The Problem With Avatar
On the one hand, people have complained about terrible writing, one-dimensional characters, and a plot that is plainly derivative from other movies.
On the other hand, people have compared the movie to Star Wars: Cameron has created a whole new world, using wholly new technology, that will change forever the way movies are made and the way we perceive our own world.
I think both sides in this debate are wrong.
Let’s take the Star Wars comparison seriously. Star Wars has vastly worse dialogue than Avatar. Try reading a transcript of each: it’s not even close. The epic badness of Star Wars’ writing is legendary. Avatar is merely standard-issue Hollywood writing – perfectly serviceable if utterly unmemorable.
One-dimensional characters? Jake Sully is hardly complex. But he’s Hamlet compared to Luke Skywalker. And Luke is the most complex of all the characters in the original Star Wars!
Derivative plotting? Yes, Avatar is pretty plainly lifted from Dances With Wolves, Ferngully, Princess Mononoke, etc. But Star Wars was not only practically hand-copied from Joseph Campbell, huge chunks of it are visually lifted from other movies. The ball-turret gunner scene? The race through the trench to destroy the Death Star? The look of C3PO? Again, I’m not going out on a limb here: George Lucas stole anything that wasn’t nailed down.
And the “spiritual politics” can’t be the problem with Avatar either – unless we’re willing to damn Star Wars in the same breath, as the two movies are close kin here as well.
So why did I find Avatar disappointing?
Because it did not create a whole new world – at least not for me.
Pandora basically looks like South America, with a few touches that recall coral reefs and fauna with a vaguely Jurassic Park look. And the reason people assume the Na’vi are supposed to be stand-ins for Native Americans or whatnot is that Cameron didn’t make them alien enough. Why, for example, is their social structure so familiar when they have cognitive abilities that are wildly different from those of humans?
Avatar is a science-fiction failure because Cameron didn’t grapple seriously with making a race of aliens, or an alien world. Science fiction abounds in authors who did so grapple – Frank Herbert, Ursula Leguin, Orson Scott Card, the team of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It’s not like it can’t be done. But if your eye is on the bottom line, it probably makes sense to stay well inside your audience’s comfort zone.
And then there’s Star Wars. No, there’s not much new realized there – but boy, does it all come together in a way we’d never seen before. The universe of Star Wars doesn’t make any sense at all; the plot and story are hackneyed; the writing is dreadful; huge chunks of the movie are stolen outright. But the whole is so much more than the sum of its parts: a persuasive and convincing whole. A whole new world. And images from that movie have become iconic: the first time we see Darth Vader; the droids huddled in the Jawas’ landcrawler; the bar in Mos Eisely; the spaceships! The Millenium Falcon, TIE fighters, X-wing fighters! These were new creations, things we had not seen, things that, in fact, made no sense at all when you thought about them, but that worked – that were and will be remembered.
Maybe it’s just because I’m not seven years old anymore, but I didn’t feel that way about Avatar. Avatar felt like someplace I’d been before. I mean, what have they got to match up against a TIE fighter? A six-legged horse with a USB port? That’s a failure – a profound failure – on really the only terms that matter for a film like this.
The crux of my problem with all these white liberals feeling guilty about white liberal guilt in “reviews” of Avatar is this: they all speak from the assumption that everyone knows that European settlers committed a genocide against American Indians, and that everyone agrees that this was a crime against humanity. But everyone most certainly does not believe the former or agree with the latter. It takes seconds of Googling to find out that there are quite a few people who justify the treatment of the American Indians by white settlers, and quite a large proportion of those justify it with appeals to the idea that the American Indians were just inherently of less value than the Europeans. Yet so many of these attacks on Avatar spend all of their time excoriating James Cameron for the attitude that the history of genocide against American Indians is something shameful and criminal in our history, and precisely none of their time recognizing that, in fact, the real battle isn’t yet another game of liberal-on-liberal oneupsmanship, but to prove the humanity and rights of American Indians from centuries ago in the first place.
And this is the disease, writ large, that infects modern American liberalism; far, far too many liberals are too busy sniping at each other, calling each other out for white guilt and trying to prove their “iconoclasm” rather than wrestling with the profound moral issues that, contrary to what they think, have not been settled.
— Freddie · Jan 11, 03:57 PM · #
“The only terms that matter” should probably refer to box-office take (and merchandising, I suppose).
— sammler · Jan 11, 03:59 PM · #
sammler: I meant: the only artistic terms that matter.
— Noah Millman · Jan 11, 04:12 PM · #
“But I was going to Tashi Station to pick up some power converters!”
Noah, that’s a really good way of looking at it. And I largely agree.
