Many of the reviews of Avatar have focused on the (over-)simplicity of the plot. I don't understand these people. Avatar is packed with so much visual confection that I could barely process half of what I was seeing; I wouldn't have had any brain left over to _understand_ a plot.
Who cares about the plot? It's beautiful. Amazingly, wonderfully, brilliantly beautiful.
yes it looks cool. Some of us expectt more in a movie. Sorry about that.
I personally found the warmed over "Stupid White Man penetrates exotic closed society and rises to be leader of it, seducing the native woman" plot tiresome, repetitive and tedious, especially with the clunkiest dialogue I've heard in a decade, and insufficiently compensated for by the technology/visuals. I found the "noble savages" idea and infantile hippy politics and preaching tiresome too.
For some of us lesser mortals good graphics/special effects is just one element of a good Scifi/fantasy movie, and then not the most important aspect.
(from the review) " what it really felt like to me was a fourth movie in the Shrek franchise, pipping the yet-to-be-released Shrek Forever After to extrapolate that series' twin curves of rising technical achievement and plumetting wit to their logical endpoint: a near-immaculate feat of visualisation, accompanied by a staggeringly awful plot in which clunky genre conventions triumph completely over plausibility and originality. Avatar even boasts its very own love story where societal expectations and superficial barriers of size and pastelicity are overcome by generous helpings of pixie dust."
This expresses my feelings perfectly, but I wouldn't be so polite. I think Avatar is a terrible movie with gorgeous visuals and nothing else.
Aliens != Red Indians in fancy dress. The movie insults my intelligence on multiple levels. Yes I know, Caveat Emptor and all that, but I guess it must be because I am one of "these people"?
Netflix also rents our pedantic art house flicks so you never have to be troubled by what the rest of us mortals watch for escapism.
I'm sure you can find some overwrought deconstruction of modern human sexuality retold as 4 movements of the lives of people in positions of authority but no power, politicians of the modern era in a mock nuclear stand-down, a 30 minute continuous scene of a single flower, in water, as people pass by blurred in the bokeh of an extreme depth of field and the audio recorded so poorly you can't actually hear what anybody is saying, and a clinically shot orgy with a clown stepping in at minute 11 to juggle, seemingly unaware of his own environs -- driven by the effort to juggle so many balls.
In the end, the clown drops the balls and close to credits.
The credits of course will flow up and will be in a mix of Italian and French. Each scene of course representing impotence, sexual drive, narcissism as a sexual trait, and lust and the struggle to balance a polygamous relationship with three waitress and a gay hairdresser at the same time (as the director was experiencing while he shot this film). The credits of course flow up in Italian and French as a both symbols of ejaculation and of salad dressing.
"I like movies that have strong plots and not try to insult my intelligence" isn't the same as saying every movie has to be "high art", - or "overwrought deconstruction of modern human sexuality retold as 4 movements of the lives of people" in your words ;-) .
What you've done is use the timeworn rhetorical device of taking someone's point of view and try to (rhetorically vs logically) invalidate it by positing an absurd opposite.
I think Avatar sucks except for the visuals. Bad plot, bad dialogue bad acting. None of this implies preferring "pedantic art flicks" as an alternative (this is your cute rhetoric at work - the unwarranted exaggeration of my stance).
Well, the story is a combination of typical archetypes retold with pretty pictures. That much I cannot argue about. And I think that what you are really saying by "the plot sucked" is "it's too archetype driven". I'm basing this on:
>I personally found the warmed over "Stupid White Man penetrates exotic closed society and rises to be leader of it, seducing the native woman" plot tiresome, repetitive and tedious
Sure the characters ranged from a bit 2-d (the Col.) to well fleshed out (Neytiri (watch it again if you don't believe me)) and the acting ranged from "will probably win an award it was so good" Saldana to "thanks for showing up and picking up your paycheck" Weaver. But that's nothing different than you'll find in almost every movie -- the principles are fleshed out and the supporting cast is flat.
