

Thoughts on James Cameron’s Avatar - jseliger
http://jseliger.com/2009/12/27/thoughts-on-james-camerons-avatar

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pgbovine
(feel free to downvote at will ...)

my trollish reply to everyone who has been analyzing the heck out of Avatar in
the past week has been: "it's a friggin' ACTION movie, that's all! enjoy it as
that, and don't expect more!"

james cameron was the guy who brought us the Terminator movies, True Lies, and
a few other great heart-pounding action movies of the 80's and 90's (Titanic
was an outlier for him ... it was far different than any other movie he had
done). nobody was over-analyzing the geo-political realism or marital
relations in True Lies.

the man is an action filmmaker. his movies should be compared to other big-
budget Hollywood action films (e.g., transformers, bourne movies), not to
deeply profound works of sci-fi/fantasy art like LOTR, Neal Stephenson novels,
etc.

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icefox
Downvoted at will :)

Sorry, but the last Bourne movie I saw had no plot, same goes for the second
transformers movie. And LOTR wasn't exactly a cheap movie to make either...
And the Terminator series has a nice deep story about AI.

It is an action movie that was fun to go see. It was visually rich. It had an
actual plot (that wasn't half bad!). While Transformers2 was written over a
few weeks, it produced a movie that was stupid and confusing. Avatar has been
in the making for the past sixteen years. There are a ton of details that were
created and even if they were not shown in the final film. A full language,
foliage, planetary physics, not to mention questions like am I a murderer if I
kill your avatar when you are in it? And then of course is the technical
aspect of the movie from being in 3D (and cameron's history of that), to the
amount of CGI in the movie. Sounds like a pretty good movie to geek out on to
me.

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pgbovine
totally agree with you --- i think it's one of the best action movies i've
ever seen. when placed head-to-head against other movies of its genre, it
truly shines.

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icefox
For those who have seen the movie checkout out this article on 'Project 880'
which goes through the original script discussing differences which very much
sound like would make for a much richer story then what we got in the movie.

[http://chud.com/articles/articles/21969/1/PROJECT-880-THE-
AV...](http://chud.com/articles/articles/21969/1/PROJECT-880-THE-AVATAR-THAT-
ALMOST-WAS/Page1.html)

~~~
anigbrowl
Don't rule out the director's cut possibilities. People had similar problems
with the Abyss, until they saw the extended version which turned out to make a
lot more sense than the theatrical one did. I wouldn't be surprised if the
version released on Blu-Ray ends up 3-4 hours long.

Great link, btw.

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fuzzmeister
I worry that any scenes that didn't make the final cut would have never even
been fully rendered, given the CGI-centric nature of the film.

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wglb
Not to review a review, but this is not a very good review. Much more
interesting is the linked wired article.

I have always been disappointed in the Star Trek films, being a fan of Dune.
Yes, it does seem to me to be a rip-off of Dune, and a poor one at that. I
think Avatar is a much better movie than any of the Star Trek series. I
wouldn't say that it is the best movie ever, but it is certainly at the top of
the list for special effects, by a large measure.

(Don't forget that James Cameron did Aliens, Titanic, Terminator one and two.)

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zackattack
I'm in avatar right now. It's beautiful but too long , and it lacks depth and
cohesion. If you want a sweet scifi movie with actual plot see district 9.

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MikeCapone
Agreed about District 9, but please don't be "that guy" who's going online
_during_ a movie.

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zackattack
Why do you care what _I_ do during the movie? There were multiple people in my
aisle who were discreetly tapping on their phones.

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bvi
You are bothering people not just in your aisle, but those behind you as well,
who can see the light from your phone from the corner of their eyes, but are
too far away from you to point it out.

So do the rest of us a favor and put that phone back into your pocket.