As an aside, you might have seen this already, but the transcript of the Lucas, Spielberg, Kasdan Raiders of the Lost Ark story conference is a great read, particularly Lucas. He comes across as something of a constructor-set genius.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jan 11, 04:20 PM · #
What is with the hipster doofus fetish for crapping on STAR WARS? It seems as though a certain segment of the folks who grew up with the film now must prove how grown up they are by trashing what they loved, creating a modern myth that STAR WARS was a piece of garbage that only suceeded because it magically tapped into a culture zeitgeist. It did do that, but it’s also a really well made adventure film.
Take the whole dialog issue for example. How can anyone say that AVATAR had better dialog than STAR WARS? Could you remember one line of dialog from AVATAR three hours after you saw it? Do you think anyone’s going to be quoting AVATAR 20 years from now? And no, most of the time folks quote from STAR WARS, they’re not doing so ironically.
Sheesh.
Mike
— MBunge · Jan 11, 04:46 PM · #
I agree with Mike. Whatever deficiencies you think Star Wars might have, the original trilogy is exciting, moving and fun. And you give a shit about the characters years after watching the movies.
— Freddie · Jan 11, 05:02 PM · #
It seems to me that all conservatives have to say anymore is…..get off my lawn!
i went again (IMAX 3D) with my young cousins yesterday and watched them reach out to touch the luminous spores and gasp at the dire horses and banshees and cheer when the obviously american military-industrial complex got kerbstomped by insurgents with bows and arrows.
One more time, Camerons GOAL is to make us fall in love with Pandora.
Avatar II is already in the works.
Passing Titanic in revenues?
Avatar is a new film paradigm….it already the most pirated movie evah….but you can’t pirate 3D IMAX.
— matoko_chan · Jan 11, 05:11 PM · #
(great, safe topic for my first post here. So… hi)
My wife and I saw Avatar in IMAX 3D this past weekend.
You mention: “Why, for example, is their social structure so familiar when they have cognitive abilities that are wildly different from those of humans?” I don’t agree that their cognitive abilities are presented as wildly different, other than the possibilities introduced by the USB port.
Yes the social and physical model is clearly based on earth’s indigenous peoples. I will admit that I can’t recall the last-time the depiction of an alien race has actually blown me away… but I haven’t been 14 for a long time. I’m no longer that interested in alien depictions that look like acid trips, seafood pasta or plumbing accidents, either.
For me the movie’s main flaw is that it actually tried to provide too many small “arcs” in it’s 2 hours and 40 min, and as a consequence all these mini-stories had by necessity to be presented in precis form, which usually means going to shorthand, or cliches. And so, the aliens aren’t that alien, sorry.
Nonetheless, there was enough novelty and enough story cohesiveness that for us it hung together for the whole time.
And the technical achievement… woah (to quote Keanu). I saw very few compromises or artifacts of an immature or incomplete technology. The marriage of real and computer-generated imagery was astounding, and we did not see any technical glitch or error, or botched or implausible motion, so we were able to remain fully engrossed in the film. Even the 3D remained natural and did not distract.
I can only compare this to Pixar films, which always seem to have story quality that eclipses the technical achievement, as great as they are. Do I think Avatar has a Pixar-grade story? No, not quite, but darn near.
All told, I think Avatar is both a technical game-changer and a very good movie, worthy of comparison with Star-Wars.
— Artful Codger · Jan 11, 05:28 PM · #
“Avatar II is already in the works.”
AVATAR II: NUKED FROM ORBIT will be the first 5 minute long sequel in movie history.
Mike
— MBunge · Jan 11, 05:34 PM · #
Mike, Freddie: sorry, I take it for granted that everyone thinks that Star Wars is phenomenal, and somehow is phenomenal in spite of its obvious deficiencies.
As for quoting the dialogue: we might have all memorized it mostly because we were kids. My son’s already running around quoting Avatar.
But maybe I’m not giving enough credit. For every clunky line like “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy” or “Good against remotes is one thing. Good against the living, that’s something else” you’ve got lines like “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for” or “What an incredible smell you’ve discovered” that sing forever.
So maybe I should just say that the writing achieves much more than you’d think it could. Or something.
As for the technical achievement: I totally agree: it’s huge. But what it mostly makes me think is: finally they can make a movie of A Mote in God’s Eye!
— Noah Millman · Jan 11, 05:43 PM · #
“Mike, Freddie: sorry, I take it for granted that everyone thinks that Star Wars is phenomenal, and somehow is phenomenal in spite of its obvious deficiencies.”
My point is that I constantly run into folks online who refer to STAR WARS and massively exaggerate its deficiencies, as though a film about people with laser swords and planet-sized space stations should be written and performed on the level of THE GODFATHER or APOCALYPSE NOW.
I mean, for pete’s sake, just compare the original trilogy to the freakin’ prequels. The differences in storytelling quality are fairly stark.