Why can't we have more 'smart' movies like Erin Brockovich/Schindler's List/Fight Club/District 9/Oldboy/etc. (archetypes of David vs. Goliath, Greed and Bullies) or The Incredibly True Story of Two Teenagers In Love/Léon/American Beauty/Mississippi Masala/South Pacific/Moulin Rouge/West Side Story etc. (Forbidden Love) or Lawrence of Arabia/Dune/Hunt for Red October/etc. (Lovable Turncoat)... you ask? And I'd counter that all of those are as archetype driven as any other well known flick (archetype stories provided in parens).
You see where I'm going with this. Even if you don't agree with all my movie choices as being "good" or "smart" you'll at least have to agree that most movies that are at least reasonably well known are pretty much based on a dissection or aggregation of common archetypes. How many times has Romeo and Juliet been retold almost verbatim? And by and large the audience enjoys these things and says "oh the plot was so good" when really, they are just a rehash of old story ideas. We even group movies into archetype driven categories "love story", "ghost story", "suspense", etc.
So yes, I was being "cute" with my notional art-house flick. But if you want to find something not driven by archetypes, where the artists consciously try to avoid those things, you have to go there, or to France or Italy perhaps. Here, http://www.imdb.com/chart/top this is the top 250 movies on IMDB not by dollars but by rating. How many of these are "smart" movies meaning "not a rehash of archetypes"? Very few if any.
It's pretty simple really, if you don't want your intelligence to be insulted (meaning you don't want an archetype driven story), you end up with a movie about a vapid cowgirl/model with giant thumbs or a movie director that can't focus on making movies because he's too busy with all his mistresses (which is actually just a retelling of the "guy with too many girlfriends archetype"). And given that non-archetype driven movies are typically poorly rated and attended by the open public, either you are particularly "smart" or those movies tend to suck.
"You see where I'm going with this. Even if you don't agree with all my movie choices as being "good" or "smart" you'll at least have to agree that most movies that are at least reasonably well known are pretty much based on a dissection or aggregation of common archetypes."
which all has nothing to do with what I said. You are reacting to your own opinions what you think is the sharp division of movies into either a collection of dumb stereotypes on one extreme (where Avatar fits) or "art movies" on the other..
Since this discussion looks increasingly pointless, I will end this thread here. Thank You for your time.
>I personally found the warmed over "Stupid White Man penetrates exotic closed society and rises to be leader of it, seducing the native woman" plot tiresome, repetitive and tedious.
to mean, in the general sense "I personally found the warmed over archetype and cliche driven plot to be tiresome, repetitive and tedious."
But now I see by your infantile "I'm right, you're wrong, end of discussion fingers in ears Nya nya nya nya I can't hear you" childishness (to wit)
>Since this discussion looks increasingly pointless, I will end this thread here. Thank You for your time.
That I should have just linked you to Amazon's Disney Princess store instead of Netflix; and related "Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs" and "Little Mermaid" to you instead of "8 1/2" and "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" as that would have been much more at your level.
Is as vapid a retelling of "guy with too many girlfriends" as any other. It simply creates an easily escapable artificial conflict that's better told in the form of a summer teen comedy.
Can't make a movie? Get less drama in your life. Situation movie solved.
It wasn't improved any when they added another 1/2 to it.
There's an interesting discussion going on at Matthew Yglesias's site - http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/12/the-racia... While his short summary of Avatar is pretty far off the mark, I thought the comparison to Dune was pretty on-point. The comments are also worth reading.
Who cares about the plot? It's beautiful. Amazingly, wonderfully, brilliantly beautiful.
There is a wonderfully realistic, fully immersive, 3D environment right outside my office window right now, but I don't care.
Want to know why?
Because the plot is boring. I get out of my chair, walk to my car, go to the gas-station, and then go home to play with my dog and go to bed.
The end.
