Avatar Critique (and a locked thread)

News & General Discussion
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I’m going to see it this month with friends but I’m not really thrilled about it.

I’m sure I’ll enjoy the CGI feast but the thing that puts me off from the trailer and stills are the actual ‘aliens’. I know they had to make up an alien race that the audience can empathize with so they made them humanoid to appeal to the masses. Not only that but they made their features the same apart from the blue skin and feline eyes. Thats so Disney and totally unbelievable from the start. They even plaited their hair like humans too :roll:

I assumed that they would blow the $300 million budget producing life on Pandora that has never been seen before.

Am I alone on this?

The above is a thread I made yesterday on a well known CGI forum. It was locked instantly without explaination. I was simply giving critique on the aesthetic approach of the film (as a artist to another). If I had song it’s praise, the thread would still be open.

I came to the conclusion that the companies that created this film probably sponsor the site resulting in any bad press being removed. What do you think? (and on the aliens too) :smile:

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Tsk tsk, now then that’s not entirely truthful is it? I’ve seen that post and a reply was given to your thread with a link to the really big, obvious and hard to miss Avatar thread that already existed that everyone else was using and was exactly two threads beneath yours before your thread was closed. I don’t think the mods there needed to add a tautology.

With regards Avatar itself, I’ll skip it as the trailers do nothing for me personally and just seem to herald a movie full of preach and above average in game cinematics style CGI with zero plot or character. Thing is Cameron is a well known micro-manager, Avatar just is how it is simply because that’s exactly what the director wanted, it’s his “vision” and for some people that’s going to be awesome but for others not so much. If nothing else it’s uncompromising.

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Yes, I noticed a few other Avatar threads. If you made a thread with your thoughts on the content, it would probably have been locked too :roll:

I’ll go and watch the film expecting a Disney, cliche fairy tale. For some reason I just expected Cameron to produce something that would break the mold, rather than playng it so safe (considering how long it took to make and the expense) :smile:

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I feel similar to you about Avatar. I was very excited at first. I have the game and have played it for a while and find that it is full of cliche and stereotype. The native Pandora aliens seem to be a stereotype based on people from Trinidad or Jamaica. I wanted more, and am not so excited about the movie any more.

One thing, though. At this point in my life (42 years old with a degree in Fine Art, and another in the religion, philosophy and literature of China, India, and Japan) and after reading a lot of Joseph Campbell and Ken Wilber and others, I feel that I have a good grasp on the reach of the human mind’s use of symbol and myth, and how we use symbol and myth to create our world, our identity… There’s a lack of imagination and true creativity in almost everyone when it comes to creating material that we (I mean you, 121, and me) would consider ‘original’ in any real way. It’s all a mirror of things that exist in our history, and extremely few writers go very deep even into that.

People who write, including Cameron, either have not studied enough history, anthropology, psychology, sociology, myth. Or else they lack the insight to see the mental or psychic patterns which underly these studies. Or else they lack the creativity to create new material that reveals those deeper patterns. Really good material just isn’t out there. That’s why the people who truly pull it off, like Tolkein, end up being copied so much (D&D, WoW, etc etc etc).

On a brighter note, if you can feel what it is that you were expecting, or what you would like to see in the future, and pull that out of your own creative imagination and put it into drawings, or script, or game play, then that is your gift.

All I’m trying to say is that real talent, the kind it would take to write a really believable, inspiring, and NEW world, is extremely rare. More rare than you would think. Out of all the people in all of the universities of the world studying writing, and all the people writing on their own in bedrooms and cafe’s and grottos and caves, there may be 5 alive in the world today that can really deliver material that is really creative in a true way.

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The moral of the story is, walk into any movie you want to like with low expectations, from there, you can only be rewarded :slight_smile:

I waited over a decade for Terminator 3 and was crushed by its crapness. It’s crapness was so bad, that Terminator 4 was by comparison, the mesiah.

Yep, there I said it. T4 is better than T3, and I don’t understand anyone who thinks that PG-13 cash-in was anything but offensive.

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I think South Park summed up the movie nicely… “Dances With Smurfs”.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/251890

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JD That was funny! LOL! I bet we could get Rush Limbaugh to go live with the Na’ve on Pandora if Zoe Saldana would be his girlfriend!