Mike
— MBunge · Jan 11, 05:59 PM · #
Sith is fantastic, though. Some Lucasian excesses, to be sure, but in my opinion right up there with Empire.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jan 11, 06:06 PM · #
Yes, but why would they want to? (I hope they don’t. My wife keeps saying “on the gripping hand” when explaining some trichotomy. I don’t think I could survive if everyone started doing it.)
I mean I guess it’s your one good piece of conservative sci-fi, but that’s not saying much. The crowning achivement of Avatar is that it has finally made the Battle Angel Alita/Gunnm movie possible. Been waiting for that for years. I know matoko-chan is with me on this one.
— Chet · Jan 11, 06:08 PM · #
Noah –
Star Wars was space fantasy – not science fiction. And Avatar really was more of a science fiction story than Star Wars, but it sure could have been better science fiction and certainly could have grappled with the issues it sought to address with more depth and care.
— E.D. Kain · Jan 11, 06:10 PM · #
Chet: one good piece of conservative sci-fi? So Heinlein never wrote anything worth reading?
Not that I’m suggesting most good sci-fi is conservative; I think you’d be hard-pressed to apply that label to Asimov, Clarke, Dick, Leguin, Card . . . But in the other corner there’s Heinlein, Pournelle, Niven, Anderson . . .
I don’t think there’s much correlation between the politics and the power of the works. The weaknesses of Mote all relate to the politics – the absurd portrayal of the scientists, for example. The strengths all relate to the portrayal of a truly alien society.
As for Battle Angel: you do know Cameron’s directing that as well, right?
— Noah Millman · Jan 11, 06:15 PM · #
Noah, you are being unfair to Princess Mononoke. While that film may ultimately come down on the same—in my opinion, mistaken—side of the issue, its depiction of all points of view is infinitely more sympathetic and intelligent than Avatar’s brainless manicheanism. That is why it is worth watching, while Avatar is not.
— Carl Edman · Jan 11, 06:24 PM · #
Let me add that the possibility of making an intelligent movie pushing for Avatar’s point of view, as demonstrated by Princess Mononoke, only serves to further indict Mr. Cameron’s abilities as film maker.
— Carl Edman · Jan 11, 06:27 PM · #
Noah….I want the the Ringworld. All kinds of aliens!
Another thing you XY are missing, is how verry much us warrior grrls dig Neytiri.
She’s River Tam and Taarna the Tarakian (and battleangel).
Princess Leia was a wuss, I never dug her.
In Na’vi society grrls can be hunters and warriors, they are exact peers.
They do exactly the same rite of passage as the boiz, riding a dire horse, bonding with a banshee.
I imagine the kids in the Avatar audience cheering the crash of the makeshift bomber and Quaritch’s gunship are the EXACT analog of those long ago kids that cheered the explosion of the deathstar.
That I guess grew up to be you.
:)
— matoko_chan · Jan 11, 06:28 PM · #
Carl, Avatar has EXACTLY the same theme as Mononoke Hime and Nausicca, and is a far more sophisticated movie in weaving earth myths into its mytho-poeisis.
You may not have the background to “get” it is all, but Cameron isnt exactly subtle in some spots.
Grace AUGUSTINE?
if it was a snake it would have bit you.
— matoko_chan · Jan 11, 06:32 PM · #
Noah, we disagree only in that I think Pandora itself is a work of very good science fiction. The Na’vi, of course, not so much, and I think Cameron made that decision deliberately based on commercial concerns.
As I said in my review, “Think about it this way: in terms of the science of Pandora, Cameron’s work is grounded in modern science fiction, even if it does shade some things more towards fantasy. In terms of the Na’vi though, Cameron’s work is grounded in the golden age of pulp.
It’s as if Kim Stanley Robinson re-imagined Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom, but left the various Martian cultures completely intact.”
— Erik Siegrist · Jan 11, 06:39 PM · #
In a word? No. The best of Heinlein trickles down second-hand; it’s best avoided directly from the source.
— Chet · Jan 11, 06:47 PM · #
Oh, I think you’ve got Card in the wrong column, there. His fiction is pretty neo-con.
Niven? Pournelle? Not on Clarke’s league, I’m afraid. Pournelle’s best work was as a computer columnist. My wife has to forget everything she knows about women to read Niven without laughing (or getting angry.)
I may have been wrong; Card may have been your best. Ender’s Game may be the best conservative SF.
Is it truly alien? I always understood “Crazy Eddie” to be a stereotype that readers, especially conservative readers who lived through the 60’s, were supposed to find incredibly familiar. Reading “Mote” as a young man in the early 90’s it was the human society that I found incredibly strange.
It’s a long-understood problem in SF that the more alien an alien is, the worse the novel is. Human readers need stories to be about humans – even humans in alien suits. If there’s a genre that is able to do a better job of having truly inhuman characters, I think it’s cyberpunk, simply because computers (and computer intelligences) are the aliens we’re already familiar with.
