 160 years, it has been one of America's two national myths. The first is the Western, and it was the dominant American myth from about 1850 to 1960. The Western is the story of the building of the American nation by taming nature and "civilizing" the "savages" the Europeans encountered as they were going about their godly task.
But there was a second American myth that played underneath the Western all those years. It was the anti-Western, also known as the "Eastern," starting with Thoreau and working its way through John Henry, Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Fitzgerald's Gatsby. It broke into the forefront of American storytelling during the Vietnam War, in films like The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
The anti-Western has been described in one line as "the Machine in the Garden," and that is the myth on which Avatar is based. It is the dark side of the American story, but more generally is the story of any technologically superior, male-god culture that wants the land of a nature-based, female-god culture.
The downside of the anti-Western myth is that it ends badly for the hero. The natives are slaughtered, and that is not going to work if you want an international blockbuster. That's where the eco-myth puts a new twist on the anti-Western. Instead of ending with inevitable destruction, the eco-myth finds a way to rejuvenate the world by creating harmony among people and between people and nature.
The great strength of the eco-myth as a foundation for a blockbuster - besides the happy ending - is that it combines the myth story structure with a detailed story world. Story world has been a major element of blockbusters for at least the last ten years, as we vividly saw with Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. The eco-myth, by its very nature, is a celebration of the interconnectedness of all things in the world, and the cinematic medium is unmatched in showing this.
Like Tolkien in Lord of the Rings, Cameron creates a lush story world that emphasizes trees and plants. The center and foundation of the Na'vi world is the great protective tree, a futuristic version of the Tree of Life that holds up the marriage bed in The Odyssey. The plants of Pandora are often floating and lit from within, which gives the audience a sensual and emotional understanding of what it really means to live in an interconnected world.
Floating is the essential feature of this story world, and is a major reason for the massive success of this film. Any fantasy world, if it is to be successful on a grand scale, must have the qualities of a utopia. And in the history of utopias, the single most important quality is floating or flying. Think of the floating tea party in Mary Poppins, Harry Potter playing Quidditch on his broomstick, or the floating house in Up. Cameron understands this deeply. So his jungle world of Pandora is much more like an ocean floor. Plants float, so do entire islands, and the ten-foot-tall Na'vi fly everywhere on the backs of the giant bat-like banshee, infinitely more agile than the most advanced fighter plane.
This element of flying is also crucial to the second major genre in Avatar, the love story. One of the unique beats of the love story is the first dance. Here the dance occurs while the would-be lovers fly on the backs of a banshee. It's a beautiful orchestration of dance, love, flight, action and story world, and that scene alone is worth the price of admission.
As Avatar moves to its inevitable final battle, Cameron brings all of the story threads together. The focal point of the battle is the lit-from-within Tree of Souls, and for the techno-fascist humans, it is fit for nothing but destruction. Of course, this film is not a tragedy, so the battle does not go the way of history, with the technologically superior Europeans wiping out the natives. It's a glorious scene where Cameron pulls out every trick in the story book, including a charge on horseback that is right out of The Charge of the Light Brigade.
If you want to understand Avatar's phenomenal success, you have to see it as a piece of screenwriting, but without the traditional standards of "good writing." Cameron is a genius of popular storytelling, and he knows that great popular storytelling comes from mixing genres that take maximum advantage of the film medium. True, the rest of us don't have the advantage of $300 million to realize our screenwriting dreams. But if you think Avatar's success comes primarily from all that money on the screen, you will miss some truly invaluable lessons in story. As Cameron himself has said, "People ask [me] about the future of filmmaking…the simple answer is that filmmaking is not going to ever fundamentally change. It's all about storytelling."
The critics aren't so much wrong as irrelevant. What they don't get is that Cameron is a brilliant writer of pop culture. He is one of three or four best popular storytellers, and his secret, which all current screenwriters need to know, is his mastery of genres.
Like Avatar, Titanic had fabulous visuals. But the key to its success was that it combined the disaster film - a sub-form of action - with the love story. These two forms are on opposite ends of the genre spectrum, which is why they are rarely combined, and why Cameron showed his true genius when he put them together.
The disaster film gives the audience the thrill of spectacle and scope, something no other medium can do as well. But for that same reason, disaster films have no heart. They're about the thousands of people in the maws of slaughter. They're not personal. That's why Cameron spent most of that film setting up a love story, which is about the community of two, the most personal, heart-filled genre you can get. So when the disaster finally hit, the pain of loss started at the epicenter of the two lovers and spread out from there.
