IanKennedy wrote:I don't need to be psychic, just observant. You've been talking about it for weeks without even seeing it. No matter what people said to you you simply dismissed it. You had made up your mind before you saw it. I'm not suggesting that you should change your opinion, just that you should not have had an opinion before you saw the thing.
The only time I've expressed an opinion as to Avatar's plot was once in this thread back when the general description of it was what I'd heard. Based off that, yeah it sounded weak. I made a few comments in the early going when the very vague general plot was all that was available but as I heard a little more I dropped it. I'll happily admit that I was wrong about a likely anti-technology bias.
And regardless of what I might have said earlier you still would have to be psychic to know in what mindset I was in when I went to see this movie. You're just flat out wrong. I've had a bug in my wife's ear for three weeks about how I really want to go see the movie in theaters and not wait for the DVD. I went with a group of family and friends who was excited to go and see it. I sat down fully intent on just watching the movie and giving it a fair shake and I did.
Finally, if I was so dead set that this movie was going to suck please explain to me why I went and blew twenty bucks to go see it.
You wanna debate some of the points I made that's great I'm happy to, but don't presume to try and tell me what I was thinking.
You had to have him involved in the learning
That's not the issue. You obviously have to have some kind learning experience to move him from marine to Na'vi warrioir. That's not the issue. It's the method. They honestly spent $300 million dollars on this movie and did a training montage complete with him attempting a "simple" task and failing so his main competition with the natives could laugh at him. It's that it was done in such a cliche manner.
so that a) you can see how different the place is, b) it would be absurd of him to simply change his mind quickly without the learning and c) he had to get the data for the humans to make their work simple. A brand new world that you know nothing of, not having trained for it etc, is a good reason to not get it. In fact I can't think of a better one. It's far far better than simple cultural differences.
That's just it, it's not that different. The Na'vi are Hollywood indians. They ride horses. They have a coming of age ritual where a to become a warrior the young trainee must caputer and tame a steed. They live as one with nature. They revere nature. They believe that life is sacred. You have predators that resemble and act like dogs (the small black creatures that attacked Jake on the first night) or big cats. You've got your monkies, your elephant/rhino. The only animals in the forest that were anything unusual were the tree of life's seeds and the Banshees which were still pretty close to just being pteradons/dragons. There's nothing that utterly alien about Pandora except that most creatures have six legs and four eyes. It's fucking gorgeous, but its not that alien.
This place truly was alien, there really was a 'god'. The beliefs of the natives, for once, really did in a measurable way turn out to be real, not just a matter of personal preference or viewpoint.
That's part of my problem. They dumbed it down. Typically in these kind of stories there's an element of faith. The natives believe in something not immediately quantifiable and as part of their learning the protagonist and the audience come around to the point where maybe they don't agree, but they can respect it and see the native's viewpoint well enough to not piss all over it. In Avatar they remove the element of faith and make the native's god and belief in nature quantifiable facts. So it's no longer the antagonists not accepting what is essentially a belief system, they are now going against scientific fact. You no longer have two groups coming to different conclusions about a belief system you have one group that's right and one that's wrong and you can prove it with science. You've removed any gray area that could exist in this choice and replaced with black and white, right and wrong and you've dumbed it down. I don't object to the concept of being able to quantify these things but in the context of this already cliche ridden story you've taken an element and made it different... but you've moved it in the wrong way. Instead of innovating with it you dumbed it down even farther and required even less thought out of the audience.