Personally, I think it’s a good thing. Our first real contact with non-human intelligence should be something new, something we can’t predict or forsee in our fiction. It should be something we bring as few preconceptions to. I’m glad it’s something our fiction can’t successfully model.
Oh, quite. He’s held the legal rights for almost a decade, now. His involvement is the only reason I’ve ever believed the movie is a possibility.
— Chet · Jan 11, 07:05 PM · #
I’m deeply upset that Cameron presents, without even acknowledging the fierce moral issues involved, the Navi’s exploitation of the Mountain Banshees. They were ridden into a war that had nothing to do with them, and many of them died for it. (Hey Navi: the Banshees aren’t just resources to be used and thrown away, y’know!)
Doesn’t Pandora have a NETA? Or is ‘animal cruelty’ truly the last acceptable chauvinism in this selfish, blighted universe?
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jan 11, 07:09 PM · #
Who is the Han Solo of Avatar? Where is Obi Wan Kenobi? At the time Star Wars was made Joseph Cambpell was not what he is now. Star Wars was “like first looking into Chapman’s Homer.” It was Balboa and the Pacific. Avatar is more like finding the Hudson River. Big but not comparable.
— jjv · Jan 11, 07:12 PM · #
Matoko,
Princess Mononoke is more sophisticated as a story than Avatar. All characters are flawed, all are sypathetic the ending is ambiguous…. As far as literary values PM is much more spohisticated than avatar.
You seem to like how Avatar upload to/downloads from popular culture. This is afunction of the type of movie Cameron makes. Simple story grounded in current popular mythology. He makes expensive hollywood movies which are by definition smiple story grounded in current popular mythology. They have to be or they can’t make the money back. I’m not disparaging this, the Odysse was astructurally simple story grounded in then current popular mythology.
Mononoke is not this. Myazaki is an auture. He makes movies based on his personal obsessions and vision. He is a genius. If you showed mononoke to Avatar audiences, at least half of them would hate it. It’s too weird, scary, ambiguous. Too sophisticated for the mass market.
— cw · Jan 11, 07:19 PM · #
Regarding Star Wars – set aside the fact that Noah isn’t slagging the movie, he is praising it overall. The writing specifically – it’s pretty bad overall. Objectively. Bad dialogue? Check. Cardboard thin characters? Check. Derivative? Check. Plot holes? Check.
But that said, I want to offer a qualified defense to it. Quoting a Wash Post review of another movie (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/09/AR2009070902567.html):
“But to call a movie well written is far more than a question of dialogue — in fact, most filmmakers agree that dialogue is the least of it. Instead, good movie writing comes down to what defines good writing in general: a command of structure, voice and momentum, all in the service of a story that grabs spectators by their throats, then leads them along a path they simply must follow or they won’t be able to eat, sleep or lead a happy life.”
By that measure, I think Star Wars does … okay. Well enough that, combined with the other strengths of the movie (the visuals, for its time; Harrision Ford; the power of the underlying story, unoriginal as it may have been, etc.), it’s a well deserved classic.
And I think by those standards Avatar comes out pretty well as well.
— LarryM · Jan 11, 07:26 PM · #
But what it mostly makes me think is: finally they can make a movie of A Mote in God’s Eye!
Not. A. Chance. Hollywood can’t make, and Americans wouldn’t watch, a movie which takes seriously the idea that aliens might be nice, smart, cultured, and in need of exterminating. And you have to take that idea seriously if there’s to be any heft in the plot.
— Adam Greenwood · Jan 11, 07:27 PM · #
Or get investment in. It’s one thing to make a commercial blockbuster. Ambiguous art with challenging themes, that’s something else.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jan 11, 07:33 PM · #
I don’t know – I think most sci-fi is a little conservative – or at least libertarian. It’s cautionary for the most part, and it cautions especially against humans taking technology and hubris too far – that is at least ostensibly conservative I would think. Maybe not modern GOP conservative, but conservative nonetheless. Science fiction is so often about hypothetical dystopias – how could it not be a little conservative?
— E.D. Kain · Jan 11, 07:43 PM · #
Has this thread seriously gone on this long without a single reference to The Hidden Fortress? For shame, my fellow nerds. For shame!
— Tom Meyer · Jan 11, 07:54 PM · #
What was the Star Wars mythos?
Knights and princesses, lords and emperors, the tao of the force, paduan apprentice/learners and wisemen/wizards.
Avatar mythos-the Tree, the garden, betrayal, temptation, the Fall, unity of existence, the balance of life…..
Messiah/avatar.
In hindu mythos, an avatar is an incarnation of a deity, usually an aspect of Vishnu (the creator), in the form of a man, animal, or mythological creature.
Cameron is EXACTLY like Miyazaki in that he has made a gorgeous autonomous world for us to love and explore. Miyazaki often uses books to do his worldbuilding on….Howl is a YA novel for example, Cameron and Lucas rolled their own.
