Wait, why are they making another one? They killed the main character off fifteen minutes before the end... I thought this was supposed to be a tragedy in one act!
I mean maybe there's a possibility of examining what the humans would do to get at the Unobtainium (clever, so clever), but I still can't see how the movie would retain its focus when the hero is dead. Unless there's napalm involved, I'm not watching it.
Go James! Give us another good one! A show to remember!
I think there is a lot to be excited about here, lets look at the facts:
#A: He wrote all three scripts at once, so the chance of discontinuity is reduced somewhat.
#B: He had to remove a LOT of stuff from the first one becasue Hollywood was sure it was going to fail, therefore forcing him to make a movie that could stand on its own, thus why the story was a little archatypical (so yeah, what the naysayers complain about, was kind done on purpose because the people who backed Cameron were only interested in the technology,not the film)
#C: James Cameron made Terminator 2 and Aliens, so he seems to be well versed in making good sequels, or at the very least decent ones.
#D: He has created a massive, beautiful and stunning universe, so the bones of a great story are there
#E: Although the story may contain characters and settings from the first, i get the impression that he will be expanding the universe, exploring new characters and new ideas, you know, the way you make a good sequel.
#F: Even if the second and third movies blow harder than a Narwal, there is still the kick-ass first movie to watch.
#G: NOthing's over while he's breathin!
Still, i am not looking forward to the uncreative fucks who think they are funny, going on and on about "pocahontas in space' or 'dances with Na'vi',you know, the ones too dim to come up with thier own material, the ones who seem to take pleasure in ruining so many htings for other people. Ah well, they are a small price to pay for a return to Pandora.
Long story short, thank you mr. Cameron all i need to do is wait until 2014 until i can get my crack fix. I jsut hope they second and third go well, it would be a shame for the franchise that got me into writing to fail. Good luck and may Eywa bless this project.
I would like to just reply to all the hate mail avatar gets,
Yes it was just virutaly a copy of so many other movies and litriture.. but hey so is modern warfare, halo, L4D and to some extent the x-box and ps3 are copies of old consols but hey y'all love them don't you?
What I'm trying to say is, just because it was good dosen't mean you have to take the opposite view of the mass audience to pretend you're clever.. I'm doing it right now, dosen't show me to be intellectual but instead i'm just trying to remove prejudice that isn't necessarily warrented..
1. Humans are douches that try to invade but get stopped.
2. Humans try again, while almost succeeding but fail at the very end and a reference to #3 comes up.
3. Alien people fight back and stop the humans once and for all and everything/everyone is happy?
We all have our opinions I guess, but that story is an age old classic. If you think Avatar has a bad story, then you think that Pocahontas has a bad story.
Now, to be perfectly honest, I'm pretty much neutral about Avatar, and maybe they could work on the the story a bit (Unobtanium? seriously? Is this a mineral or a friggin' trope?)... but I don't see how more could come out of it.
What bothers me though, is a) the surge in popularity of 3D movies, and b) all the crazy fans who dress uplike Na'vi, because seriously, obsessive fans of anything scare me.
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe the sequels will turn out better. Maybe. For now, though, I'll just stick with District 9.
2 is about a female... blue person (don't remember their names) who really wants to be a human because she sees a human man who she instantly falls in love with, and turns into a human with the help of an evil witch. The twist is that she can't talk as a human though.
3 is about a blue person whose father is killed by his uncle and he then runs off into the wilderness thinking he did it. He meets up with several humans who live out there and decides he doesn't need the other blue people and lives on his own, but eventually he goes back and casts down his uncle- becoming the lion- sorry- blue person king.
Ah yes, Disney- er- James Cameron is a true genius.
What I do hate is what Avatar and movies similar to it are doing to the film industry.
Here is a movie a so-called "genius of the medium" took allegedly 4 to 6 years off to think of the concept and then spent another couple years and hundreds of millions of dollars to create. But instead of using his time, money, and talent to make something truly amazing and revolutionary, he instead made a movie that was pretty much on par with a summer pop-corn flick. The special effects were good, but the story was unoriginal, the characters were bland and forgettable stereotypes, the writing and dialog wasn't all that good and unintentionally funny at some points, and the pacing was pretty slow (and considering that its almost 2 and a half hours long, that's not a good thing).