Jump forward to Avatar, and Cameron is using the exact same strategy. Avatar isn't just a big, noisy war story set in an outer space future. It's an epic romance, the grand myth combined with the intimate love story. The technical definition of the romantic epic is that the fate of the nation is determined by the love between two people. That is a very tough story weave to do right, but if you do, it has almost infinite worldwide popular appeal.
An epic is almost always built on the myth genre, by far the most common genre in worldwide blockbusters. The key question for the screenwriter, especially when you are adding fantasy and science fiction elements, is what myth to use. In the Myth Class, I talk extensively about the ten new myth forms on which a large percentage of worldwide storytelling will be based. One of these I call the eco-myth, and that is beat for beat the new myth that Cameron uses in Avatar.
Of course, the "new" eco-myth has a history. For over 160 years, it has been one of America's two national myths. The first is the Western, and it was the dominant American myth from about 1850 to 1960. The Western is the story of the building of the American nation by taming nature and "civilizing" the "savages" the Europeans encountered as they were going about their godly task.
But there was a second American myth that played underneath the Western all those years. It was the anti-Western, also known as the "Eastern," starting with Thoreau and working its way through John Henry, Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Fitzgerald's Gatsby. It broke into the forefront of American storytelling during the Vietnam War, in films like The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
The anti-Western has been described in one line as "the Machine in the Garden," and that is the myth on which Avatar is based. It is the dark side of the American story, but more generally is the story of any technologically superior, male-god culture that wants the land of a nature-based, female-god culture.
The downside of the anti-Western myth is that it ends badly for the hero. The natives are slaughtered, and that is not going to work if you want an international blockbuster. That's where the eco-myth puts a new twist on the anti-Western. Instead of ending with inevitable destruction, the eco-myth finds a way to rejuvenate the world by creating harmony among people and between people and nature.
The great strength of the eco-myth as a foundation for a blockbuster - besides the happy ending - is that it combines the myth story structure with a detailed story world. Story world has been a major element of blockbusters for at least the last ten years, as we vividly saw with Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. The eco-myth, by its very nature, is a celebration of the interconnectedness of all things in the world, and the cinematic medium is unmatched in showing this.
Like Tolkien in Lord of the Rings, Cameron creates a lush story world that emphasizes trees and plants. The center and foundation of the Na'vi world is the great protective tree, a futuristic version of the Tree of Life that holds up the marriage bed in The Odyssey. The plants of Pandora are often floating and lit from within, which gives the audience a sensual and emotional understanding of what it really means to live in an interconnected world.
Floating is the essential feature of this story world, and is a major reason for the massive success of this film. Any fantasy world, if it is to be successful on a grand scale, must have the qualities of a utopia. And in the history of utopias, the single most important quality is floating or flying. Think of the floating tea party in Mary Poppins, Harry Potter playing Quidditch on his broomstick, or the floating house in Up. Cameron understands this deeply. So his jungle world of Pandora is much more like an ocean floor. Plants float, so do entire islands, and the ten-foot-tall Na'vi fly everywhere on the backs of the giant bat-like banshee, infinitely more agile than the most advanced fighter plane.
This element of flying is also crucial to the second major genre in Avatar, the love story. One of the unique beats of the love story is the first dance. Here the dance occurs while the would-be lovers fly on the backs of a banshee. It's a beautiful orchestration of dance, love, flight, action and story world, and that scene alone is worth the price of admission.
As Avatar moves to its inevitable final battle, Cameron brings all of the story threads together. The focal point of the battle is the lit-from-within Tree of Souls, and for the techno-fascist humans, it is fit for nothing but destruction. Of course, this film is not a tragedy, so the battle does not go the way of history, with the technologically superior Europeans wiping out the natives. It's a glorious scene where Cameron pulls out every trick in the story book, including a charge on horseback that is right out of The Charge of the Light Brigade.
If you want to understand Avatar's phenomenal success, you have to see it as a piece of screenwriting, but without the traditional standards of "good writing." Cameron is a genius of popular storytelling, and he knows that great popular storytelling comes from mixing genres that take maximum advantage of the film medium. True, the rest of us don't have the advantage of $300 million to realize our screenwriting dreams. But if you think Avatar's success comes primarily from all that money on the screen, you will miss some truly invaluable lessons in story. As Cameron himself has said, "People ask [me] about the future of filmmaking…the simple answer is that filmmaking is not going to ever fundamentally change. It's all about storytelling."