Lucas built a galaxy where Miyazaki and Cameron have made worlds……so far.
;)
And man….E.D….“scifi is conservative???”
some scifi is conservative, some is liberal, but it is all the paradigm of test driving the future before we get there.
sheesh. are you now attending the University of Wrong with Joe Carter?
— matoko_chan · Jan 11, 08:01 PM · #
“If you showed mononoke to Avatar audiences, at least half of them would hate it. It’s too weird, scary, ambiguous.”
yeah, cuz Miyazaki is japanese, lol.
Do you know the only other anime I have ever seen a totoro in?
One of the floats in the doll-parade in Innosensu.
— matoko_chan · Jan 11, 08:08 PM · #
I saw Avatar and loved it. Terrific movie. Good show. I liked the coral reef/jungle. The 3-D (finally!) made the film look better and it was almost never gratuitous or intrusive.
As you say, there were no real characters, just stereotypes — then again, Aeschylus. The story is so trite that David Brooks’ two word plot summary, “White Messiah”, is really all you need to know about it. But. The story of Hoosiers is as trite as they come and that’s one of the better, if not one of the best movies, of recent decades.
The aliens are a romantic mish-mash of human stereotypes. True, but I find even fewer credible aliens in books or movies than you do. Even the Moties seem awfully human to me. To my mind, the best – most different – aliens that I have run across are those in Vernor Vinge’s Deepness in the Sky and in his Fire Upon the Deep. Of course, in Deepness, he makes many of his human characters both recognizable and very alien to us at the same time.
— bill.who · Jan 11, 08:11 PM · #
bill, who do think are MORE alien…moties or Piersen’s puppeteers?
lol we shud have a poll.
— matoko_chan · Jan 11, 08:22 PM · #
“yeah, cuz Miyazaki is japanese, lol”
It’s not just that he’s japanese, though the Japanese are profoundly weird. But all kids and parents can relate to Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery service, so he can make movies that mainstream for audiences. But Mononoke has strange charachters and is in no way a three act hollywood movie and has a not just ambiguous but contradictory ending. It is ART. That’s why it is not suitable for mass audience. Avatar is popular art. That is in no way a disparagement. It just means it has certain self-imposed constraints.
— cw · Jan 11, 08:40 PM · #
ooo…..Cameron also owns the rights to Ringworld.
9th October 2001
Larry was Guest of Honor at the Albacon convention this past weekend and announced that on 6th October Larry, Robert Mandel and James Cameron ……. (yes JAMES CAMERON), had signed a deal to make the Ringworld Movie.
Dan Procopio, who attended the convention reported that Larry “was very excited and said, ‘Imagine seeing a Pierson’s Puppeteer coming at you on screen.’ No other details about the movie were forthcoming, although Larry did talk about his ongoing projects including the fourth sequel to Ringworld, the forthcoming novelRingworld’s Children.
— matoko_chan · Jan 11, 08:41 PM · #
okfine, My Dark Master.
Mononoke Hime is Art, Avatar is pop art……and Star Wars is pop art.
;)
— matoko_chan · Jan 11, 08:44 PM · #
“It’s as if Kim Stanley Robinson re-imagined Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom, but left the various Martian cultures completely intact.””
OT, but has there been any movement on the “Princess of Mars” movie, or did that get killed once they hired whatsisass that directed “Sky Captain?” I, for one, would LOVE to see The Martian Tales on the big screen.
Orson Scott Card, like most good fiction writers, is a little too hard to identify as conservative or liberal in his novels (for all that I don’t actually care for his books, I have to admit his talent). Besides, who better to write science fiction than a man who believes that when he dies he becomes a god on his very own planet?
For me, all that “Avatar” really means is maybe Iain M. Banks’ “Culture” novels can get some big screen love.
— Erik Vanderhoff · Jan 11, 08:47 PM · #
bill who
I put up a comment saying how I wanted them to make a movie of Deepness (he said, wildly gesticularing with his eating hands) but it got ate. That is one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time.
What about Ken McCloud’s Fall Revoloution series? That would make a much better book disccusion for TAS than the ridiculous USA which no one has ever actually made it through.
— cw · Jan 11, 08:49 PM · #
To answer my own question, IMDb has two versions of “The Princess of Mars” in development: A crappy “SyFy” channel type version starring Antonio Sabato Jr. and Traci Lords (I feel dirty just typing that) and a much much more interesting version penned by Michael Chabon and starring, among others, Willem Dafoe and James Purefoy.
— Erik Vanderhoff · Jan 11, 08:55 PM · #
“okfine, My Dark Master.
Mononoke Hime is Art, Avatar is pop art……and Star Wars is pop art.
;)”
I’m glad you see it my way young Matoko. I wouldn’t want to have give you the claw hand.
Also, In my very great post that got ate I mentions Banks, one of my other favorite authors. I would really like to see the those huge floating creatures from Look to Windward.