People go to movies because it is better than reality. Perhaps those who never leave their couch are wowed by images that look exactly like reality, but Avatar's visual effects wowed me only in a "well, it looks like they finally did it properly!" sense. No offense to anyone who worked on this film, it is a staggering technical achievement, but it doesn't really do anything that reality doesn't.
/this might be due to my being a bit bitter that I can't see the 3D version due to my non-stereoscopic vision :(.
> but it doesn't really do anything that reality doesn't.
Apparently you live on Pandora,
where you can look at the office window right now and see the alien planet with floating mountains, giant six legged carnivores, pack hunters, bio-luminescent forests, two kinds (count them 2) of flying dragons and 12 foot tall blue skinned people with tails and braids with autonomous nerve endings at the end that can mentally bond with all of the above (sans the flying mountains).
Egan gets your point entirely, and laments that it hasn't been put in service of something better. The best technology in the world deserves to be joined with a great script, not a severely impaired one.
All new technologies are first paired with non-risky material.
So they use a non-risky script, with nothing objectionable in it.
Once the technology matures you can use a better script. The price of better is that sometimes it's worse, that's why it's a risk. If it was a sure thing everyone would do it, but it's not easy to create something great. You can try, and sometimes you'll make it, and other times you'll flop.
Which is too much of a risk for a new technology - better to have something good enough, with little risk.
Why are you repeating the points Egan already made as though they were novel? He says in his review the same things as you're saying.
"Sometime in the next twenty years or so, the technology that enabled Avatar will become cheap enough to risk employing alongside a moderately intelligent script." - it's right there in the review.
It's frustrating when this happens:
Author: A, yet also B. You may think that C, but I'd argue that D makes that untenable.
Commenter: He said A, but clearly C.
Another commenter: Hmm, C you say? But what about D?
Another commenter: y'all are too swept up in your As and Cs and Ds, have you even stopped to consider B?
Digression: I felt this comment of yours sounded much more natural than the Russian translation you posted on your blog, even though you're a native Russian speaker. And people still ask me why I prefer to make complex arguments in English!
Because it wasn't a humans are evil, kill them all plot, it was a standard corporations are evil and stupid and scientists are good and help the natives plot. Humans were the good guys here as well as the bad.
The point is that the movie could have been so much more. The visuals are incredible, I think the best ever done so far, that's what makes it all the more unfortunate that the story was weak. With a strong plot, and the visuals this movie could have been over the top, goosebumps incredible. Instead I went out of the movie theater sad that all this incredible artistry was wasted and what a shame that was.
I think Cameron lost it. The story was a nothing, and there were a few lines in there so bad, you don't even often see their equal on terrible sitcom TV. They were cheesy video game cut scene bad, only the godhead visual prevented me from wincing.
I'd still recommend for folks to see this movie, it is incredible, but what a shame...
If you're reviewing a movie then the weakness of the plot is something valid to comment on. Plot is usually considered an important part of a movie. I was enthralled by the movie from beginning to end; my friend was squirming in his seat and commenting on how long it was. Different people like different things about movies.
I would argue it is to do with the medium. The feature length film needs a plot to sustain interest, for me and apparently at least a few other people. If it's just a technology demo then it can be over and done with in 10 minutes - in Avatar they could have just started with the final battle. If Avatar were such a tech demo, then your comment would be unassailable, but as it is as a film is a bit lack-lustre.
Complaining about the plot does seem like complaining about the font in a copy of War and Peace. Avatar is a combination of world-building and world-rendering on a scale never before seen.
I plan to see the film tomorrow, but the video game does give credit to the world-building aspect. I was quite ambivalent about the key materiel being called unobtainium at first, but after reading a backstory article, it seems quite appropriate. Perhaps the movie itself is just part of it, but overall he seems to have brought forth a detailed universe, even if it is only glossed over in the movie.
Who cares about the plot? It's beautiful. Amazingly, wonderfully, brilliantly beautiful.