Comments
Anu Menon
25 May 2010, 23:57
25 May 2010, 23:57
Cameron Riff
04 Feb 2010, 10:58
04 Feb 2010, 10:58
John said, "And in the history of utopias, the single most important
quality is floating or flying." Which means the Avatars in the sequel
should be second-gen, mixing the DNA of flying creatures with humans. The
part I find most interesting is how the list of story beats applies to
three separate movies in a Trilogy. POTC and Spider-Man failed miserably
in the third movie. George Lucas said, "Each movie is an episode of a
complete saga, like the old serials, and each one follows a formula. It
ends with the hero going inside an enormous "beast" and blowing it up." Do
we have to follow Jake Sully as our hero? Will Neytiri evolve? I agree
with Bill, that the true hero of the saga should be Jake's twin brother,
who decided to do something noble for his brother Jake, to allow him to
walk again, and the only way to get Jake to Pandora was to fake his own
death. which means, by the third movie, Jake has gone through a character
arc where he's become the villain. Jake, still human, has to defend
Pandora against attack from earth. Each one changes him, until he becomes
the total opposite of how he started. I think we've seen the first chapter
of "The Redemption of Jake Sully," and his life is going to get much, much
worse before it gets any better. I'm just wondering how the story beats of
Myth and Romance apply to a three-movie story line.
Bill Hays
28 Jan 2010, 01:16
28 Jan 2010, 01:16
Choosing an injured Marine as the hero was a brilliant start. We've seen
them on the news, and the fantasy of not only being able to walk again, but
to become Superman, struck a chord everywhere. Problems? About half an
hour from the end, the Marines stop being human beings. When Jake arrived,
we saw a conflict between the scientists and the soldiers protecting them.
Well, they stopped protecting and became robots. Second, the Na'vi were
supposed to be spiritual because of their connections to each other,
animals, etc. But no one in Neytiri's tribe showed any spirituality. They
were generic backward natives, ready to pick up spears at a moment's
provocation.
Zoe Saldana said the had read for the lead in "Battle Angel Alita" in New York, and when she flew to Los Angeles, she thought she would be playing a robot. I hope Mr. Cameron abandons the "Alita" concept and finds a story closer to Titanic.
I'm reminded of "Star Wars: A New Hope," and how Darth Vader was the greatest villain in movie history for several years. Then, as the saga unfolded, we saw him as a young hero. I think we'll think quite differently about Jake Sully and Neytiri after the third movie ends. Cameron hasn't really "found" the motivation of his characters yet. As he said, audiences think the movie just sprang out of his imagination, fully formed, when it was the end result of hundreds of people contributing ideas and performances. I think "Avatar" worked despite having a rather weak villain, weak because he turned out to be one-dimensional.
Zoe Saldana said the had read for the lead in "Battle Angel Alita" in New York, and when she flew to Los Angeles, she thought she would be playing a robot. I hope Mr. Cameron abandons the "Alita" concept and finds a story closer to Titanic.
I'm reminded of "Star Wars: A New Hope," and how Darth Vader was the greatest villain in movie history for several years. Then, as the saga unfolded, we saw him as a young hero. I think we'll think quite differently about Jake Sully and Neytiri after the third movie ends. Cameron hasn't really "found" the motivation of his characters yet. As he said, audiences think the movie just sprang out of his imagination, fully formed, when it was the end result of hundreds of people contributing ideas and performances. I think "Avatar" worked despite having a rather weak villain, weak because he turned out to be one-dimensional.
Karthik Varma
26 Jan 2010, 09:07
26 Jan 2010, 09:07
As rightly pointed out and paraphrasing it,Cameron is a genius in directing
some of the best blockbusters ever.....how do i know it.....just look at
the worldwide collections.....and no script is perfect and for gods
sake,cameron is a genius director,not a writer
Any movie of such huge costs needs to recoup it and it has to look beyond the American market in order to do that...and talking about it being pochahantas-rip off..well the majority of the audience who is gonna watch the movie have no idea about such American myth stories and I doubt if anyone from america itself were able to pickup the subtleties.