— cw · Jan 11, 08:58 PM · #
<em>For me, all that “Avatar” really means is maybe Iain M. Banks’ “Culture” novels can get some big screen love.</em>
Please! This is exactly what I thought, too.
— rob · Jan 11, 09:21 PM · #
Anyone complaining about the politics of Avatar (supposedly anti-American, supposedly anti-capitalist etc.) is just being silly. The movie is way too derivative and superficial to deserve such treatment.
I agree that Pandora should have been MUCH more “other-worldly” considering it’s mostly a CGI film. E.g. Cameron & co. could have done any kinds of computer-generated flora, yet they mostly settled for a computer imitation of tropical rain forests from Earth. The color of the sky, lighting conditions and colors in general would be different on a planet orbiting a cool dwarf star (or a hotter white star for that matter). It’s disappointing Avatar explores very few of those possibilities.
MARCU$
— mlindroo · Jan 11, 09:59 PM · #
I’m enjoying following the combox on this one; just jumping in to make one correction: I don’t believe I said anything derogatory about Princess Mononoke, which I think is brilliant. Lady Iboshi is quite an interesting movie “villain” and Ashitaka a very rare hero for trying not to pick sides. Princess Mononoke is, story-wise, so many leagues ahead of something like Avatar that we’re really not talking about the same kind of movie at all.
— Noah Millman · Jan 11, 10:16 PM · #
When did the term “combox” get invented?
— cw · Jan 11, 11:03 PM · #
It wasn’t a new world, but I did find a setting that took the time to establish a world in which pantheism/animism actually worked was rather well realized. Admittedly, the scale of that world isn’t that huge in scope nor is it especially alien. However, I did find the world interesting and reasonably internally consistent (although I don’t think it could evolve naturally) which is enough to consider it not a sci-fi failure in my book.
I certainly also believe that Princess Mononoke is a far superior film artistically (I’m a huge fan of Lady Eboshi), but I do think that some of the visuals in the filmed evoked a live action Miyazaki which I certainly intend as a high compliment.
— GregSanders · Jan 11, 11:31 PM · #
I’m with you on the “new world” front, Noah, but your answer to the first point is non-responsive. You can agree that Star Wars’ dialogue, characters, and plot are worse without in any way conceding that Avatar’s isn’t terrible too. (If Star Wars is the gold standard in movie-making, we’re in trouble.)
I fully hear you regarding the lack of “alien-ness” for the Na’vi, and think this point isn’t made often enough by critics. The world is less of an analogue for Earth – as, say, Dune was – than a duplication of it.
— Geoff · Jan 11, 11:32 PM · #
I’d come very close to selling my soul for a Ringworld movie. I want to see Ringworld before I die. The story not so much.
— Keid A · Jan 12, 12:17 AM · #
SPOILER ALERT
I shared Jake’s boyish wonder at Pandora.
I dig Neytiri and her sexy slimness.
I absolutely loved how Neytiri didn’t kill Jake because of a “superstition”.
I sympathized with Jake’s complications when he felt his avatar was his real self, shuttling between scientists who dissed him and military that abandoned him.
I felt the romance beat between Jake and Neytiri.
I shared Neytiri’s sense of utter betrayal at Jake.
I felt a deep sense of loss when the Giant Tree was destroyed.
I got big-eyed for the magic of the Eywa.
I hated Col. Quaritch and the Sky People even though they were an extension of me.
I hoped and prayed Parker would have a change of heart.
I was happy Trudy had a change of heart.
I felt a great elation when retribution was finally achieved.
My take-away line soaked in eastern mysticism (on why innocents get killed in conflicts): “Eywa does not take sides, she only maintains the balance of life”.
Others: “What have we got to offer them – lite beer and blue jeans?”
I felt he was talking to everyone in the theater: “How does it feel to betray your own race?”
— t2 · Jan 12, 12:20 AM · #
Noah, other reviewers have said Avatar represents a Miyazaki world, and the balance of life, unity of existance is certainly one theme of Nausicca AND Mononoke. That said, I’ll concede to my Dark Master and say Star Wars and Avatar more alike ……pop culture works of art.
Avatar II is already being made….one guess is that Pandora was bio-engineered by a post-technological society that was Falling…as a sort of redemptive escape pod.
I HATED Lady Eboshi…..I am totally San.
;)
Now….Ringworld is my alltime favorite scifi novel evah….think about 4 or 5 Pandoras spread along the Ring in Throne….the fallen city people, the vamphyres, the kzinti, the Pak, the puppeteers…..a lot of room for imagining.
I think Cameron owns the scifi blockbuster genre for the forseeable future.
Just please don’t try to tell me Mononoke Hime has a “conservative” message.
I’ll cut you.