I probably wouldn't have minded that Avatar was filled with all these problems if it wasn't for the fact that this was slated as one of the biggest, most ambitious, and most epic films of all time. But instead of seeing something that was on par with something like Ben-Hur [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SOT0ofuscU] or Lawrence of Arabia [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDF0at7sC0M], I instead saw something more on the lines of GI Joe VS Thunder Cats. It wasn't bad and it was pretty fun, but after all this waiting and hype, I was expecting something that had A LOT more quality to its name than "cool action!". Avatar isn't an "epic", its another bland special effects driven action movie.
Yet the film still managed to break box office records, get legions of praise, and still be talked about today not because of its overall quality as a film, but because of its name recognition and its filming technology; While another film released in the same year with virtually the same basic set up only with a much better, more relevant story, stronger characters, cooler action, and an R rating that took less time and millions of dollars less to make [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6PDlMggROA] got some praise and big sales, but was completely forgotten within a few months.
Avatar is pretty much the Uncharted 2 of movies. For what it is, it does it right and it looks very pretty, but the whole experience was nothing we haven't seen before and more shallow than a kiddy pool for midgets.
Firstly, the movie was so self contained it could, and probably should, be a one-shot with no sequel, no prequel, and no-revisit. Ever.
Secondly, I can't name anything about that movie that actually blew my mind or really impressed me. It looked like little more than the best cut-away scene for a video game ever (but how long can that last before somebody does one better?) and the story was so well tread it was like trying to get interested in packed dirt for three hours.
I'm a long time enjoyer of Cameron's films. I was there, 14 years old, for Terminator, which I saw twice in the theater. I was among the first to tout the man's ability to actually pack some emotion into action flicks. I even defended The Abyss against my friends, most of whom hated it at the time it came out.
But with age and wisdom, it's clear to me that though Cameron makes entertaining films and tries to balance them well for all audiences, his balancing act is unsubtle and his ideas are rather unoriginal. The result are films that seem more forced than natural, which he overcomes for many people with wiz-bang effects. But in the end, his is really kind of middling stuff, non-committal and often (not always) shallow. And we need to stop rewarding him so highly for it.
I like him. But he's in no way the best filmmaker ever, and we need to stop paying him like he is. Doing so is dumbing down film more and more. By idolizing a middling artist, we encourage pretenders to copy him. Copies always suck. But copies of half-crap suck like big crap, and I have a bad feeling that's really going to be Cameron's biggest legacy.
He actually deserves better than that, but we can only help him achieve it by ignoring him from now on, until he stops.
I was thinking the other day about movie plots and tropes when I was struck by something: Avatar and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, have one thing in common.
Both involve a villain nearly destroying a primitive civilisation for the want of their own races needs but are thwarted.
However, detractors of Avatar keep asking why humanity didn't just nuke them and be done with it, meaning the lives of an otherwise innocent if simple people (who have literally no capacity to strike back at them) mean jack shit. Seriously, you people are getting pissed about a people protecting their home from invaders.
Yet when The Fallen tried to do the exact same thing, with the same justification, its treated as an action so immoral that he was excommunicated and nearly killed by his brothers. Yeah, the ancient space travelling robots who can change shape have all sorts of reality bending powers decided that their survival wasn't worth one planet of humanoids who had barely discovered fire.
Just chew on that for a while.
On Topic, I was hoping he was going to do Battle Angel Alita first, but hey, Avatar made 2 billion, pissed off the Michael Bay fanboys and was the most enjoyable cinema experience I'd had since I saw the Lion King.
I don't know how he is going to come up with a script for the third on. I mean Pocahontas 2 already exists, but as far as I know there is no third one.
I remember a lot of reviews for the first one being fairly unimpressed, but excited by the fact that it wasn't a sequel. These ones will be, uh, sequels. They'll have to give a good deal more of the budget to the making-good department than they did for the first one.
I mean, in order for the films to be good. They'll make massive amounts of money no matter what they do.
Oh yeah, and it bugs the hell out of me that every film that makes money has to be turned into a trilogy, and that the trilogy apparently has to suck. Is it a rule of Hollywood? I don't know.
Believe it or not, Unobtanium is an actual thing. It's a word created to describe building material needed to construct objects that go against the laws of physics. For example, one might need Unobtanium to build a frictionless pulley. It doesn't really exist, but Cameron used the term, probably because he felt like it. It does sort of imply why the material is worth so much in the movie.
Also, for those complaining about the "emotional horsepower" said in the OP, that may actually be more describing the viewers responses to the movie. There were entire websites dedicated to consoling those who couldn't face the fact that Avatar wasn't real.
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