Whatever it did,it did it fine and I also hate to admit but,yes if only it was written so that it is structurally sound,it would have have pleased the critics and budding screenwriters like us,and probably talked and raved about for another 20 years or so or even beyond
Any movie of such huge costs needs to recoup it and it has to look beyond the American market in order to do that...and talking about it being pochahantas-rip off..well the majority of the audience who is gonna watch the movie have no idea about such American myth stories and I doubt if anyone from america itself were able to pickup the subtleties.
Whatever it did,it did it fine and I also hate to admit but,yes if only it was written so that it is structurally sound,it would have have pleased the critics and budding screenwriters like us,and probably talked and raved about for another 20 years or so or even beyond
david fertik
25 Jan 2010, 17:01
25 Jan 2010, 17:01
I enjoyed Avatar. I never expect Hollywood to give me great art but we can
celebrate great artistry. What film that grossed Big Bucks didn't have
cliches--or too much violence. We live on a dysfunctional planet, our
values, priorities speak of a spiritual sickness.
Our institutions: government,banks,Wall Street,health insurance,big oil, bureaucracies have failed us, are not fair or people oriented. Blindness, greed and a lack of due diligence rule our country.
Avatar is a messenger trying to re-balance our world. It's better than most. It's Chinatown Jake.
Our institutions: government,banks,Wall Street,health insurance,big oil, bureaucracies have failed us, are not fair or people oriented. Blindness, greed and a lack of due diligence rule our country.
Avatar is a messenger trying to re-balance our world. It's better than most. It's Chinatown Jake.
Mitch Anderson
22 Jan 2010, 07:11
22 Jan 2010, 07:11
I am surprised of the praise John gave the movie.
The story is incredibly simplistic and written for 10 year olds. So the technologically advanced humans of the future go to another planet. The material that motivates the oppressive industrialists is the "Hard Obtanium" that has the only virtue of being .... hard to obtain...
Therefore the white men decide to just kill some natives to obtain it... Get it?
Now seriously, the story is amazingly one sided. All the native values are positive, kindness and compassion and nature is all they need... Civilization sucks, it is all bad and oppressive...
The film is highly symptomatic of the progress paradox. Industry has made life better for more people than in any time in the history of mankind however so many of us feel awfully guilty for it. Why is that?
And to relieve the guilt we get deluded with this perfect world where man lives in harmony with nature, and of course he needs no medicine, literacy, electricity, rule of law, clean water, affordable food... Because they all come for free from the mother nature...
Just like in Africa maybe? Check out Rwanda or the 9 million per year that die of starvation and malnutrition each year. Well, at least they die happy for not being oppressed by corporations that want to steal their obtanium, Mr Cameron might argue.
In fact the West should have a Citizenship exchange for the guilt ridden well fed white men, that want to surrender their passports to the Africans, Indians and poor South Americans that dont mind being exploited and benefit of the industrial comfort that we have. Lots of Hollywood celebrities would be first in line. Right?
If my review sounds too militant, here is why: By the way of his artistry, Mr. Cameron (and other authors) will lure and covert millions of young minds to his ideology - industry and progress are a fundamentally a bad thing. If this current of thought will ever catch a critical mass, it could result in tremendous setbacks for the whole mankind. Or it might result in a new superior society, but I doubt it. Great progress in based on improving on what works not on the subjective denial of the benefits one gets.
On a different note, as a writer/director I have to praise the film for the art direction, creativity and technological ingenuity.
I wonder if the Na'vi people ever made such a film. Ooops... making a film would require technology and that is bad. Remember?
Mitch Anderson
The story is incredibly simplistic and written for 10 year olds. So the technologically advanced humans of the future go to another planet. The material that motivates the oppressive industrialists is the "Hard Obtanium" that has the only virtue of being .... hard to obtain...
Therefore the white men decide to just kill some natives to obtain it... Get it?
Now seriously, the story is amazingly one sided. All the native values are positive, kindness and compassion and nature is all they need... Civilization sucks, it is all bad and oppressive...
The film is highly symptomatic of the progress paradox. Industry has made life better for more people than in any time in the history of mankind however so many of us feel awfully guilty for it. Why is that?
And to relieve the guilt we get deluded with this perfect world where man lives in harmony with nature, and of course he needs no medicine, literacy, electricity, rule of law, clean water, affordable food... Because they all come for free from the mother nature...
Just like in Africa maybe? Check out Rwanda or the 9 million per year that die of starvation and malnutrition each year. Well, at least they die happy for not being oppressed by corporations that want to steal their obtanium, Mr Cameron might argue.