— matoko_chan · Jan 12, 12:30 AM · #
As far as i’m concerned there is no “conservative” message anymore …..you sold your souls to Kylon when McCain nominated Palin.
— matoko_chan · Jan 12, 12:48 AM · #
I suggest you play Halo. It’s not technically a ringworld, more like an orbital, but the visual effect is very similar.
— Chet · Jan 12, 12:55 AM · #
Chet,
I realized even as I read the first novel that Ringworld wasn’t gravitationally stable. I kept thinking, what a pity. Niven’s “fix” in later novels never really satisfied me.
— Keid A · Jan 12, 01:01 AM · #
I’ll stand by my first statement though.
There isn’t an Avatar problem….Noah…..Avatar has made 1.3 billion dollars…… the problem is you.
All conservatives have to say anymore…..the only message left of a once grand philosophy……is you damn kids get off my lawn!
That is all your crit of Avatar is.
— matoko_chan · Jan 12, 04:22 AM · #
David Henderson’s over at Econlog has an interesting take on Avatar.
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/01/avatar_as_a_def.html
— shecky · Jan 12, 05:08 AM · #
Vernor Vinge, Ken MacLeod, Ian M. Banks.
— cw · Jan 12, 05:19 AM · #
Thanks t2 for answering the critics who deride Avatar for not having enough emotions and memorable lines. One of my favorite lines when a defining moment reveals the inner soul of a person –
I see you
— pandora · Jan 12, 06:14 AM · #
“But what it mostly makes me think is: finally they can make a movie of A Mote in God’s Eye!”
Jerry Pournelle once told me about his lengthy meetings with James Cameron when he and Larry Niven sold Cameron an option on one of their other sci-fi novels. He just raved about Cameron as the ideal reader that any sci-fi author could ever want to have.
So, I suspect Cameron has more than enough talent to make “The Mote in God’s Eye,” but he’d rather be a technical innovator, and to be able to afford to do that, he has to make mass market sci-fi rather than high end sci-fi.
Cameron is a fascinating figure because he can push the envelope in any one of several places, but he still has to choose which place. So, he constantly disappoints people even while triumphing hugely.
— Steve Sailer · Jan 12, 07:13 AM · #
Hmmm. Avatar causes depression in some viewers.
— Keid A · Jan 12, 10:47 AM · #
My own son, who is somewhat older than Noah’s, came out of Avatar and almost immediately said, “Why did they make that when they could have made Dune?”
— sammler · Jan 12, 12:03 PM · #
The did make Dune, twice I think. David Lynch made one version. Sting and the guy from twin peaks was in it. Tell your son to wake up and smell the coffee.
— cw · Jan 12, 04:06 PM · #
They are making a new Dune, sammier, and these guyz will hate it too.
Dune has a lot of ARABIC and islamic/bedouin mytho-poeisis in it.
Didn’t you know Herbert modelled Paul Mua’did on Muhammed?
Perhaps we should make a taxonomy of Avatar criticism?
Noah’s falls into the Hey You Kids Get Off My Lawn School.
Both E.D. and Annalee fall into the White Guilt Over teh Aboriginals School.
Reihan is in the Don’t Crit My Capitalism/Military/Industrial/Complex School.
James is in the First Culture Intellectuals Try to Review a Third Culture Movie School.
Jonah Goldberg is in the All Butthurt Because People Hate WECs School.
Conor is actually the best of a bad lot..in that he at least gets that Cameron was worldbuilding Pandora.
Sailor—“So, I suspect Cameron has more than enough talent to make “The Mote in God’s Eye,” but he’d rather be a technical innovator, and to be able to afford to do that, he has to make mass market sci-fi rather than high end sci-fi.
Cameron is a fascinating figure because he can push the envelope in any one of several places, but he still has to choose which place. So, he constantly disappoints people even while triumphing hugely.”
I think one reason Cameron made Avatar first is that it is HIS story, that HE wrote when he was a child.
He made Avatar so that he can make Ringworld and Battleangel and Mote later on….because Avatar is a GINORMOUS financial success and will show extreme high tech worldbuilding is cost-viable.
Sadface for conservos and Andrew Breitbart, because Cameron is definitely NOT a “conservative”…and film is one of the organs of culture.
— matoko_chan · Jan 12, 04:14 PM · #
…film is one of the organs of culture.
maybe even the heart.
<3
— matoko_chan · Jan 12, 04:32 PM · #
Sorry to chime in just to say something negative, but I started Mote in God’s Eye awhile back and couldn’t make it through 50 pages, I think. Talk about bad dialogue, Noah. I trust there’s some really cool theoretical world-building going on later in the book, but a novel is more than a good idea.
But, hey, my idea of great science fiction is Ray Bradbury, which most hard-sci-fi folks would scoff at. Give me Martian Chronicles over any Asimov book any day.