In fact the West should have a Citizenship exchange for the guilt ridden well fed white men, that want to surrender their passports to the Africans, Indians and poor South Americans that dont mind being exploited and benefit of the industrial comfort that we have. Lots of Hollywood celebrities would be first in line. Right?
If my review sounds too militant, here is why: By the way of his artistry, Mr. Cameron (and other authors) will lure and covert millions of young minds to his ideology - industry and progress are a fundamentally a bad thing. If this current of thought will ever catch a critical mass, it could result in tremendous setbacks for the whole mankind. Or it might result in a new superior society, but I doubt it. Great progress in based on improving on what works not on the subjective denial of the benefits one gets.
On a different note, as a writer/director I have to praise the film for the art direction, creativity and technological ingenuity.
I wonder if the Na'vi people ever made such a film. Ooops... making a film would require technology and that is bad. Remember?
Mitch Anderson
John Lomas-Bullivant
22 Jan 2010, 02:01
22 Jan 2010, 02:01
Any genius Mr Cameron has is predicated upon his ability to sell a barely
second rate story and get the biggest budget Hollywood has ever seen and
then make that money back! As a Producer / Writer I have to admire that -
it is a form of 'genius' but true creative genius it certainly is not.
What irks people is we all know that if anybody without his CV had pitched that story or script...they'd be laughed out of court, as per all the commenst above. When you strive to be original and you see a shoddy story, with utterly predictable characters given that kind of moeny you do begin to despair...but nobody said it was going to be fair! In Hollywood when you deliver huge bucks, the time old question of 'Why do dogs like their balls? eventually applies... Answer: Because they can! When Directors, Actors or Producers get to the point in their careers they can lick all they like, the studios just have to pray that people want to watch them doing it ...and in the case of Avatar they seem only too keen to.
As for any 'genius' in Titantic. The moment you even start think about doing that story you have to address the final act - the boat sinks, people die...durr people are going to walk out hugely depressed, not why we go to the movies! So how do we do all that sinking and dying and still give people hope....a love story solution is not act of genius, its an act of the obvious!
Mr Cameron is a 'genius' at making Hollywood money and significant respect is due on that account - in an industry that is called the Movie BUSINESS! and is about renting seats, selling popcorn and DVDS!
JLB. London.
What irks people is we all know that if anybody without his CV had pitched that story or script...they'd be laughed out of court, as per all the commenst above. When you strive to be original and you see a shoddy story, with utterly predictable characters given that kind of moeny you do begin to despair...but nobody said it was going to be fair! In Hollywood when you deliver huge bucks, the time old question of 'Why do dogs like their balls? eventually applies... Answer: Because they can! When Directors, Actors or Producers get to the point in their careers they can lick all they like, the studios just have to pray that people want to watch them doing it ...and in the case of Avatar they seem only too keen to.
As for any 'genius' in Titantic. The moment you even start think about doing that story you have to address the final act - the boat sinks, people die...durr people are going to walk out hugely depressed, not why we go to the movies! So how do we do all that sinking and dying and still give people hope....a love story solution is not act of genius, its an act of the obvious!
Mr Cameron is a 'genius' at making Hollywood money and significant respect is due on that account - in an industry that is called the Movie BUSINESS! and is about renting seats, selling popcorn and DVDS!
JLB. London.
Alex B.
20 Jan 2010, 10:23
20 Jan 2010, 10:23
Even though the detractors of the Pocahontas script might not have caught
on all the subtleties highlighted by the article (me included), they have
generally recognized that a film that cost $300M needs to make money to
cover its expenses. And hence please the most people possible.
Cameron therefore had to resort to well-known popular myths that he knows would work. He couldn't financially take more risks than that. The fact that Cameron is a genius at those popular myths is not, I think, disputed. The said detractors though usually prefer maybe less broad-based story telling with less pre-hashed clichés (the living tree is exactly out of the Disney cartoon for example).
But any script writer who wants to make money in this business should, indeed, be inspired here... at the cost of originality, that is.
Cameron therefore had to resort to well-known popular myths that he knows would work. He couldn't financially take more risks than that. The fact that Cameron is a genius at those popular myths is not, I think, disputed. The said detractors though usually prefer maybe less broad-based story telling with less pre-hashed clichés (the living tree is exactly out of the Disney cartoon for example).
But any script writer who wants to make money in this business should, indeed, be inspired here... at the cost of originality, that is.
MKC
19 Jan 2010, 22:35
19 Jan 2010, 22:35
If you want to understand Avatar's phenomenal success, you have to see it
as a piece of screenwriting, but without the traditional standards of "good
writing."
Are you kidding me, Truby! Seriously. Read that sentence.
How about calling it Dance with Wolves with blue people or The Last Samurai with fluorescent plants? How about talking about the voice over used at the beginning to tell us our hero's need instead of showing it? Or the use of the video log as exposition to move the story forward instead of showing it?
How about talking about the lack of plot? What were they trying to do by using the avatars again? Were they negotiating something?
And unobtainium?!! Are you joking?!
The love story did hit all the right beats. And the final sacrifice for true love is the same as Titanic, only instead of giving his life he gave his human life. It was a true transformation for the character.
Avatar is not a good movie. But what cool blue people. And dig those floating mountains. Did I mention the fluorescent plants? How pretty!
John Truby, don't cop out next time. James Cameron has more than his share of suck-ups.
Are you kidding me, Truby! Seriously. Read that sentence.
How about calling it Dance with Wolves with blue people or The Last Samurai with fluorescent plants? How about talking about the voice over used at the beginning to tell us our hero's need instead of showing it? Or the use of the video log as exposition to move the story forward instead of showing it?
How about talking about the lack of plot? What were they trying to do by using the avatars again? Were they negotiating something?
And unobtainium?!! Are you joking?!
The love story did hit all the right beats. And the final sacrifice for true love is the same as Titanic, only instead of giving his life he gave his human life. It was a true transformation for the character.
Avatar is not a good movie. But what cool blue people. And dig those floating mountains. Did I mention the fluorescent plants? How pretty!
John Truby, don't cop out next time. James Cameron has more than his share of suck-ups.
Chris
19 Jan 2010, 13:26
19 Jan 2010, 13:26
It doesn't take a genius to combine two genres. It does take a genius to
write a compelling story with interesting characters who behave in
believably surprising ways. This story could not be more predictable, the
plot elements more derivative of other films (themselves not all that
interesting), the characters more wooden, the message more preachy and
politically correct, the logic of the moral argument more shallow and
poorly made. And any great action movie needs a great villain. Heath
Ledger's Joker was diabolically interesting; here Colonel what's-his-name
was a colossal, one-dimensional testosterone bore.
Lawrence of Arabia has a similar "going native" story, but it's not based on the conceit that the locals were living in utopia before the conflict or that they can ever return to utopia after it ends. Cameron on the other hand makes a contradictory moral argument through his utopianism. On the one hand he's saying it's wrong for Culture A (the humans) to declare itself superior to Culture B (the Navi). But the way to make that argument is to say that Cultures A and B both are rich and interesting and valuable and neither should be considered superior to the other. Instead, Cameron argues that Culture B with its utopia is in every way superior to Culture A, thus guilty of the very attitude he decries. And he stacks the deck in a such a clumsy way, as if these "Marines" are mindless drones who don't have families or values of their own. As for the love story, if there was any chemistry or passion between those two blue cats, it's funny how even people who are absolutely crazy about this movie never mention it when I ask them why liked about the movie. (3-D! is their number one answer, and what exactly does that have to do w/ the screenplay?).
On the plus side, Avatar wasn't as bad as Crash.
Lawrence of Arabia has a similar "going native" story, but it's not based on the conceit that the locals were living in utopia before the conflict or that they can ever return to utopia after it ends. Cameron on the other hand makes a contradictory moral argument through his utopianism. On the one hand he's saying it's wrong for Culture A (the humans) to declare itself superior to Culture B (the Navi). But the way to make that argument is to say that Cultures A and B both are rich and interesting and valuable and neither should be considered superior to the other. Instead, Cameron argues that Culture B with its utopia is in every way superior to Culture A, thus guilty of the very attitude he decries. And he stacks the deck in a such a clumsy way, as if these "Marines" are mindless drones who don't have families or values of their own. As for the love story, if there was any chemistry or passion between those two blue cats, it's funny how even people who are absolutely crazy about this movie never mention it when I ask them why liked about the movie. (3-D! is their number one answer, and what exactly does that have to do w/ the screenplay?).
On the plus side, Avatar wasn't as bad as Crash.
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