— Chris Floyd · Jan 12, 04:36 PM · #
Greetings to one and all: In that most precious name. That name which is above every name, the name: “Jesus”
There’s tremendous power in that name. I’d suppose we’ll never fully realize all that can truly be accomplished, by us simply calling out that name in true faith.
There’s an old, old, gospel song that goes like this: Faith in the Father, faith in the Son, faith in the Holy Spirit, great victories are won. Demons will tremble and sinners will awake, faith in Jehovah will anything shake.
For you who have never come into this realization, if you’re reading this, just give him a welcome into your heart and life. You will both feel and see an awesome difference. You will have also purchased the ticket to heaven (by accepting, therefore making him welcome to come into your life. You will also sup from His cup that contains living water. (As did the woman at the well of Bethesda.) John 4:10
Much love,
Your brother in Christ Jesus, who is both our Lord, and Savior.
www.eloquentbooks.com/BeyondTheGoldenSunsetAndByTheCrystalSea.html
http://www.eloquentbooks.com/OffToVisitTheProphetElijah
— GuestWilliam Dunigan · Jan 12, 04:54 PM · #
^^ jesusspam.
niiiice.
;)
— matoko_chan · Jan 12, 06:25 PM · #
“I trust there’s some really cool theoretical world-building going on later in the book”
I think both AVATAR and DAYBREAKERS demonstrate that world-building has become a substitute for storytelling in a lot of genre entertainment.
Mike
— MBunge · Jan 12, 07:18 PM · #
I can say this about Avatar vs. Star Wars: less actors were harmed in the making of Avatar.
I mean who’s career wasn’t killed by it besides good ole Han? (I heard Greedo did a soap commercial)
— Geoff in DFW · Jan 12, 09:06 PM · #
Greetings to one and all: In that most precious name. That name which is above every name, the name: “Sting”
There’s tremendous power in that name. I’d suppose we’ll never fully realize all that can truly be accomplished, by us simply calling out that name in true faith.
— cw · Jan 13, 12:45 AM · #
Even his name is a killing word! Wait, no, that’s the other guy.
— Chet · Jan 13, 01:04 AM · #
This reminds of a great TV commercial I saw, I forget for what product, in which Sting is in a limousine and a group of clueless marketing people get in the car with him to talk about the product he is to pitch. When they get in the car, one of them says something like “Dune is one of my favorite films ever”, and he responds with a rather surprised and horrified glance. It probably would be a lot of fun to say that to him in real life.
— Mark in Houston · Jan 13, 02:49 AM · #
By Spock’s evil goatee! Chet, check out that picture you posted. That’s Jean Luc Picard there in the background. What the hell was he doing on Arrakis? He is in direct violation of the Prime Directive.
On side note, check out the codpiece on Sting (they don’t call him “Sting” for nothing).
— cw · Jan 13, 06:06 AM · #
Not at all. The Prime Directive only forbids interference in pre-warp civilizations.
— Chet · Jan 13, 04:23 PM · #
Douthat, or teh Pudgy-Reese-Witherspoon-Playah-Hatah as we on the left call him, weighs in (an I do mean weigh ) with another whiney pantheism sux, and why does ever one hate teh baby jesus post. So he falls into the school of first culture intellectuals trying to review third culture movies school, along with Poulos.
— matoko_chan · Jan 16, 09:33 PM · #
“On the other hand, people have compared the movie to Star Wars: Cameron has created a whole new world, using wholly new technology, that will change forever the way movies are made and the way we perceive our own world.“
And this isn’t wrong. Avatar represents the knee in the curve of full-immersion film technology, and represents cost-viable return on extreme tech.
Avatar may not be the Star Wars for this generation, but Avatar 1-3 + Ringworld + Battleangel sure hella will be.
:)
— matoko_chan · Jan 16, 09:44 PM · #
avatar wins the golden globe for best director. suck it! ;)
— pandora · Jan 18, 04:22 AM · #
ok, avatar also wins the golden globe for best movie drama. suck it again!!! ;););)
— pandora · Jan 18, 05:00 AM · #
Essay: Luminous 3-D Jungle Is a Biologist’s Dream
So it is time for all the biologists who have not yet done so to shut their laptops and run from their laboratories directly to the movie theaters, put on 3-D glasses and watch the film “Avatar.”
Please excuse me if I seem a bit breathless, but the experience I had when I first saw the film (in 2-D, no less) shocked me. I felt as if someone had filmed my favorite dreams from those best nights of sleep where I wander and play through a landscape of familiar yet strange creatures, taking a swim and noticing dinosaurs paddling by, going out for a walk and spying several entirely new species of penguins, going sledding with giant tortoises. Less than the details of the movie, it was, I realized, the same feeling of elation, of wonder at life.
By CAROL KAESUK YOON http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/y/carol_kaesuk_yoon/
Published: January 18, 2010
— t2 · Jan 19, 10:54 PM · #